Live-in relationships in India: Is marriage still the endgame?

“Test-drive the car before you put down a deposit,” my mother has always said. It sounds oddly progressive coming from someone of her generation, but she has long believed that living together before marriage is sensible . If it does not work out, you go your separate ways. At least you’ve tried, she says, without the added complications of divorce, dividing property and untangling two lives legally. Of course, she also thinks it can be an easy escape for men who want the comforts of a relationship without committing all the way.It is an argument that captures the peculiar place live-in relationships occupy in India: they are simultaneously a sensible experiment, depending on whom you ask, and a convenient arrangement that lets one partner indefinitely postpone the question of marriage. Does a live-in work for modern couples? | Photo Credit: triloks The numbers suggest that marriage itself is being reconsidered, albeit slowly. According to the National Statistical Office’s Youth in India 2022 report, the proportion of Indians aged 15–29 who had never married rose from 17.2% in 2011 to 23% in 2019. This isn’t evidence that young Indians are rejecting marriage. But the changing numbers, alongside rising ages at marriage, point towards a generation taking longer to arrive at the altar.Meanwhile, a 2025 study of 150 unmarried women aged 18–26 in Kerala found anxieties around marital adjustment, sacrificing personal ambitions and interference from in-laws. Most, however, still hoped for lasting marriages. The contradiction is telling: wanting companionship and wanting marriage are no longer necessarily the same thing.For one woman, six years of living together appeared to suggest that a wedding was somewhere on the horizon. When she moved out to take some space and think about the relationship, her boyfriend had a new girlfriend moving in within eight days. Her belongings were still in the drawers; the new girlfriend’s things were already in the house. When she confronted him, his response was brutally simple: “You moved out. I moved on.”The speed of the transition was less shocking than the realisation that six years had apparently meant something entirely different to each of them. For her, the relationship had been moving towards a future. For him, it had perhaps been a relationship that was good while it lasted.What the heart wantsThen there is the rather less romantic question of convenience. A man from Delhi, speaking candidly about his own live-in relationship, offered a perspective that rarely makes it into the more celebratory accounts of cohabitation. A live-in couple celebrates Deepavali | Photo Credit: lakshmiprasad S “I think most men enjoy how easy it is,” he said. With demanding jobs on both sides, he liked returning home to his partner, having someone to take care of things, and not having to make the same effort to meet or organise time together. He was, he admitted, being selfish. For some men, he suggested, the arrangement can resemble a transition from being looked after by their mothers to being looked after by their partners, without the additional commitment of marriage.He also believed that many of his friends who had lived with their partners did not necessarily want to marry them. “They liked the relationship as it was: monogamous, intimate, comfortable and relatively uncomplicated,” he says. Marriage, in his view, brought an additional layer of expectations. The husband and wife titles could alter the dynamic, making a relationship feel more demanding because it had acquired a socially recognised status.His observation isn’t a universal diagnosis of men, nor is domestic ease inherently a bad thing. But it raises an awkward question: when one person experiences a live-in as an equal partnership, and the other as a particularly convenient arrangement, who is doing the emotional and domestic work of making it function?A woman who moved to Pune with her boyfriend during lockdown discovered a different version of this mismatch. Six months into living together, he wanted an open relationship. She didn’t, but tried to accommodate his wishes. Eventually, he began repeatedly pushing for a third person in their bedroom, despite her refusal. She realised that what she had understood as a shared relationship was becoming something she couldn’t consent to. They eventually broke up.The problem wasn’t non-monogamy. It was the repeated pressure after she had said no. A live-in, like a marriage, doesn’t come with automatic access to another person’s body, or an obligation to agree to whatever a partner wants.The question of marriage becomes more complicated still for queer couples. Two women who moved in together in Bengaluru found themselves disagreeing over whether marriage was something they needed to aspire to. One wanted it; the other wasn’t convinced that a wedding would fundamentally change their relationship. “Compatibility is a day-to-day thing,” she argued. It was about temperaments, how two people negotiated disagreements, and whether they could see eye to eye on the ordinary business of sharing a life. Representational picture | Photo Credit: FG Trade For queer couples in India, this disagreement carries an additional weight: marriage isn’t even legally available to them. In October 2023, the Supreme Court declined to legalise same-sex marriage, leaving the question to Parliament. While the court affirmed queer people’s right to choose their partners and cohabit without interference, it did not recognise same-sex marriage or civil unions. The distinction matters: sharing a home doesn’t automatically confer the legal protections married couples enjoy, including several rights around inheritance, adoption and spousal recognition.Perhaps that’s the point. A live-in isn’t necessarily a marriage waiting to happen, nor is it always a trial run that ends with a wedding. It can be a relationship people choose because it suits the lives they want, even if those lives don’t fit neatly into conventional expectations.A fortnightly guide to love in the age of bare minimum