Marriage Lite? The Supreme Court's patch notes for live-in relationships

There is something deeply ironic about the way Indian law has approached the live-in relationship. The arrangement was, at least in part, supposed to offer consenting adults an alternative to marriage. Instead, the law has spent the better part of two decades making that alternative look increasingly like marriage - only without the wedding and the social approval.

The Supreme Court’s recent judgment in Dr Lokesh BH & Ors v. State of Karnataka has pushed that evolution a little further.

A Bench of Justices Sanjay Karol and NK Singh held that Section 498A of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) - the cruelty provision meant for husbands - and its corresponding provision under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, can apply to a live-in relationship which is 'in the nature of marriage'. No wedding required. Only two things: a relationship that looks like a marriage and both partners genuinely meaning it to become one.

The judgment is undoubtedly driven by a legitimate concern - a man should not be permitted to escape criminal liability for cruelty merely because he avoided performing a marriage ceremony. It is a judgment wrapped in progressive empathy, aiming to shield women from the technical loopholes of patriarchal legal structures.

But there is a larger question here, one that sits somewhat awkwardly beside the judgment’s protective logic.

By systematically importing the criminal liabilities, financial obligations and institutional surveillance of marriage into the sphere of live-in relationships, the State and the judiciary are inadvertently defeating the very purpose of non-marital cohabitation.

If a live-in relationship invites the exact same legal ramifications as a marriage, why would any rational, consenting adult choose it as an alternative? At what point does protecting people in live-in relationships become an exercise in making live-in relationships legally indistinguishable from marriage?

For many urban Indians, particularly financially independent adults, the absence of marriage is the point. It can mean avoiding the legal and social baggage that comes with marriage: dowry demands, interference from extended families, expectations imposed by traditional gender roles and, perhaps most importantly, the extraordinarily cumbersome process of getting out of the relationship once it has stopped working.

A live-in relationship is meant to be a fluid contract of companionship - one that can be terminated when love and compatibility expire, without the permission of a judge.

In its simplest form, it offers two consenting adults the ability to say: we want to be together, but we do not want to marry. The law, however, appears increasingly uncomfortable with the second half of that sentence.

Indian society has hardly made life easy for unmarried couples. Finding a house can become an exercise in creative fiction. “Husband and wife” is often easier to tell a landlord than “two consenting adults in a relationship”. Resident welfare associations have their own ideas about morality, parents have theirs and, in some places, vigilante groups volunteer theirs too.

The courts stepped into this space for understandable reasons. Women who had spent years in relationships resembling marriages could otherwise find themselves without financial or legal protection when those relationships collapsed. The problem is not that the courts intervened. The interesting question is what happened after they did.

The nature of marriage

The first major shift occurred with the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 (DV Act). The legislature introduced the concept of a "relationship in the nature of marriage," granting civil remedies like protection orders and right to residence to unmarried partners.

In D Velusamy v. D Patchaiammal (2010) and Indra Sarma v. VKV Sarma (2013), the Supreme Court clarified that not all weekend affairs qualify; the relationship must possess marital trappings - shared resources, a shared household and public socialisation as a couple. This was a necessary civil shield.

The financial obligation

Section 125 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) was explicitly drafted to prevent vagrancy, allowing magistrates to order maintenance for "wives," children and parents. The statute's language is strict. However, the courts recognized the sheer inequity of allowing men to exploit the technical lack of a marriage certificate to avoid maintaining a woman who had acted as their wife for years.

In landmark rulings like Kamala v. MR Mohan Kumar (2019), the Supreme Court expanded the definition of "wife" under Section 125. The Court ruled that where a man and woman live together as husband and wife for a long term, the law will presume they are legally married, entitling the woman to maintenance. While this was a victory for gender justice, it fundamentally altered the live-in dynamic, imposing the financial permanence of marriage onto an arrangement explicitly designed to avoid it.

Bad romance

As live-in relationships became more common, courts witnessed a surge in a specific breed of litigation: women filing rape cases against their ex-partners under Section 376 IPC upon the breakdown of a long-term cohabitation, alleging that their consent to sex was obtained on a "false promise to marry."

The Supreme Court had to step in to prevent the criminalisation of consensual, albeit failed, romances.

In the case of Pramod Suryabhan Pawar v. State of Maharashtra (2019), the Court drew a sharp distinction between a promise made in bad faith (where the man never intended to marry and used the promise solely to extract sexual consent) and a breach of a promise made in good faith (where the intention to marry was genuine, but unforeseen circumstances led to a breakup).

Over the years, courts have consistently held that when a couple cohabits for years, engaging voluntarily in sexual and domestic life, the relationship transforms into a de facto family unit. A subsequent falling out does not retrospectively convert years of consensual intimacy into rape. By recognising long-term live-in partners as a "family unit," the judiciary shielded men from the misuse of rape laws, but it further cemented the idea that a mature live-in relationship is legally indistinguishable from a marriage.

The extension in Lokesh BH

The man in this case had a straightforward defence. He was never legally married to the woman accusing him of cruelty. So how could a provision written for husbands reach him?

Cruelty, the judgment observes, "does not check at the door" of a house merely because there was no wedding in it. If the legislative purpose of Section 498A is to deter domestic cruelty, then denying that deterrence to a woman solely because her partner never went through with a ceremony is a distinction without a rational link to the statute's object - precisely the kind of classification Article 14 forbids.

The Court was also careful to close off the obvious rejoinder: doesn't the DV Act already cover "relationships in the nature of marriage"? It does, but the judgment points out, rightly, that the DV Act is substantially a civil remedy. It doesn't carry the deterrent weight of a criminal cruelty provision like 498A.

