“This is perfectly good – it is supposed to happen between every husband and wife sooner or later. You are intelligent people: it is happening sooner. But one thing I cannot understand: once in a while you both say to each other, ‘I love you, darling, I love you.’ That, I cannot understand. Everything else is understandable to me.

“I had to interfere in the middle of the night because just now, after a big pillow fight, you said, ‘I love you, I love you, my darling.’ It simply disturbs my whole sleep. Everything else I accept, but how, out of this pillow fight, and throwing things and shouting and screaming, does the conclusion come, ‘I love you, darling’?”

They looked at each other. They had no answer because…. Then the professor said, “I have never thought about it but certainly you are right. After all this, this should not be the conclusion. I can understand – you are a man of logic. I cannot understand too much logic but physics is also based on logic; I can see the contradiction.”

The wife said, “I have never thought about it, but it is true that…. Can you help us to understand why?”

I said, “That’s why I have come. This happens with husband and wife: they hate each other, and then they hate themselves for hating each other. And then to cover up the whole thing – that ‘I hate you,’ that, ‘I hate myself for hating you’ – this is the cover: ‘I love you, darling.’

“This manages both things. You are no longer hating yourself, because you love your wife. But this is only a cover, a very thin cover which cannot stand the strong winds of life. Tomorrow morning again you have forgotten. The same story begins, comes to the same conclusion. Why don’t you just separate?”

And they both were angry at my suggestion. They said, “This is not nice of you to suggest that we separate.”

I said, “Yes, I suggest it. Get a divorce.” And they were both ready to fight with me.

I said, “You need not fight with me because I don’t hate you, I don’t love you, darling; I am simply not part of it. Exclude me out, I am going back. I just dropped in the suggestion – you can think about it. Only three months have passed. After thirty years you will be still in the same situation, but then it will be too late, even divorce will not be of any help. You will have become addicted to the quarreling, to the fighting, to everything that you hate. You will become addicted to it, you will miss it.”

They were very angry; they closed the door in my face. I said, “Thank you.”

After two months the wife went to see her mother for a week – her mother was sick – and in just one week Professor Nityanand Mukhopadhyaya started coming to me and continuously saying, “I miss my wife so much. I cannot sleep – the bed seems so empty.”