Question:I need your help. Badly. I am a 25 year old woman behaving like a teenager. A very young one at that. I am in love with my girlfriend’s husband while my parents are looking for a groom for me. Could it get more juvenile than that? How I came to love him is a long story, but to cut it short, all I can say is that we clicked from the time we have met. He completes not only my sentences, but my thoughts and me as well. I go to spend over the day with them often. We get to be with each other when my girlfriend gets up to do something. She is not what I would say too bright in the head. She just loves her clothes, her make up, her home and yes her husband! Not necessarily in that order. If you ask her what is in her life beyond that she won’t be able to tell you much. Oh wait! There is. Ekta Kapoor’s serials. Which? I would not know. All those that start with k sometimes and those that start with kk too! Her husband on the other hand is a complete opposite. I would not say he is shabbily dressed, but would say does not care that much about his appearance. Just like me. He is hardly interested in what he is eating. We belong to that category of people who eat to live, not the other way around. TV? Oh you mean idiot box would be our popular retort! About loving his wife, I am sure he does in a way. I am not sure about that. What I am sure about is my love for him. I seem to be falling and falling for him. I just keep loving him more the more I spend time with him. I do feel guilty, very much so. Especially since my girlfriend is such a gullible and naïve person who trusts me implicitly. She is just happy in the knowledge that she has a friend whom he wants to spend time with. She has confided in me many a time about her marriage. About how they are not that a great match but that she loves him beyond everything. She claims that he loves her the same. I feel jealous when she says that. I know, I know I am not that good a person. My parents are looking out for a suitable bridegroom for me. I am just not interested. I don’t know what I want to do. But one thing I do know. I need HELP. So please help me!

Answer:Not caught in a very good kind of situation now, are we? But yes if everything in life happened according to our plans then all of us would be in a very good kind of situation. But unfortunately that is not so. I am sure as a young lady you had every good intention of falling in love with the right man. A man who was just like you – since that seems to be your type – but is sure who was unmarried. But no, life is not that easy, is it? It just has to put us in that kind of situation where you don’t have much choice except tearing your hair out in frustration or calling out for help, which you did. That in itself is the first step. You know you have a problem here. Took you a while to get there, didn’t it? Well this thing that you call love has this knack of surreptiously gaining on you. You keep thinking you are never going to be there when one moment you realize you are already there. You ask yourself when is it that you lost control? Well all I can say to that is our emotions control and drive us. Not the other way around. We are guided by our emotions, we take actions based on our emotions – we are in a way powerless in their midst. Especially love. Love could give us a high in a way that no other emotion can. It’s like taking a drug. You know you could do yourself harm. But you do it anyway. Just to get on that high. You are in exactly that kind of situation. I am sure you knew in the back of your mind, what was going on. But you might have dismissed it off with it is not going to happen to me – I am too strong and too much in control and am too much of a good person for it to happen to me. Well, all I can say is that it happens to the best of us. We make mistakes without meaning to. I am sure hurting or betraying your girlfriend was the farthest thing from your mind. But you ended up doing it anyway. Worst of all, there is nothing you are able to do to get out of it. I am sure you have tried doing it too. I am going to stop this you must have said to yourself, only to drag yourself more into the vortex. I wonder what Ekta Kapoor would have done? Got the guy married a second time. Have to hand it to her though, her characters do all these out of character things and still manage to stay saints. But in real life, we are not saints are we? We are not sinners either. We are just humans. The firs thing you do in your kind of situation is to step back, take stock of the situation and then step away. Looks like a 3 step process but actually it’s a lot of steps. The first thing you need to do, as I am sure you understand pretty well is to get away from the centre point as fast as you could. I don’t exactly know how much time you spend with these guys. Am thinking maybe a couple of days per month or something like that. Whatever it is, cut it by half. If you go there once a week, cut it down to once a fortnight. If you cut it out completely in one go, not only will you make doubts to arise in your friend’s mind, you will also not be peace with yourself. Temptation does not go away easily. It needs to be eased off, not cut off. So, reduce your frequency by half. For the other half time that you spend there reduce the time. Instead of leaving at 5, leave at 4. The change has to be gradual. That is just the beginning of the firs step! Don’t be discouraged if you find yourself slipping. Keep trying. Instead of thinking up excuses not to visit, create reasons not to visit. Go out with another friend, go watch a movie if you don’t watch TV; if you don’t enjoy a movie, do whatever it is you enjoy. There are times when you will feel like there is nothing for you to enjoy. Well, then don’t. Curl up at home with a coffee mug and a book. Give in to some pondering. When you are away from the situation, it’s easier to be more pragmatic. If you surround yourself by the same emotions, it is easy to give in to them! It will be very hard in the beginning. But if you don’t give up and keep trying, you will eventually be there where you are visiting them half the time as before. And no one is smarter. Keep reducing the time in half. The one disadvantage I see to this approach however is that it might take too much time. You might not be able to keep yourself away. If you find yourself slipping then you have to come up with Plan B. This is a more drastic approach but that which is more effective. You tell your girlfriend the truth. I know its going to take a lot of guts to be able to do that, but believe me it’s not the end of the world. There are worst things that people do than falling in love with their friends’ spouse. She seems like a very sweet girl to me. I am sure she will try to understand. Even if she does not, which she has every right to, try to make her to understand and let her know that you are telling her this because you are serious about getting over it. If she is the secure girl that I think she is (no insecure girl will ever leave her husband in the company of her unmarried girl friend!) she will be more receptive to your confession. In this approach the hard part is the beginning. But after that everything becomes easy. Everything will fall in place. There will be no more visits, no more temptation on your part to go visit. Yes it will ruin a friendship, but hasn’t the rot already begun? Maybe after you are married to the right person, you could try to revive the friendship if you think it’s worth the effort, but for right now, you have to give up the relationship. Correction both the relationships. To err is human. To keep on making the same mistake is inhuman. To never repeat the mistake is being more human. Good luck to you. Peace.