An ex-super star of Hindi films, after separating from his wife, started living with another actress. It was a live-in-arrangement – love without license.
The live-in- actress left the star and after some time married an industrialist.
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In another case of a similar nature, the daughter of an actor, producer-director started living with the son of another film personality despite stiff opposition from her father. After the live-in-arrangement, the two some married and started living like wife and husband.
The two real-life examples show that in one case love without license proved a naught. Their trial marriage flopped. In the second, the arrangement led to a conventional marriage. What happens to such a marriage in the long run only time can unfold. Anyway, that happens to any marriage.
Image Source: vanderbilt.edu
In modern changing society, where the twilight values clash every day, it is becoming a recurrent questions whether it is right for a woman to opt for the live-in-love or not.
Then, what are the consequences? What if the man backs out? How does she face the society after having compromised herself? This is galling. May prove highly humiliating’ in the long run because she does get sexually involved.
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Pushpa, hardly 18, eloped with a playboy years her senior stayed in a hotel and returned claiming that she had married him. Her parents hurriedly put the seal on the marriage for the obvious reason. The girl would have earned the stigma of being “loose” for a life time, depriving herself a stable, durable marriage.
However, her marriage did not last. Her husband, mired in mushy matches of this kind, revealed his true colours sooner than was expected. Pushpa still lives like a deserted “wife”. She has paid a heavy price for her promiscuity. The relationship of the young is sex. Love is different. It needs development and evolution. It is a cultural growth. The young are too naive to know the difference.
No wonder, they try every bit of strategy to breach rigid conventions. They are overpowered by urges, hormones and explosive feelings. Their urges become urgent. They are too inexperienced to know which dominates – love or sex. Love is a feeling. Sex is an act. They mix the two. Where should the sex-staggered youngsters find the solution?
Parents are stubbornly convinced that going steady is no problem, but getting involved in sex is. “Go ahead as friends. Stop as sex partners,” is their line.
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Youngsters, contrarily, are in quest for a method of evolving a lasting marital relationship. Some sincerely believe that trial marriage is a solution. They are entitled to their thinking.
Trial marriage involves two unmarried who have decided to ‘live” together. Sexual equation between them is taken for granted. After a period of time, they think they are compatible. They tie the knoty they think otherwise, and breakaway. The latter is bound to hurt. But it has one advantage- it saves them from enduring a long-time suffering with all its complications, conflicts and compromises.
The aim was to have a full-dress rehearsal for the marriage. To test the waters, so to say. It ensures continuity in the relationship because there is no sudden jump from “I” to “We”. The gap is bridged by the live-in period.
In another formation, the couples know that they have no long-range intention of getting married. Both have come together on sex without bondings. Love binds them, not the law.
There is a difference between youngsters who live together and those who do so or meet occasionally. The former see and put sex in perspective. The latter want to have sex whenever they meet. Most other things are relegated to the background
In the former, sex finds a place of its own. In the latter, it dominates. Any available opportunity is devoted to love- making. In the former, a greater scope for compatibly and companionship is explored, which strengthens the relationship. This spills over to marriage, too. The first phase of marriage which generates misunderstandings, is softened somewhat, if not much.
For example, the live “in girl knows that the man will get up at 7 a.m. and ask for tea and newspaper. She has no illusion that he will linger in bed with her. She also knows that he smokes in bed. So, there is no element of shocks. She has absorbed them during the live-in period.
Similarly, the husband knows she will get up and switch the TV set. Whatever he may be doing at that point of time. Trial marriage is like a trial match in which independence converts into inter-dependence. Another softening point is financial management. Living twosome entails expenditure of a full household.
It requires skill in management, using money, and the essential art of saving it and staggering the income over a month. It is a training ground.
Money is a big marriage-breaker. At least, a trouble-maker. Its potential has increased these days as couples tend to live recklessly on credit. They are having little appreciation of the amounts they have, and how to .tailor their needs accordingly. Sooner than later, they run into debt. Love wings out with money.
There is the “shady” side to trial marriage, which cannot be blinked away. When two people have sex relations, they are bound to have children. Even when they take every precaution, some slip at sometime will result into pregnancy. One solution to this problem is don’t have children.
But this is easier said than done. Small slips can have big consequences. Therefore, the live-in couple must know that they have a heavy joint responsibility.
The issue ought to be discussed and decision taken before they move in together. They must discuss the problem- what if there is a pregnancy? Abortion should be the least acceptable solution as it is fraught with serious consequences. Trifles can trigger a parting. More so as legal bonds are missing. Even the social conventions and their cementing force are missing. The union is based on defiance of society.
It happened in the case of Anand and Bina. She says, “It revealed that we were bound by nothing. Hence even trifles got the better of our judgment.”
Uncertainty may not affect the male as much as it does the female. For her, all is at the stake. There are a few women who can face the risk with a shrug of the shoulder.
Nina moved in and started living with a middle-aged male on the understanding that as soon she gets pregnant, she would move out and go back to her job in a newspaper. She did not get pregnant. But she had to move out. It was a “marriage” of convenience that flopped.
No matter how the “couple” looks upon it, they cannot win society’s nod for their action. Society frowns upon it; sex without social and legal sanction is immoral.
Society’s verdict, with which the separated girl has to live, is bound to be bad and condemnatory. Society is, at core, hypocritical. This makes the verdict all the more galling. Our society, invaded by western concepts, is in a twilight zone. It does not know in which direction to go: the western or the eastern.
The young are fluttering their wings. They need love- nests. Hence the live-in arrangements, which are the half- way-homes for them. These may end in delight or disaster. Concerned elders can only show them the path. They cannot make them tread it.
One thing is, however absolutely certain and should be understood by fledglings: the intention to marry at a future data is not the same thing as being already married. Admire the sea but keep at the shore, is perhaps the most prudent and practical way to handle the hot situation.