Marriage is Bondage—Love is Liberation

Why society’s vows may bind the body, but only the soul’s surrender sets you free.

In a world where romantic ideals are often equated with wedding rituals, and love is frequently validated by legal contracts, the statement “Marriage is bondage – Love is liberation” appears heretical. Yet, this provocative assertion is not an indictment of companionship—it is a challenge to differentiate between what is constructed and what is eternal.

Marriage, when stripped to its skeletal form, is a social, legal, and often religious agreement. Love, on the other hand, is a phenomenon of the soul—boundless, spontaneous, and liberating. This essay explores the tension between the two, drawing from psychology, literature, and Indic philosophy to argue that true love must transcend the possessive bindings of marriage to touch the infinite.


From a sociological point of view, marriage is one of the most enduring human institutions. It serves purposes: economic stability, child-rearing, social order, inheritance rights. But all these are external. Marriage survives not because two people are necessarily in love, but because society needs order. It is a box in which love may or may not live.

However, love is an emotion ungoverned by society. It does not ask for witness or approval. Love cannot be measured by anniversaries or rings. In fact, the more you try to possess love, the faster it evaporates. As the Persian mystic Rumi wrote:

"Try to hold on to it, and it slips away. Let it be, and it stays forever."

Where marriage is conditional, love is unconditional. Where marriage seeks definition, love thrives in the undefined. Marriage requires effort; love arises from grace.


Modern psychology often reveals how marriages, especially loveless or abusive ones, can act as emotional prisons. The pressure to conform, to sacrifice individuality for the sake of a "relationship," creates resentment, stagnation, and silent suffering. Many stay in marriages not out of love, but out of fear: fear of loneliness, of judgement, of failure.

Love, by contrast, encourages freedom of self-expression. A loving partner does not demand you to change—they inspire your evolution. In a loving dynamic, you are not afraid to be vulnerable, to speak your truth, to dream. The bond is not from fear but from mutual expansion.

Carl Jung hinted at this when he wrote:

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”

Marriage often avoids transformation; love demands it.


Nowhere is this paradox more beautifully portrayed than in the story of Radha and Krishna. Radha was never married to Krishna. In fact, Krishna married many others. But it is Radha’s name that is eternally linked with him. Why? Because their love transcended form, law, and ritual.

Radha’s devotion was not transactional. She didn’t expect Krishna to promise her fidelity, property, or social status. She simply dissolved in him. In that dissolution, she attained the highest form of spiritual liberation—Moksha.

Contrast this with many modern relationships where marriage becomes an entitlement to someone’s time, body, and choices. In Radha’s love, there was no demand—only surrender. That surrender became liberation.

In the Bhakti tradition of India, Radha is often considered a symbol of pure longing, the kind of love that leads one not to bondage but to oneness with the divine.


Yet it would be unfair to reduce all marriages to bondage. The problem is not marriage, but when marriage becomes a replacement for love.

Marriage can become a sacred space when it is rooted in mutual love, respect, and inner freedom. In ancient Indian philosophy, Grihastha Ashram (the householder stage) is not a fall from grace, but a vital phase of life meant for practicing Dharma through relationships. But this only holds true when the marriage is a vehicle for inner growth, not an obstacle.

In the Yoga Vasishtha, a beautiful metaphor is used:

“Two birds sit on the same tree. One eats the fruit, the other simply watches.”

When two people live together in love, they are like these two birds—one engaged, the other witnessing. There is activity, but also detachment. There is togetherness, but not possession.

A marriage rooted in love becomes companionship, not ownership. In such a relationship, both partners liberate each other.

Let us consider what liberation (Moksha) really is in Indian philosophy. It is the state where one is free from fear, desire, and ego. Interestingly, when one experiences deep, real love—not romantic obsession, but spiritual oneness—one gets a taste of that Moksha.

You forget the self. Time dissolves. There is only presence.

In such love:

• You are not looking to gain anything.
• You are not seeking guarantees.
• You are simply being—with another, for another, through another.

That’s why many saints, like Mira Bai, found liberation in divine love, not in worldly companionship. She rejected marriage and sang only for her beloved Krishna. For her, love was not a union of two people, but dissolution into the infinite.

So is marriage truly bondage? Not always. But it easily becomes so when love is absent and only form remains.

And is love always liberating? Only when it is pure, not tainted by control, ego, or fear.

The truth is this: marriage is a choice made in society; love is a state reached in the soul. You can be married and free, or unmarried and chained. The question is not about the ritual, but the reality of the relationship.

Choose love—not just for romance, but for liberation. If marriage flows from that love, let it be a temple, not a prison.

Because in the end, only love—not the law, not the rituals, not the names—can set you free.