Love and let live-in: State should keep its nose out of people’s bedrooms

I have been with my partner for 12 years now, six years married, six years in a live-in relationship. We shared a home, a bed, bills and three cats. “So why not get married?” People — generally older relatives — asked, often. I couldn’t explain the beautiful temporariness of our relationship, how it seemed so within our control: to stay together or not was a choice we could make daily, and we kept coming back to each other as an affirmation of our love, not because it was “too much hassle” to split up and divide our assets.

I grew up in Delhi, in the 1990s. Mine was a liberal upbringing but not without moral policing. I went to a co-ed school, and knew boys, not just as the opposite sex, but as friends and classmates. They were simply a part of my life and I felt no distance from them, even as I grew older and crushes inevitably formed and dissipated, all part of the miasma of adolescence. Later, when some of us got driving licenses, we’d sometimes sit in a parked car on some quiet colony road, listening to music, the air conditioner on. I recall so clearly, being interrupted in the middle of several conversations by some policeman on his rounds, saying, “Get out of the car, I’ll call your parents.” I would have been okay with the policeman calling my parents, I had nothing to hide, but sometimes the boy I was with was not quite so confident.

The policemen didn’t need a reason to stop us, apart from a vague ‘public indecency’ excuse. Couples sitting close together in Lodi Gardens or behind bushes in public parks are often hustled along. Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, in the decades before it was struck down, was similarly often a convenient cover for police to harass gay couples.

India’s states have always been proud standard bearers for moral policing but Uttarakhand just passed a Uniform Civil Code that would allow, among other things, the state to punish with jail two unmarried, consenting adults living “in the nature of marriage”.  A month into your new relationship, you, an Uttarakhand native, must, no matter where in the world you are, find a ‘registrar’ somewhere and declare that you are cohabiting. This registrar will then do a “summary inquiry” of your life, and summon you or others. If they find anything “suspicious” in your living arrangement, they must also ask the local police station to take “appropriate action” (specifics are left to the registrar and police’s no-doubt vivid imagination).  And when the relationship ends, you must ask the registrar for a “statement of termination.”

With the state knowing where you are and who you’re with at all times, it becomes easier to ‘rescue’ women from matches their families might find unsuitable, for reasons of religion, caste or other fever-dreamed ‘love jihads’: the registrar must inform your parents if you’re under 21 years old and living with someone, as well as when you break up (incidentally, the legal age for women to marry is still 18). If you’ve run away from home with your partner to escape an abusive family or domestic violence, this makes near-sure they can find you.

Romance is hard to come by in the best of times. How are relationships supposed to grow? Through months of getting to know each other, of being alone with one another, of learning what it is to share a life? Or through the traditional decades-old route of picking out an ‘appropriate’ partner for your child and letting them share a household only once they’re married, but still practically strangers to each other?
Imagine a man and woman deciding, sensibly, that before getting married, they will give this relationship a trial run. Who is messy in the bathroom and who leaves all household chores for the other to complain about? Who behaves like a completely different person behind closed doors than they do in the few hours you spend together in public. Who is disposed to violence or abuse?

Several plausible things could happen in Uttarakhand. Couples might dispense with the living together arrangement altogether. Divorce rates could rise from incompatible partnerships. More unhappy marriages might follow. You live with someone, register, break up, move in with someone else, and soon strangers in a government office and police station know more about your love life than even your friends perhaps, and might even shame you in that exquisite, no-need-for-words way that government officials are sometimes fond of doing.

I had one other live-in relationship before. We were together for three years, and eventually broke up, realising that we were both unhappy. I was glad to have tried it out, relieved that I didn’t have to go through the rigmarole of a divorce. I cherished my alone time to process in peace. This right to love freely and this rite of learning how to love will soon be taken away from many people.

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