I came across an article today hailing the steps being taken by the Indian judiciary towards granting a legal status to live-in relationships. However, even without honking the conservative argument that live-ins destroy the sanctity of marriage, blah, blah, is live-in legalisation seriously something to cheer about?...
Let's take a look what the legalisation of live-in relationships will really entail: right to maintenance, right to property and inheritance, even right to enforce co-habitation....in short, all the ingredients which make a marriage. What will then make a live-in different from a marriage? The absence of a ceremony? So marriage is the rich guy's live-in who can afford a party...how lame does that sound?
Let's take a look what the legalisation of live-in relationships will really entail: right to maintenance, right to property and inheritance, even right to enforce co-habitation....in short, all the ingredients which make a marriage. What will then make a live-in different from a marriage? The absence of a ceremony? So marriage is the rich guy's live-in who can afford a party...how lame does that sound?
I've been hearing a lot of talk about how legalising live-ins will give them social sanction...but will that really happen? Consider that the widow remarriage today is still a kind of social stigma, even though the requisite legislation for it had been passed some 150 years back in the form of The Widow Remarriage Act, 1856. And even though inter-caste marriages are legally permissible, they do not enjoy social popularity. On the other hand, child marriage still has social sanction, even as laws to discourage it have been implemented.
Also consider that people usually enjoy attending parties, and hence are less likely to grant social sanction to something which excludes them from the benefit of one. =P
But forget arguments breaking the defence of legalisation. Think for a moment what a live-in really means. The very concept of a live-in, which is essentially anarchist in nature, exists outside the purview of law. While marriage lets the law intervene into the sphere of personal relationships, live-ins try to escape this interference by law, in a field which the proponents of live-ins consider essentially private. The concept of a live-in entails the shift of risk-bearing to the people in the relationship. It entails freedom by the removal of obligations, by giving the opportunity to walk-out. And sometimes I fail to understand what's so wrong about this...True, one may get hurt, but isn't that worse than living a hypocrisy of obligations when you don't even feel any kind of attachment to a person?
Well, anyway, that isn't exactly my point here. My point is that live-ins are an entirely different concept from marriage. But by trying to legalise it, courts are converting live-ins into pseudo-marriages, and thus eroding the very aim of a live-in: experiments, and the freedom to ditch an experiment gone awry.
