When Living Together Was Easy, But Marriage Became Difficult
This article has been researched and written by Advocate Aarun Chanda, who practices divorce law in Mumbai and Pune. It is intended solely for academic purposes and should not be construed as legal advice. The views expressed are personal. Readers are encouraged to consult a qualified lawyer or advocate specializing in divorce cases for professional legal guidance.
There’s a special kind of paperwork that makes a Family Court lawyer sigh before even untying the file ribbon. It goes like this: a couple shares a flat for half a decade. They’ve survived IKEA furniture assembly, joint Netflix passwords, a rescue dog with anxiety issues, and enough Instagram-worthy vacations to make their friends quietly jealous. Everything about their life together screams “these two have it figured out.”
Then they get married.
And within months, they’re glaring at each other across a courtroom like strangers who’ve just discovered they hate each other’s taste in curtains.
One young man once looked at me, genuinely baffled, and said, “Sir, we already knew each other for years! How does the marriage just… fail?” It’s a fair question. It’s also proof that love, like gravity, works differently once you sign the paperwork.
1. TIME TOGETHER IS NOT A COMPATIBILITY TEST
Everyone assumes that years of cohabitation is basically a dress rehearsal for marriage — if you survived the live-in phase, surely the real show will go fine too. In practice, that logic holds up about as well as a paper umbrella in a monsoon.
Living together answers cozy little questions: Can we share a bathroom? Can we survive each other’s snoring? Can we split the electricity bill without a shouting match? Marriage, on the other hand, shows up with a much scarier syllabus: Where do we live? Whose parents get priority during festivals? Who’s cooking when someone gets promoted to another city? Do we want kids, and if so, how many, and starting when, and what if we disagree?
A couple can spend five blissful years never once being forced to answer these questions with any seriousness. Their relationship ran on “we’re together because we enjoy this.” Marriage runs on “we’re together because we promised — legally, socially, and now also to Aunty Kamla at every family function — that we would be.”
That’s not a small upgrade. That’s basically switching from a free trial to a lifetime subscription with no refund policy.
Flexibility Dies the Moment the Mangalsutra Goes On
Here’s the cruel plot twist: sometimes it’s precisely because the live-in phase went so smoothly that couples get blindsided later. Cohabitation is forgiving. Need space? Rearrange the living situation. Careers pulling you to different cities? Simply adjust. Unhappy? Pack a bag, no courtroom required.
Marriage removes that safety net and replaces it with an audience — families, society, and a suspicious number of opinions about how you’re supposed to spend Diwali. Suddenly “where should we celebrate the festival” isn’t a scheduling issue, it’s a referendum on whose parents matter more. A money disagreement becomes an accusation of neglect. Wanting some alone time becomes “emotional abandonment.” In Family Court, small arguments rarely stay small — they grow annexures, and once a fight has annexures, you know things have gotten serious.
2. MARRIAGE DOESN’T CREATE COMPATIBILITY — IT INTERROGATES IT
The law, mercifully, doesn’t demand that spouses be identical twins in temperament. Plenty of very different people build very happy marriages. Trouble starts when differences calcify into a steady diet of conflict, coldness, humiliation, or emotional checkout.
Courts have long recognized that this kind of “mental cruelty” rarely announces itself with one dramatic slammed door — it usually creeps in slowly, visible only when you zoom out and look at the whole pattern. There’s no tidy formula here. Five years of cohabitation plus a wedding does not equal guaranteed happily-ever-after. Human relationships, annoyingly, refuse to be solved with arithmetic.
3. WHAT ACTUALLY CHANGES AFTER THE WEDDING
Permanence changes the vibe. “If this doesn’t work we can just go separate ways” hits differently once it’s now legally and socially complicated to do so. Ironically, some people get more demanding post-marriage, convinced the title now entitles them to certain behavior.
Families crash the party. What was once a two-person show becomes a family committee with strong opinions on real estate, grandchildren, and lifestyle — often delivered with all the diplomatic subtlety of a courtroom verdict, but at the dinner table.
Kids become non-negotiable questions. Postponing the baby conversation is easy when you’re just dating-with-a-lease. Marriage forces the topic into the spotlight — and “we’ll figure it out eventually” stops being an acceptable answer.
Money stops being just money. It becomes a referendum on control, contribution, and who owes what to whose parents.
Careers collide. One person gets transferred to Bengaluru, the other refuses to leave Pune. A marriage, unlike a long-distance situationship, isn’t built to survive indefinitely on video calls.
The romance fades into the mundane. Restaurant photos get replaced by grocery bills. Spontaneous weekend trips get replaced by school admission forms. That’s when couples discover whether their bond was ever more than novelty.
4. CAN YOU JUST… GET DIVORCED BECAUSE IT’S NOT WORKING?
Not quite so simply. Under the Hindu Marriage Act, “we’re just not compatible anymore” isn’t, on its own, a valid legal reason for divorce. Courts need an actual statutory ground — cruelty, for instance — not just a shrug and a sigh. The idea of “irretrievable breakdown” as an automatic divorce ticket has been floated by the Law Commission for decades, but Parliament never made it an ordinary ground.
The Supreme Court, however, does hold a special constitutional power to dissolve marriages that have completely and hopelessly broken down — even without both parties agreeing — but this is an exceptional tool reserved for the apex court, not a shortcut available at every local Family Court.
5. THE REAL TAKEAWAY
A long live-in relationship proves one thing: two people once knew how to share a life. It says nothing about whether they’ll manage it forever. It shows familiarity, not maturity. Affection, not resilience. It tells you nothing about how they’ll cope with illness, unemployment, aging parents, or disagreements about parenting styles.
Duration, in short, is not the same thing as durability. A photo from a 2019 vacation cannot testify to what a marriage feels like in 2026.
Courts, for their part, shouldn’t turn every case into forensic archaeology of who liked whose Instagram post in 2021. The real question is always simpler and harder: does the conduct in question cross the line into legal cruelty, or is it just the ordinary, unglamorous friction of two humans sharing a life?
Not every failed marriage needs a villain. Sometimes two people just become strangers, even after loving each other honestly for years. The job of the court isn’t to rewrite their story — just to make sure that whatever the final chapter says, it’s written by the law, not by heartbreak or headlines.
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