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Reflections from thirty-one years at the Bar

Early in my career, a client asked me a question I have never quite stopped turning over. His marriage had lasted a single day — the couple had separated before the wedding night was even over, over a dispute so trivial that neither side, years later, could describe it consistently. And yet, he wanted to know, why was he still expected, a decade on, to keep answering to a court about what he owed her. I gave him the correct legal answer at the time. I am not certain I gave him a satisfying one, and I have thought about that gap between the two ever since.

The law, as I explained to him, does not measure a marriage by its duration when it comes to maintenance. A union that lasted twenty-five years and one that lasted twenty-five hours are, in the eyes of the maintenance provisions, formally the same event: a marriage solemnised, a status conferred, an obligation triggered. Courts have long taken the view that maintenance is not a reward for years of companionship or a penalty proportioned to the length of cohabitation, but a recognition that marriage itself — however briefly it was lived — can alter a person’s position in the world, sometimes irreversibly, from the moment the ceremony is complete.

I understand the reasoning, and in many cases I have seen it vindicated. I have represented women whose families withdrew all support the day the wedding took place, on the assumption that another household now bore that responsibility, and who found themselves, when the marriage collapsed within weeks, with neither a natal home fully willing to take them back nor a marital one prepared to provide for them. For such a person, the length of the marriage is almost beside the point; what matters is that a single ceremony rearranged her entire economic dependency, and the law’s insistence on continuing support is not sentiment but repair. I have sat across from women in exactly this position, and I do not think any fair-minded observer could call their claim to maintenance unjust merely because the marriage itself was brief.

And yet I have also sat, many times, across from men for whom the same rule produced something that felt less like repair and more like an indefinite sentence for an event that barely occurred. A short marriage, entered into in good faith, undone almost immediately by circumstances that had little to do with either party’s conduct, can still generate litigation that runs for years and an order that runs for a lifetime — an obligation whose size bears no relationship to what was actually built, or shared, or even experienced, in the marriage itself. I have watched such men grow old still paying, still appearing in court on applications for enhancement, long after the marriage that gave rise to the liability has become, for both parties, a distant and almost unreal memory. There is something genuinely difficult to reconcile in a legal order that treats a single day and a quarter century as producing, in principle, the same category of obligation.

What I have come to believe, after enough years of sitting on both sides of this question, is that the difficulty is not that the law is wrong to look past duration, but that duration is being asked to stand in for something else the law finds harder to measure directly — actual dependency, actual sacrifice, actual disruption to a life. Where a marriage, however short, has genuinely altered a spouse’s position — cost her a career, a home, a place in her own family — the case for lifetime support is strong regardless of the calendar. Where a marriage has changed almost nothing beyond its own brief existence, the same rule, applied mechanically, produces an obligation with no real object behind it. The trouble is that courts, working from petitions and counter-petitions rather than lived experience, are often left to infer the reality of dependency from proxies — the length of the marriage foremost among them — precisely because the truer measures are so much harder to prove.

I think this is also why so much of the bitterness in these cases attaches not to the fact of maintenance itself, but to its permanence. A defined sum, paid once and finished with, is something most people, however reluctantly, can accept as the price of closing a chapter. A monthly obligation that stretches forward without a fixed end, revisited every few years at the other side’s application, asks something different of a person — it asks him to remain, in a small but continuing way, financially bound to a chapter of his life he otherwise closed decades ago. I do not think this feeling, common as it is among the men I have represented, is illegitimate merely because the underlying obligation is legally sound. A rule can be just in its purpose and still sit uneasily with the person who lives under it for thirty years on account of a marriage that lasted one.

I no longer think the honest answer to my old client’s question is that the law is simply unfair to him, nor that it is simply protective of her. The honest answer is that maintenance law is trying to do something genuinely difficult — to look past the brevity of a single day and ask what that day actually did to two lives — and that it does not always succeed. I have seen it succeed, quietly and rightly, in cases where a short marriage left a real and lasting wound. I have seen it fail, just as quietly, in cases where a short marriage left almost nothing behind except the litigation itself. I no longer expect the law to draw that line perfectly. I have simply come to believe that the question my client asked me, all those years ago, deserves to be asked honestly in every such case — not answered by the calendar alone, but by what the marriage, however brief, actually did to the people who were in it.

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. Readers are encouraged to consult a qualified lawyer or advocate specializing in divorce cases for professional legal guidance.

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