Marriage in Indian culture is rarely treated as a personal choice. It is a social expectation, a family milestone – especially for women. From an early age, girls are raised with the understanding that marriage will define their adult lives. It is presented as a destination offering social and economic security.
Education, independence, and even ambition are encouraged only to the extent that they do not interfere with this final goal. Women are often warned against being ‘overqualified’ or too independent. Marriage is not framed as one possible life path, but as the inevitable one.
Yet marriage, historically and structurally, was never designed with women’s freedom at its center. It functioned as a system of dutiful subjugation – a handover to another family for ‘safe keeping’ (sic). Marriage is one of humanity’s oldest institutions, created to regulate reproduction, inheritance, caste, property, and labour. Love entered the conversation much later.
In India, marriage has long operated as a mechanism that transfers women from their natal homes into their husband’s families, while preserving social hierarchies. A woman does not merely gain a partner; she inherits an entire structure of expectations. In many cases, she even loses her name and assumes a new identity. In real terms, she migrates – willingly or compulsively.
The language surrounding marriage makes this imbalance clear. A daughter is ‘given away’. A bride is expected to ‘adjust’. The success of a marriage is measured not by mutual fulfilment, but by a woman’s ability to endure ‘quietly and adapt’.
Research consistently shows that men benefit significantly from marriage. Married men tend to live longer, earn more, and enjoy better physical and mental health. Marriage stabilises men’s lives and provides them with lifelong emotional and domestic support. For women, however, marriage offers no guaranteed benefit. Their well-being depends almost entirely on the quality of the relationship and the amount of unpaid labour they are expected to absorb. Marriage itself brings no inherent joy; it introduces new responsibilities, sometimes resembling captivity, where survival depends on the environment.
In the Indian context, this imbalance is intensified. Marriage is not just a bond between two individuals; it involves families, traditions, and constant social surveillance. A woman is expected to integrate seamlessly into her husband’s household, often at the cost of her own identity. Her routines change. Her freedom changes. Her emotional labour multiplies. This transformation is normalised – and even celebrated – as maturity or personal growth.
Financially, marriage often undermines women’s independence rather than strengthening it. Even when women work, their income is treated as supplementary. Career decisions – relocations, breaks, compromises – are framed as practical necessities for family harmony. Men’s careers expand after marriage; women’s careers are adjusted around domestic needs. Ambition becomes conditional and is often sacrificed, willingly or otherwise. Support systems shrink. Friendships fade under the weight of responsibility. Access to one’s parents becomes negotiated. Emotional care flows outward – to husbands, in-laws, and children – but rarely inward. The woman becomes the glue holding everything together, even as she disappears from the centre of her own life.
Motherhood intensifies this erasure. In India, motherhood is not merely expected; it is idealised. A woman is judged by her sacrifice, patience, and ability to place herself last. She is expected to manage household labour, childcare, and increasingly paid work, while remaining emotionally available at all times. Fathers may participate, but responsibility remains overwhelmingly feminised. When mothers struggle, the failure is framed as personal rather than structural.
As children grow, the demands do not lessen – they shift. Emotional responsibility continues, later extending to elderly care or grandchildren. A woman’s life remains organised around others’ needs long after her own have been postponed.
Socially, marriage remains a marker of respectability. Unmarried women are questioned relentlessly about their age, character, and priorities. Married but unhappy women are advised to compromise, endure, and remain silent. Divorce, though increasingly common, still carries stigma, borne disproportionately by women.
And yet, something is changing.
Women today are more educated, more financially independent, and more aware of the costs they are expected to bear. Singlehood is no longer synonymous with failure. Divorce is survivable. Motherhood is increasingly recognised as a choice, not an obligation. Women are asking questions their mothers were discouraged from voicing: What does marriage give me? What does it take from me? Who am I allowed to be within it?
These questions are not anti-marriage. They are anti-denial.
Marriage is not inherently oppressive, but it has been historically unequal. Until emotional labour, domestic work, caregiving, and sacrifice are acknowledged and fairly distributed, marriage will continue to benefit men more reliably than women.
Perhaps the most radical act today is not rejecting marriage, but telling the truth about it. To stop treating it as the inevitable destiny of every woman. To stop asking daughters when they will marry, and start asking whether the lives they are building allow them dignity, autonomy, and joy.
Admitting this truth does not weaken society. It allows us to imagine partnerships that do not require women to shrink in order to belong. Women need not be raised as social migrants. They can remain rooted, independent, and connected to their own networks of friendship and sisterhood.
They must be encouraged to plan their lives on their own terms, and to decide whose voices they listen to: society’s, or their own.
kiranbediofficial@gmail.com
(The writer, India’s first female IPS officer, is former lieutenant governor of Puducherry)
www.hindustantimes.com
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