None of this is novel doctrine invented for this case. It's an extension of a purposive reading of "husband" that the Court gave to void and bigamous marriages in Reema Aggarwal v. Anupam (2004) - later affirmed by a three-judge bench in Rajinder Singh v. State of Punjab (2015) - combined with the tests for what counts as a "relationship in the nature of marriage" laid down in Velusamy and Sarma.

The Court didn't invent a new box. It just decided the old box, built for the DV Act, could also hold up Section 498A. With one added condition the DV Act cases never required: an established intent to marry and, notably, a higher evidentiary bar to prove it. Thus, the "intent to marry" requirement is meant to be the safety valve here, distinguishing a marriage-track live-in relationship from a casual one. 

And that is precisely where the uncomfortable questions begin.

How does one legally quantify intent? Is it a conversation between partners? A meeting with parents? Is a romantic WhatsApp text from 3 years ago proof of intent? Is an off-hand promise made during an intimate moment sufficient to trigger the criminal law machinery against a man and his elderly parents?

Trial courts will inevitably be flooded with exactly the kind of vindictive, exaggerated FIRs that the Supreme Court has spent the last two decades trying to curtail in marital disputes.

There is also a curious tension here with the Supreme Court’s rape jurisprudence. In Ravish Singh Rana, the Court held that years of cohabitation could support the conclusion that two adults had voluntarily chosen their relationship, making a later allegation of a false promise to marry difficult to sustain. The Court specifically noted that a desire or wish to marry at some point does not, by itself, change the nature of the relationship.

Put that beside Lokesh and the same fact - a long relationship in which marriage was discussed - can start doing two different kinds of legal work. In a false-promise rape case, a man may say: I genuinely intended to marry her. The relationship simply did not get there. Under Lokesh, that same evidence may help establish the intent to marry that is necessary to bring the relationship within Section 498A.

The same WhatsApp message can, therefore, become a shield in one case and a piece of evidence in another.

That is not quite a contradiction. The two cases ask different questions. Ravish Singh Rana asks whether a promise of marriage was false from the beginning. Lokesh asks whether the parties intended the relationship to culminate in marriage for the purpose of determining whether it should attract Section 498A.

But there is a genuine bind here. Where there is no evidence of an intention to marry - no promise, no family involvement, no plans - it may be difficult to establish the 498A threshold. But in a rape case, the absence of such evidence may make it easier for the accused to say that there was never any promise that induced consent in the first place.

Evidence of a genuine intention to marry may help answer the 498A threshold. But the same evidence can become central to a dispute over whether sexual consent was obtained through a promise of marriage. The law has, therefore. created a strange evidentiary space in which the documentary traces of a relationship can cut both ways.

Nor are these always separate battles, fought years apart in different courtrooms. The two charges are routinely filed together, in a single complaint - a point the Court itself has made elsewhere. And that matters, because these relationships are rarely documented like marriages. There is no certificate recording what the parties intended their relationship to become. There are usually only conversations, photographs, messages, plans and memories.

Section 498A does not have a clean record and the Court knows it better than anyone.

In Arnesh Kumar v. State of Bihar (2014), it warned against automatic arrests. In Preeti Gupta v. State of Jharkhand (2010), it flagged the tendency to implicate several members of the husband’s family in a single complaint. In Dara Lakshmi Narayana v. State of Telangana (2025), it cautioned against vague, generalised allegations being used to settle scores. In Rinku Baheti v. Sandesh Sharda (2025), the Court also noted the use of multiple serious provisions as a “combined package” in matrimonial disputes.

None of this means genuine victims should go unprotected. What it means is that extending a criminal provision with a long history of misuse to a new category of relationships requires careful safeguards.

The Court has tried to provide them. The initial burden of proving the parties’ intent to marry lies on the woman seeking protection. A higher standard of proof is required because the provision carries criminal consequences. There are safeguards in place - including a preliminary inquiry before arresting the live-in partner or his relatives.

The question is whether those safeguards will be enough.

The problem becomes more convoluted when the judicial story is placed alongside the legislative one. Uttarakhand's Uniform Civil Code, for instance, recognises live-in relationships, but recognition comes with a distinctly bureaucratic price. Couples are required to submit a statement of their relationship for registration and failure to comply can attract criminal consequences. The statutory framework also provides for maintenance rights and recognition of children born from such relationships.

There is an undeniable progressive side to this. Legal recognition can mean legal protection. A woman abandoned after years of cohabitation should not have to discover that the law has suddenly stopped recognising the life she actually lived.

But there is also an extraordinary paradox here. Marriage is one of the most heavily institutionalised relationships in Indian society. The live-in relationship emerged, among other reasons, as a way of stepping outside that institution. The response of the law has increasingly been to say: fine, you may step outside the institution, but please fill out this form first.

That is where “Marriage-Lite” begins to look less like a joke and more like a legal category. A marriage with no pheras, no wedding reception, no relatives dancing to London Thumakda. Just maintenance, criminal law, residence rights and, in some jurisdictions, a registrar.

None of this makes the top court's recent judgment wrong. A woman facing real cruelty should not lose a criminal remedy for want of a ceremony.

But the question asked at the outset is still sitting there, unanswered. If a live-in relationship now carries maintenance, civil protection, criminal liability and, in some states, a registration requirement - why would a rational, consenting adult still choose it over marriage?

Perhaps only because Marriage-Lite, whatever else it is, still comes without the pheras.