Readers Write In #646: The Psychology behind Irugapatru

By T Bhuvanesh Ram

Irugapatru (“Hold tight”), the recent Tamil movie, has been making waves ever since its release, or shall we say, its unique promotion. The film revolves around three couples who are put to test when faced with a crisis in their marital lives. While Rangesh despises his wife, Pavithra for not being health-conscious, Arjun and Divya have grown apart despite being newlywed lovebirds. Their lives become intertwined through Mitra, a marriage counsellor who therapizes them and many others on how to save their relationships

Irugapattru is rightly being appreciated for its realistic and detail-oriented portrayal of relationships ably aided by a breezy score, organic humour and neat performances. However, what caught me by surprise was the earnest effort in grounding the plot of Irugapattru in psychological principles.

Relationships and psychology share a long history. In fact, the longest running study on happiness in the world, led by Robert Waldinger of Harvard University, found that the secret sauce to lead a long, healthy and happy life is, voila, positive relationships (not just romantic). Placed at this intersection of psychology and relationships, there’s a lot to unpack in Irugapattru.

In an overpopulated genre i.e. romantic dramas, it comes as a whiff of fresh air when we witness psychologically valid relationship principles being portrayed in mainstream cinema. Consider the opening scene in which Mitra introduces us to eye-gazing, where partners consciously attempt to sustain their eye contact with each other. Eye-gazing has been proven to significantly enhance relationship quality and makes us feel connected and present for one another.

Other instances include the blink-and-miss reference to Elaine Hatfield’s work on compassionate vs passionate love, recurrent references to Gary Chapman’s 5 love languages, and the 4 Rs of relationship breakdown (Resistance, Rejection, Resentment, Repression).

Having said that, it is also impossible to look beyond the various issues in the plot from a strictly psychological prism. For instance, the idea of “honesty hour” wherein a weekly hour is dedicated for partners to discuss critical issues to avoid confrontation otherwise. Based on personal experience with her husband Manohar, Mitra readily prescribes it as a solution for couples to “schedule” their fights. At another instance, again based on her own experience, a client is suggested to note down her concerns with her husband, stash them away and look back at it later only to find them silly and funny.

Unquestionably, keeping aside certain hours a week for one’s partner is a worthy goal in itself. And ideally, honesty and sensitive communication should not be restricted to just an hour a week! While “honesty hour” may work with couples having communication troubles, it is not as universal a solution as it is made out to be.

In fact, when Manohar accuses Mitra of being too calculative in their relationship thanks to her profession, she is symbolically shown to move beyond “honesty hours” to patch up things. Even if it did work for Mitra, an objective approach would have been to separate the professional and the personal. Similarly, the advise to stash away the concerns doesn’t sit well with Mitra’s own invocation of the 4 Rs later, where she explains how failing to communicate one’s issues in a relationship will eventually snowball into resentment, to the point of no return.

The story arc of Divya-Arjun also appears ill-developed. When Divya opens up to Mitra about her marital struggles, she mentions that her major problem with Arjun is his self-righteous attitude. She painfully recounts how she has been subject to verbal and emotional abuse, treated with no respect and how she has become devoid of self-worth.

Cut to the next scene, Mitra counsels Arjun, quite inexplicably, on various types of love languages and advises them to write “Thank you” notes for the things for which they are grateful to each other. True, Arjun had become entirely unappreciative of Divya. However, it was not due to incompatible love languages, but rather due to the his toxic male ego, as is clear from Divya’s story. One wonders why Mitra’s therapeutic diagnosis didn’t strike at the heart of the issue early on.

In the next session, Mitra does impress upon Arjun to confront his fragile male ego that simply cannot see Divya being smarter than him. However, there were several other red flags in Arjun’s behaviour such as Divya needing to ask his “permission” to take up a job by assuring that she will “take care” of both the home and the job and Arjun’s forcible insistence that Divya leave her job to have a baby.

Though Arjun is finally shown to regret his hurtful language, these red flags remained unresolved throughout the plot and were never pointed out by Mitra, as a therapist should have. Even conceding that Divya and Arjun got back together under the pressure of cinematic happy endings and the spirit of the movie to “hold tight”, the unaddressed psychological issues leave a lot to be desired. Sweeping generalisations at other places like a call for divorce implying a request for alone-time to self-heal also make little sense.

To be clear, this is not to take away what the movie has achieved in terms of emotionally rich, theory-backed storytelling. At no point do we feel bored despite the heavy monologues. The movie is weaved around the powerful idea that relationships are essentially a gestalt of little nothings, from nuisances to niceties. It might even inadvertently destigmatise marriage counselling and therapy. Irugapattru is a definitive step from pop psychology to psychology in pop culture!