On the surface Roop Sharma and his wife Tania are a poster couple for dinkdom. They’ve been married for over a year, have jobs that bring the money rolling in and are still a long way from their 30th birthdays. What’s more, they have a Maruti Alto parked down the street and a house of their own with monthly payments that aren’t tough to handle.

But there’s one great big dark cloud hanging over their lives: even though they live in the same house, they barely see each other.

How’s that? Roop works for a multinational bank and he works long hours getting home around nine most evenings. Tania brings home her paypacket from a financial services firm. The catch: almost all her clients are in the US and this means she usually ends up working through the night. The result is they frequently meet on the doorstep of their flat heading in opposite directions.

The Sharmas aren’t an unusual couple by any stretch of imagination.

This is true particularly in Bangalore, city of hi-technology and BPOs, where every second young couple is likely to be working in one of the ‘knowledge’ industries. That means they are also probably working shifts.

The end result is that marriage for many young people is something that happens only on weekends and often they don’t even get the same days off.

Take the case of 30-year-olds Kaustav Singh and his wife Sonali. Based in Bangalore, both work for a multinational financial news major’s BPO centre, but while she works for a department that keeps normal day hours, her husband has joined the financial analysis group watching the US markets. Which, needless to say, means his working hours have to be co-ordinated with the opening and closing of the American markets.

Sonali gives a rundown on their schedule, “Every morning, I leave for office at 8 am, when Kaustav is fast asleep after returning at 2 in the morning. When I get home at 7pm, he’s already at work. And even though we work in the same office, it’s so hectic we don’t see each other at work either. In fact, she jokes, “I’ve started forgetting what my husband looks like.”

Once upon a time, shifts were a problem for the working classes who slaved in factories. It wasn’t usually a problem for the middle class who could hope for a 9-5 job in an air-conditioned office and return home for dinner.

Now it’s a different story. As more work is outsourced to India, increasingly sophisticated BPOs have sprung up. They are backend operations, doing financial, legal, banking, software and journalism work and catering to clients in countries as far flung as Denmark and Canada. Many of the highly paid and trained employees of these sectors are married, sometimes to other BPO workers keeping odd hours. Or they are wed to people outside the sector. But that doesn’t help either because one partner is keeping normal working hours while the other isn’t.

For those who get the same days off, weekends inevitably take on a giant-sized importance for couples who barely see each other during the week. Firstly, it’s the only time they get to spend together. But, because they keep unsocial hours during the week, it’s also the only time they have to socialise with friends and relatives.

What ends up happening is that many couples say they try and compress too much into too little time. “Weekends are over in a blink,” says Sudeshna Som, a senior processes manager with Hewlett Packard whose husband Kaushik works as a consultant on the media team of ITC Infotech.

This often put couples at loggerheads. Some complain too much socialising takes away from the time they have to spend together. “Often, one partner is forced to socialise with the other partner’s friends. If he or she resents the fact that their spouse would rather hang out with friends than spend time with them, it can lead to fights,” says Dr Ali Khwaja, director of the Banjara group, a Bangalore counselling centre.

The stresses and strains can show in other ways too. Kaustav and Sonali, who have been married for two-and-a-half years, have been keeping up their shifts for the last three months and say the tension is showing. “Not being able to talk to your spouse for days, except on the phone, can be very stressful,” says Kaustav. “Even the most ordinary misunderstandings threaten to take on exaggerated proportions because they don’t get thrashed out and build up,” says Sonali.

Kaustav and Sonali aren’t the only young couple who know they are caught in a bind. An increasing number of young people are seeking professional help because of their modern lifestyles. Says Khwaja, “The number of couples coming in for counselling with relationship problems stemming from their unnatural working hours has increased steadily over the last couple of years. There are a lot of insecurities among these people, because deep down, they know they are headed against a wall.”

While there have always been professions that have demanded unusual working hours ? think doctors, nurses, police, soldiers, fire fighters, there was a feeling it served a social purpose, Khwaja says. That isn’t true for the BPO workers. “It makes commercial sense, but the BPO industry can hardly be said to satisfy any moral or social obligations,” he says.

Besides those already married, BPO life also affects those contemplating marriage, he says. “I’ve seen many putting off marriage because they feel the unconventional working hours will be a problem and they want to sort it out, get a different job if possible, before taking the plunge. This may lead to frustration and acrimony even before the couple wed.”

Alternatively, couples may have to make inconvenient compromises. Take Arun Emerson and his wife Maria. While Emerson works as a team leader in a US bank back office, his wife has chosen to be a housewife, though she had a well-paid banking job before she married. “I quit simply because I knew Arun would be home only in the mornings and afternoons, and if I had a day job we’d see nothing of each other,” says Maria. So while a double income would have been welcome, they have to choose between that or living separately under the same roof. Arun is also thinking of looking out for a job that does not involve night shifts.

BPO marriages are extensions and slightly extreme versions of most modern marriages, feels sociologist Dr G K Karanth of the Institute for Social and Economic Change in Bangalore. “The very concept of marriage in urban, metropolitan India is undergoing a radical change and nowhere is this more visible than among the so-called BPO couple,” says Karanth.

He believes that the fact that so many couples are willing to compromise on family life shows marriage no longer means what it used to. Often, it does not bring about any big change in lifestyles of young urban couples. “This decade is seeing a radical shift in the way work and marriage are linked in our lives,” says Karanth.

He also points out how marriage as the central backbone of one’s adult life is receding. Each partner feels able to carry on without the help and support which has traditionally been provided by the spouse. Now, this is often replaced by an alternative support system of friends and co-workers.

“With these couples spending minimal time with each other, they have to look for some kind of support structure outside marriage and develop greater dependency on friends,” says Karanth. This theory is echoed by counsellor Khwaja, who feels that unlimited freedom and loneliness may increase the threat of either partner having extra marital relationships.

Grim as the picture may look, there are those who manage to carve out a fulfilling life. Says Sharmishtha Ghosh, an AOL call centre employee married to a software consultant, “The trick is to realise that there could be a problem because of your irregular working hours and then try to find solutions.”

Ghosh, who worked in a call centre for three years has now shifted to a different role in the same organisation that lets her function on a nine to five basis. She made sure she and her husband Shivaram Venkatesh spent their weekends doing everything together, from watching movies to shopping for groceries. They also cut down on meeting friends and socialising, leaving the weekend free to potter around the house.

The Soms say there’s another advantage because there’s always one parent home with their one-year-old daughter. But how much help that parent is when he or she is asleep after a nine-hour night shift is anybody’s guess.

Kaushik Som, too, has an unusual take on the time factor. He feels a sense of humour about the situation goes a long way towards making it better. “Anyway, after you’ve seen each other for five years and then been married for another five, you’re ready for a break from one another,” he says, tongue in cheek. “Having different working hours lets you savour the precious few hours you do get together,” he says, adding cynically, “Rather than bicker and fight which, let’s admit it, is all most couples do after being together for a while, you start appreciating your partner once again.”

Illustrations by Suman Choudhury