Almost nobody openly defends infidelity. Ask anyone on the street whether cheating in a committed relationship is wrong, and you will hear a fairly unanimous answer. And yet, put that same behaviour on a cinema screen, dress it up in comic timing, soften it with a doe-eyed lead actor and a catchy background score, and suddenly, it becomes something audiences are expected to not just tolerate, but enjoy.

That contradiction sits at the heart of what makes Bollywood’s long-standing love affair with the straying husband so uncomfortable to watch. Not because the subject is off-limits, but because of how it keeps being told, and who keeps getting away with it.

Why Indian Society Gives Cheating Husbands a Free Pass

Before we even get to the film, it is worth asking why this trope survives at all. The answer, honestly, is not about cinema. It is about how Indian society has long treated infidelity differently depending on who is doing it.

A woman who cheats faces social ruin. A man, particularly one past a certain age, settled in life, presumably under pressure, is granted the luxury of ambiguity. His betrayal gets reframed as weakness rather than wrongdoing. People say things like boys will be boys, or suggest his wife must have been neglectful, or simply shrug and move on. The moral arithmetic changes entirely based on gender.

Bollywood did not create this double standard. But for decades, it has happily monetised it.

Pati Patni Aur Woh Do Is Already Doing the Most

The teaser for Ayushmann Khurrana’s ‘Pati Patni Aur Woh Do’ makes its intentions clear within the first 45 seconds. It opens with a clip from the 1978 original, ‘Pati Patni Aur Woh’, presumably for nostalgia, before cutting to footage from the 2019 remake starring Kartik Aaryan. Now, in 2026, the makers are back with a third chapter.

The tagline of the film, ‘Patiyon ki fitrat kabhi nahi badalti’, husbands never change. The film, it seems, does not want them to. If anything, the only thing that has evolved is ambition: instead of one woman on the side, the husband in this version apparently juggles two.

If you are waiting for the satire, for the sharp self-awareness, for some signal that the filmmakers know exactly what they are doing and intend to interrogate it, the teaser does not offer any. What it offers instead is an invitation to laugh along.

Bollywood’s Long History of Justified Infidelity

This is not a new problem. Bollywood has been finding reasons to excuse unfaithful husbands, and straying partners more broadly, for the better part of five decades.

In ‘Silsila’ (1981), Amitabh Bachchan’s character drifts into an affair as a form of escape from an unhappy marriage. The film treats his infidelity as tragic and romantic in equal measure. In ‘Cocktail’ (2012), Saif Ali Khan’s character strings along two women simultaneously while the film frames his indecision as emotional complexity rather than selfishness. ‘Haseen Dilruba’ (2021) gives us Taapsee Pannu’s character, unhappily married, seeking something more, and handles her affair with enough moral ambiguity to make it feel almost earned. ‘Gehraiyaan’ (2022) goes further still, with Deepika Padukone’s character beginning an affair with her own cousin’s boyfriend, framed largely as an act of emotional survival rather than cruelty.

Then there is ‘Rocky Aur Rani Ki Prem Kahani’ (2023), which sparked genuine debate about how far mainstream Bollywood is willing to stretch its definitions of loyalty and commitment.

Each of these films handles the subject with varying degrees of honesty. Some are genuinely interested in the messiness of it. But across all of them, a thread runs: that infidelity, when given enough context, can be made sympathetic. The problem with ‘Pati Patni Aur Woh Do’ is that it does not appear to be interested in context at all, only punchlines.

Why the ‘Comedy’ Defence Does Not Hold Up

The usual response to this kind of criticism is that it is ‘just a film’, or that comedy has always pushed boundaries, or that audiences are grown-up enough to separate screen fiction from real life. All fair points, up to a point.

But here is the thing: even if a film about an unfaithful husband ends with consequences, with karma, with the wife leaving and the husband learning his lesson, the two hours that precede that ending still matter. What ideas does the film plant along the way? What does it ask audiences to laugh at, to sympathise with, to find charming?

When a film presents a married man who cannot keep his hands to himself as fundamentally adorable, harmless, just a bit weak-willed, it does something quietly insidious. It domesticates betrayal. It makes gaslighting cosy. It suggests that men who cheat are not villains but children, and that the women they deceive should perhaps have known better.

ALSO READ- 5 Films About Fashion Every Aspiring Designer Should Watch

The Real-World Cost of Normalising Infidelity on Screen

Films shape the way people, particularly young people, understand relationships, expectations and what is considered normal. When infidelity is packaged as entertainment often enough, it stops looking like a breach of trust and starts looking like an inevitability. Something men do. Something women endure.

Teenagers watching these films are not watching them critically. They are absorbing the emotional logic the film offers: that a husband who cheats is still loveable, that his wife’s pain is a plot device, that this is just how marriage works sometimes.

Bollywood Needs to Retire the Straying Husband

Filmmaking has always carried a degree of responsibility precisely because it has the power to normalise things that should not be normal. That is not an argument for sanitising stories or pretending human relationships are uncomplicated. Infidelity is a real part of life, and it deserves to be told honestly, with consequences, with interiority, with a genuine reckoning.

What it does not deserve is to be a running joke. ‘Pati Patni Aur Woh Do’ may well turn out to be a perfectly entertaining film. Ayushmann Khurrana is a genuinely gifted actor who has, in other projects, shown real range and sensitivity. But the teaser suggests that this particular film is not interested in range or sensitivity. It is interested in recreating a formula that was questionable in 1978 and is considerably more so in 2026.

ALSO READ- Euphoria Season 3: The Downfall Of Sydney Sweeney’s Cassie Howard

Keep reading Herzindagi for more such stories.

Image Courtesy: Instagram