Do you really need to take the next exit?: Simran Mangharam on staying in love
When Love Survives Everything Except the Question of Forever
Bharatmorningnews.com – Some of cinema's most enduring heartbreaks share a single architecture: two people recognise, with full clarity, that they have found a rare and irreplaceable match — and then, for reasons that feel small in hindsight, they let the moment dissolve. Casablanca (1942) built its entire emotional weight on that single missed turn. The Remains of the Day (1993) turned a lifetime of quiet restraint into a wound that never closes. La La Land (2016) wrapped the same tragedy in neon and jazz. In each case, no external catastrophe forced the separation. The characters simply chose, at the critical juncture, to step away.
In practice, as relationship coach Simran Mangharam observes, the reasons people give for ending a bond are rarely trivial. They are genuine anxieties, real fears, legitimate concerns about identity and autonomy. What makes the stories so painful is not that the reasons existed, but that they were allowed to function as a terminal point rather than a conversation to be worked through.
A Case Study in Six Years and One Unanswered Question
Mangharam's client — a 38-year-old lawyer she refers to as Rinny — embodies this pattern with painful specificity. Rinny met a college classmate, whom we'll call Kris, during their final year. Their connection did not ignite overnight. They interned at the same legal firm, built a friendship first, then discovered trust, then affection, then a physical pull neither could ignore. The progression was gradual, almost geological in its patience.
After graduation, the two launched their careers at the same law firm. A year into that shared professional life, they announced they would be moving in together. Both families celebrated. Friends, by then, had written them off as a single unit: a package deal, as the joke went. Wherever one appeared, the other was guaranteed to follow. Rinny and Kris themselves felt the certainty. Their happiness, acquaintances quipped, had become almost unbearable to witness.
Four years of cohabitation deepened the bond in ways that went beyond romance. They showed up at each other's parental homes during festivals and during family illness. They learned the names and temperaments of each other's cousins. They developed what Mangharam calls a healthy argumentative vocabulary — a transition from raw, bitter attack toward measured, structured disagreement, a shift that, over time, protects a relationship far more than perpetual harmony ever could.
The Panic at the Threshold
Then Kris raised the subject of marriage. Rinny's response was not anger or rejection. It was fear. "It's too big a step," she told him, and she repeated the phrase until it became a refrain. Kris, for the first time in six years of partnership, found himself on the opposite side of a conversation. He could not parse what she actually meant. The arguments that followed exhausted themselves, and what remained was not resolution but a deep, quiet hurt.
The gap proved unbridgeable. Rinny was shattered. Kris, so devastated by the loss, quit his position and relocated to another city. Ten years have passed since that separation.
What Remains After a Decade
Rinny has dated intermittently over the intervening decade but has not entered another committed partnership. She tells Mangharam she still loves Kris and regrets executing her decision to decline marriage. Yet she also notes, with some justification, that many women approach the institution with understandable wariness — fear that it will reshape the dynamic, impose predetermined roles, or overwrite the autonomy they built over years of independent living.
She has watched this play out in others, and Mangharam confirms she has as well. Formalising a relationship, Rinny argues, would have introduced a constellation of expectations into their shared life that neither had budgeted for.
"I've seen people who lived together and were perfectly happy, as we were, tie the knot. And then expectations change," she says. "From family, from their spouse, even from themselves."
She does not know whether she and Kris would have been immune to those pressures. But she is beginning to wish she had at least attempted the experiment.
The Counselling Gap
Mangharam's professional instinct, looking back, is that the couple should have sought external guidance before the final decision was made. Impasses of this kind — where one partner wants to formalise and the other wants to preserve the existing equilibrium — are precisely the situations where an experienced counsellor can redirect two trajectories before they become irreversible. Couples can continue cohabiting and build their own rituals of commitment. They can marry while adhering to a privately negotiated pact that protects individual autonomy. The options are numerous; what was absent was a structured space to explore them.
Fear of being consumed by a partnership, insecurity about the changes that formalisation brings, a sense of being overwhelmed by expectation — these are among the most frequently encountered emotions in the practice of relationship coaching. They can drive a person to walk away from a healthy, loving bond for reasons that are entirely real yet need not constitute a breaking point. The distinction matters: a feeling is valid, and a decision based solely on that feeling, without mediation or exploration, need not follow.
Once the separation has occurred, the work shifts. What remains is grief processing, the slow burial of what-ifs, and the open-ended hope that another profound love will eventually arrive. Mangharam admits it is difficult to sit with a client at that stage; she cannot fully imagine the weight Rinny carries.
Her message to readers in a similar position is direct: there is a better path than silence and unilateral departure. Speak with someone trained to facilitate that conversation. No one can guarantee the outcome — no one ever can — but at least the decision will have been made with full information, full support, and the knowledge that every available avenue was explored before the door closed.
(Simran Mangharam is a dating and relationship coach. The views expressed here are personal.)
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