Is live-in relationship better than marriage? || Acharya Prashant (2020)
Question (Q): There is a growing trend of having live-in relationships as opposing the marriage. We are finding more people falling into a live-in relationship. Is that a movement forward? Would that be considered something that would take us to freedom?
Acharya Prashant (AP): We are very good at playing with names. So if you are married to someone, you live with him or her; in a live-in relationship too, you live with somebody. How does it matter? Ultimately you are living with somebody.
Why are you living with anybody? You can choose the marriage route, you can choose the live-in route, you can choose some other route, you can decide to be part of a commune or some other setting, some other kind of gathering, a club or something; but the thing is about company and relationship. Why is there such a hungry need to be with someone? And when I say, "Why," I mean, "Why?" It's a question, not an allegation. When I say, "Why is there such a need to be with someone?," we need to answer this.
It's mostly about men and women being together. There is a man, there is a woman; when they are married, then they have obtained some kind of a social license, a sanction. The hold of society is now loosening, the old barriers of religion and cast are slowly crumbling, and especially the big cities offer a lot of anonymity, so you can afford to be together without seeking the sanction of family or society. And that you call as a 'live-in relationship'.
In fact, many, if not most of the live-in partners would probably not have moved into live-in, had it been possible to somehow get married. Given a choice, they would get married, but because marriage is being opposed on grounds of caste, religion, economics, or something, so they decide to live-in an anonymous way. I am not saying this happens in all live-in cases; but in a large number of cases, this too is the story. So, all said and done, it is about the desire to be with a person, whether in a married way or in an unmarried way.
