Why Indian Marriages Survive Because of Fear, Not Love

People often say Indian marriages are unbreakable. They last decades, generations, lifetimes. But longevity does not always mean strength, and survival does not always mean happiness. If you look closely, beneath the gold-plated photographs and the rehearsed smiles at family gatherings, you’ll see it: many marriages survive not because of love, but because of fear. Fear of judgment. Fear of shame. Fear of starting over. And fear, unlike love, asks for nothing but silence.

In this country, the weight of society is heavier than the weight of one’s own heart. A woman can cry herself to sleep for years, but the thought of neighbors whispering her name is unbearable. A man can feel suffocated, trapped in a bond that feels more like a contract, yet he swallows his truth because divorce is treated like failure, not freedom. And so, couples learn to stay. Not because they can’t leave, but because leaving would mean tearing apart the illusion that society worships.

In the beginning, there may have been love. Or maybe not. Maybe it was arranged, like most things in Indian life, carefully, dutifully, with compatibility measured in horoscopes and family reputations. But even when love existed, it often fades under the pressure of responsibility. Love asks for choice. Duty demands obedience. And so the vows shift: not “I love you,” but “I will not dishonor you. I will not dishonor us.”

What makes these marriages last is not resilience but resignation. Countless women stay in loveless unions because they are told endurance is their greatest virtue. Countless men remain because walking away would brand them selfish, disloyal, broken. And in this endurance, there is a quiet kind of violence, not the visible kind, but the slow erosion of the self. Dreams left behind. Joy swallowed whole. Nights spent side by side, with a distance wider than oceans.

Fear has a way of disguising itself as tradition. “Stay together, no matter what” is praised as loyalty, but often it is just fear of the unknown. Fear of losing children. Fear of financial instability. Fear of being the scandal whispered about at every wedding. Fear keeps couples bound even when the love has long since died.

And yet, society claps when anniversaries are celebrated, when fifty years are marked, never asking if those years were kind, if they were fulfilling, if they were truly lived. We equate endurance with success, but endurance without love is just survival. And survival without joy is a slow, invisible kind of death.

Perhaps the question is not why Indian marriages survive, but what we call survival. Fear can keep two people in the same house, under the same roof, for a lifetime. But survival is not the same as living. A marriage without love may endure, yes. But it endures like a tree stripped of its leaves, standing, rooted, yet lifeless. Maybe it’s time we stop applauding survival and start asking: where is the love?