Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh): SoulMate, a social media chat box, has brought the marriage of a couple in their mid-twenties from the city on the verge of collapse. The man wants the wife to withdraw from the application that hosts the chat box whereas the woman is not ready for it.
The couple got married a year ago with their parents’ consent. The man runs an eatery in the city and has a decent income. The woman is a homemaker. Everything went off well after the wedding. About six months after the wedding, the man happened to chance upon his wife’s picture with her maternal uncle. He found the way the two had posed together a bit strange and too close for maternal uncle and niece relationship.
He asked wife about it that revealed many facts. The man came to know that his mother-in-law was not the biological mother of his wife. Her mother had walked out on her father and married someone else. Later, her father also married another woman.
The woman, however, was very close to her stepmother and both, along with her stepmother’s brother (maternal uncle) and his wife were on a social media app. The app had a chat box and also allowed uploading of videos and photographs.
But the talk on the chat box had to be titillating or even vulgar and so did the photographs and videos. And that generated income for them.
According to counsellor Shail Awasthi who is handling the case, the man asked his woman to withdraw from the app. But she refused, prompting him to file a divorce plea. “I handled a similar case last year too. It is strange and disappointing that social media apps are breaking marriages. It is pathetic,” Awasthi said.
