The Legal Angle Partners in a live-in relationship have no rights on each other unless they go in for a legal agreement. Which means that in the case of a split, there will be no ownership or property rights. Children born into a live-in relationship are considered illegitimate. Partners have no rights to each other’s financial assets, and remember, verbal agreements don’t always stand up.
Partners can also not make end-of-life decisions for each other — about surgery, transfusions, cardiac pulmonary resuscitation, and the use of life support machines. And of course, in the absence of a will, the deceased’s family has all rights.
Photograph: Zul Siwani Models: Pratyasha & Yayati Note: The models have been used for illustrative purposes only

‘Marriage Is a Brain-dead Idea’ PRITISH NANDY’s take on marriage and living in Ihave always believed in the infinite power of love. It makes me look a bit stupid and old fashioned in this age of instant ‘karma’, but what is life without a little foolishness and old world innocence? It is because I cherish this idea of innocence, because I think love is so central to life, that I find marriage such a rotten, brain-dead idea.
People in love must learn to live with each other, in a relationship of trust. They must respect each other’s freedoms and offer each other the choice to walk away when they want. Instead of compelling, as we do, two unwilling, unhappy people to suffer each other in the name of matrimony.
Most marriages are in any case, all about exploitation. Sexual and social exploitation. And the tragedy is: It is usually the woman who is exploited. It is she who bears the cross on her fragile shoulders, because when a man walks away from a marriage, he does so as the relationship is not working. But when a woman opts out, it is because she is a wicked, adulterous bitch. Because she sleeps around. If she is a career woman, the instant assumption is that she is sleeping around with colleagues. If she is a housewife, she must have found others in the neighbourhood to f***.
Most husbands in our disgustingly male-dominated society think with their d***s. So, when it comes to women, they are instantly judgemental. You can never have a situation where a woman walks out of her marriage because she is looking for something that the marriage does not offer her. At the same time, ask any married man if he sleeps around. He will be too embarrassed to say ‘No’. He will either puff up his barrel chest and tell you stories about his superhuman sexual prowess and how every woman he has met in his life has instantly jumped into bed with him. Or, if he is the sly type, with slicked-back hair, he will have a much-practised wink, nudge response that is so adolescent you will want to puke.
The third kind protests too much about his faithfulness and then you will see him sneaking away every evening, to sleazy beer bars and discos that double up as pick-up joints. A married man simply cannot be seen keeping his Kohinoor inside his jocks. It is seen as a fatal flaw.
Women do not see sex as the beginning and the end of their world. That is what makes them the superior sex. Most women who have walked away from marriages have done so not because they were sexually dissatisfied — most women are ready to live with deep sexual dissatisfaction. In fact, in a society like ours, they invariably do.
What they cannot live with are pompous, boastful pricks who keep them sexually dissatisfied at home and then flaunt their testosterone before the world.
Women are canny creatures. They never look for Adonis. Instead, they yearn for compassion, understanding, love, tenderness. They look for men they can trust and respect. An intellectual orgasm means as much to a woman as a sexual one — but the tragedy is very few men can give them that. Which is why most marriages end up in rape, not love. In thousands of marriages, women suffer rape night after night. They sleep with people they do not love and never will. It is only an unspoken covenant that keeps them together. They would be happy to stray.
Erica Jong calls this the yearning for the zipless fuck. An experience that most women believe can help them escape the yawn of their married lives. They suffer it only because they know no way of escape.
They are frightened of hurting their parents, of getting a bad name in the workplace, worried that their husbands, once they are estranged, will go around telling the whole world that they are sluts and this would provoke others to harrass them.
To avoid all this, I know many women who would rather suffer their unhappy, unfulfilled marriages, part their legs at night and fake orgasms. It is, after all, easier to cope with one bastard at home than having to fend off many more outside.
Love is all about choices. The magic of a true relationship, the miracle of two people finding each other and deciding to share a common future is destroyed the moment compulsion enters the picture. The moment freedom is replaced by bondage; love, by ownership. The sexiness of the ‘rishta’ yields way to boredom and ennui. The very things that brought two people together become the reasons for them to drive each other apart.
Something beautiful and magical morphs into something that leaves you terribly lonely, terribly disappointed.
Society does not help either. It invests marriage with much too much baggage. To find someone whose family business is a perfect fit with yours, whose caste and community are identical to yours, whose qualifications can get you a green card or a visa. Someone who will please your father, mother, great granduncle, who will impress your boss, turn your friends green with envy.
Most marriages are business deals today. Instead of a merchant banker, you have friends, relatives, assorted pimps who not only bring you flesh but also structure the arithmetics of the deal for you so that you know how much this acquisition or merger will add to your bottomline.
Marriage is thus a commercial proposition as well. It could enhance your status, increase your market share, grow your family brand, open up serious global opportunities. It is no longer about two individuals. It is about two families who want to feed off each other...
Most families are producing these charming little creatures who know exactly what jeans to wear, which shade of lip gloss to put on, how to streak their hair and roll their hips while walking in front of potential buyers. And our society has become this one huge Pushkar mela where, instead of trading in animals, you trade in human flesh.
Marriage brings the worst things centrestage. Greed, exploitation, rampant consumerism, how much you can grab from the other. Innocence has vanished. There is no serendipity left. You rarely come across a person for whom you are ready to give up everything and start all over again. All we search for is bejewelled leashes to tie around each other’s necks and claim ownership.
You call it marriage. I call it slavery. You call it an institution. I see it as an aberration. You cannot own a person. You can love her, look after her, cherish her, build a home for her. Without a selfish thought. But the moment you marry her, that is the end.
(Pritish Nandy has been married, and still is...)
Photograph: Zenobia A Bharucha Models: Ronak & Pinky Note: The models have been used for illustratiive purposes only
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