Can love survive the seven-year itch? This couple made it to year 10

Since the beginning of time, a ‘romantic relationship’ has been treated as a ceramic object in the showcase of other human emotions. It must be handled with care, and cannot be allowed to crack under human frailties.

In contrast to the many lore reaffirming relationships as endless, is the theory of the seven-year itch—that relationships wane after the seven-year mark. Boredom trickles in. Annoyance become commonplace, and you wonder: Is this all my life will amount to, a compromise in the shape of the glorious mess standing in front of me? The seven-year itch is often backed by loose statistics and was largely popularised by the 1955 film of the same name.

The central question is always the same: How do we make it last? When the Delhi-based couple Sidharth Sarcar, a landscape architect and Mandeep Raikhy, a dance artist, met exactly a decade ago, they were making sense of the world around them. They connected on Tinder. Later, Sidharth attended one of Mandeep’s dance pieces, and they met for the first time. A vacation with friends in the backwaters of Keralam followed.

“Mandeep met me when I was 25, and he was 36. I am now 36, and he is at the same age I was when he’d met me,” Sidharth says. “What we have done time and time again in our relationship is to communicate and evolve. Even right now, he is in another room of the same building, and that is annoying me.”

The relationship has lasted, from Sidharth’s perspective, because they have managed to look at not just the proximity between them, “but also the space—having some air, being able to travel without each other and with each other, and live away for long periods of time.”

Math of longevity

Does it all boil down to space? That would be flattening it. I present to them my own relationship, ridden by my anxious-avoidant attachment style. Just when my partner needs me the most, a creeping sense of repulsion from my end settles down in all the voids between us. “What is wrong with you?” is the usual refrain from their end, to which my response is an incoherent babble.

Mandeep posits that “You have to give love a chance, and be aware that you cannot get 100 per cent of what you want from the person. You will probably get 60 per cent, and then you milk the other 30 out with time. What we started with in our relationship is very different from what we are now.” Space can be a loaded word when it is not broken down to its bare bones. If a couple assumes the fundamentals of space, it is no longer a relationship but a simmering pot of slow resentments and, worse, competition. All it takes is that one argument with your partner in the kitchen on a sunny day, like Sandra Hüller, who portrays Sandra Voyter in Anatomy of a Fall (2023), to reveal the deep rot under it all. Or that disarmingly simple line uttered by Scarlett Johansson as Nicole Barber in Marriage Story (2019): “I never really came alive for myself; I was only feeding his aliveness.”

With Mandeep and Sidharth, it was a process that would slowly, but meaningfully, build up to the mundane, but essential, logistics of what truly constitutes space. When they met, Sidharth was in a hostel room, and Mandeep didn’t have a house to take him to, spend time or, well, just f*ck. They were growing up, venturing beyond the coddled limits of true adulthood. “It was difficult,” Sidharth says, “and then at some point, Mandeep decided to build a house, probably in the second year of our relationship. He built a barsati (a rooftop house) right above his parents’. We spent a lot of time together, but we never lived together—officially, we didn’t move in with each other until only five years into our relationship.”

Dynamics of love

It helped that the contour of the relationship, which has been open, was established from day one. Sidharth had entered Mandeep’s world after a spate of monogamous relationships. Mandeep’s rationale was simple: If they were choosing to spend time with each other physically, even if it was a dinner outside, it had to be a conscious choice. If that choice was mutual and conscious, there was no need for a third person in those moments. “We never decided to start closed and then open,” Mandeep says. “I think that might have been our strength too, that we did not ever experience a rupture, where you are starting closed, then having to open, and all the heartbreak that comes with it.”

In their endless travels, their dates together, the silence after the obvious arguments, they would assemble and identify the pieces that would form the bedrock on which they now thrive. The smaller chips, too, help construct the edifice: Mandeep eats lunch at lunchtime and will eat whatever is available, but Sidharth prefers adventure, even if that means taking a bike ride through the sweltering streets of Bali for a thali joint 40 kilometres away. What deal did they strike to avoid the tensions in such an arrangement? Out of the three meals in a day, only one could be an adventure. When they are in a car, the driver, and not they, takes the final call to play songs. The same logic carries over when they are in the trenches of an argument. “I would call myself a nag in this relationship because Mandeep has a slightly shorter temper,” Sidharth says. “That is something that gets difficult to process for me. Because when there is conflict, and there is anger, I prefer an immediate resolution.” The more harmless arguments have been over Madhuri and Sridevi, over the merit of Rihanna and Lady Gaga.

Between the lines

The story of Mandeep and Sidharth persists, and it persists in a queer culture that is vulnerable to the search for the new man on Grindr, for a new group of friends, always, always the allure of the shiny new toy. They aren’t immune to it, either. Less than four years ago, Mandeep admits, he wasn’t comfortable with a third person who had entered their equation—someone who Sidharth had been close to. It was a make-or- break situation; he was ready to renegotiate what this relationship meant if this new variable couldn’t be taken care of. Sidharth, though, told Mandeep that he was going to put an end to it because everything else could wait. “For me, that was it,” Mandeep says. “That is all I needed. That moment of weakness passed, and a few months later, I told him that I had thought about it for the last couple of weeks and that he should reach out to this other person to see if he could still have some kind of relationship. All this happened beautifully. I think that got me closer to Sidharth.”

Mandeep and Sidharth show us that the health of a relationship in today’s India—particularly one that is always under the shadow of the State, the cautious eyes of society, with no seven vows and Chinese red threads to give it spiritual sanction—lies only in the slow, unglamorous labour of choosing each other on a Tuesday afternoon, in a house with two floors, with the phone ringing and the other one in the next room, mildly annoying.

This article first appeared in Cosmopolitan India's September-October 2025 print edition

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