He comes to the room secretly
In my mother-in-law's house, everyone sleeps on the terrace in the open. My husband also sleeps with the family and I stay in the room below. In such a situation, it is not possible to have an intimate relationship with the husband at night.
So, my husband gets up at dawn and comes downstairs to my room, that’s when the two of us are intimate for a while. He is afraid of being ridiculed if anyone in the family sees him coming down to my room. That's why my husband and I are unable to have sex every day. The joint family does have some affect on sex life.
Sheetal, 31, Homemaker, Bihar
Send my brother out on some pretext
I live in a rented room with my wife and brother. We go to the office and return home at almost the same time. So I get hardly any time for sex with my wife. My wife often gets angry, then I find some ways to make her happy.
I send my brother to the market under some pretext and then have sex with my wife in that short period. But this is not always possible. On Sundays, when my brother goes out to visit his friends, then we use that precious time to have sex.
Harish, 35, Salesman, Mumbai
What if someone hears the noises?
I just got married. My room is in the middle of my elder brother and my parents’ rooms. My wife feels a lot of pain during sex so she makes loud sounds. So before having sex, I have to ponder upon if the voices are going out of the room or not.
What would happen if our parents hear these voices? Just thinking about it makes me nervous. I feel there are many people like me who must be facing the same problems living in a joint family. One’s sex life gets a bit spoiled.
Raghav, 30, Bank Manager, Pune
Feels sleepy as soon as I hit bed
My in-laws have a joint family of 14 people in total. I am the youngest daughter-in-law of the house, so my work and responsibilities are huge. Everyone’s eating time is different, so I feed everyone at their preferred times and then have my food in the end.
After this when I go to my bedroom, I get so tired that I feel like going to sleep immediately. And my husband falls asleep while waiting for me. This is an everyday story. That's why we rarely have sex at night. During the day, my husband is in the office. Such problems happen in joint families.
Arpita, 28, Homemaker, Haryana
Scared that someone will knock
My wife is very passionate about sex and feels like having sex all the time. But we live in a joint family and are able to have sex only at night. During the day, whenever both of us try to get intimate, my mother or elder sister calls my wife for some work or many times someone knocks on the door.
Now, we have become so terrified that whenever we think of spending some beautiful moments together in the afternoon, it definitely remains somewhere in our mind that what if someone knocks the door.
Vineet, 41, Businessman, Varanasi
To protect the identity, the person in the picture is a model and names have been changed.
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About the author: Anoop Kumar Singh is a freelance translator and Hindi copywriter based in Gurugram. He completed his bachelor's degree in Hindi literature from Kanpur University. He specializes in creating Hindi SEO content for companies in the health, lifestyle and marketing domain. You can find him on Substack and Twitter.