In Mst. Amara Waqas v Muhammad Waqas Rasheed and others (decided on 2 March 2026), the Islamabad High Court ruled that wives have a legal right to property accumulated during marriage under Islamic family law. Drawing on both Islamic and common law jurisprudence, Justice Kayani held that the principles of fairness require that a wife must share in the matrimonial property in addition to her other financial rights. He invoked the classical Islamic legal doctrine of partnership (shariqah), noting that where both spouses contribute to the acquisition of property, shared ownership may be recognised.

The judgment marks a significant milestone. For the first time, a superior court in Pakistan has recognised a wife’s legal right to matrimonial property and has held that the unpaid work she performs at home such as raising children, managing the household, supporting family life, has genuine economic value that the law must acknowledge. It is a landmark step forward in protecting women’s financial rights in the event of divorce in Pakistan, as argued in scholarly literature.

The judgment contributes to a growing body of Supreme Court jurisprudence that has progressively strengthened women’s rights within marriage. Recent Supreme Court judgments have reinforced this direction. In 2025, the Court held that a wife’s right to maintenance begins at the moment of marriage, not from the time she moves into the matrimonial home, and that her claim to unpaid maintenance has no time limit, since a husband’s duty to maintain his wife is a legal debt, not a moral favour. Taken together, these judgments mark a clear judicial direction: marriage in Pakistan is increasingly being formulated, via legal precedents, as a partnership between equals rather than a relationship in which the husband has superior position.

Yet the transformation is incomplete. One key area of family law that urgently needs reform is the remedy of restitution of conjugal rights. Rooted in Christian canon law and transplanted into Muslim personal law through British colonial court decisions rather than having any foundation in Islamic teaching, restitution sits uneasily with the contractual and consensual nature of Islamic marriage. In practice, it operates as a tactical weapon. When a wife files for maintenance, dower, divorce or custody of her children, her husband responds by filing a restitution petition — effectively asking the court to order her home rather than address her claims. Yet despite the incompatibility of restitution with the injunctions of Islam and its violation of the constitutional rights to dignity, equality, and non-discrimination, Pakistani courts have so far declined to strike it down. This is a striking omission that represents one of the most overdue reforms in Pakistani family law.

The recent judgments of superior courts reflect a decisive shift towards treating marriage as a partnership of equals. The restitution of conjugal rights belongs to the older, discredited model of marriage as ownership and control. It is a colonial relic that has no place in a legal order that now affirms the equal dignity and financial rights of wives. The case for abolishing the restitution remedy is as strong in Islamic law as it is in constitutional law, and the time for that judgment is long overdue.

In 2025, the Allahabad High Court took suo motu cognisance of what it viewed as a rise in fake temple societies that were issuing fabricated marriage certificates to eloping couples. According to the court, these fake certificates allowed them to circumvent statutory provisions, thereby degrading “the sanctity of marriage.” Earlier, registration of marriages required proof of age, birth, and marriage, along with three witnesses in the district where either spouse resided. The High Court restricted marriage registration to the couple’s or parents’ ordinary residence, requiring video recordings of the ceremony and the officiant’s physical presence at the registrar’s office. The registrar can waive these requirements only if family members are present during registration.

Through these guidelines, the court intends to protect minors from child marriage and potential sexual or labor exploitation. However, the court has imposed these restrictions upon all couples, including consenting adults. In doing so, it has significantly endangered inter-caste and inter-religious marriages, which may be solemnised against the consent of the families. The trajectory of the proposed Gujarat law is along similar lines—surveillance under the guise of protection. The dangers of mandating parental consent can act as a weapon in the hands of family members who often misuse the administrative machinery to threaten these couples with false kidnapping or abduction charges, something that has already been dissuaded by the Supreme Court in Lata Singh v State of UP.

Even when the outcome protected the freedom to choose a partner, the process of arriving at it was a punishment in itself. In Shafin Jahan v KM Ashokan, the Supreme Court held that the right to marry a person of one’s choice is part of the right to life (Article 21 of the Constitution of India). The court also cautioned against unbridled use of parens patriae jurisdiction by holding that it cannot be used to determine “the suitability of partners to a marital tie.” While the final decision was a welcome outcome and landmark precedent, the choice of the adult woman was subject to extraordinary scrutiny. The Kerala High Court had initially invalidated the voluntary marriage and granted custody to Hadiya’s father.  It took several months of hearings before the Supreme Court finally overruled the Kerala High Court’s decision.

These measures risk framing individuals, particularly women, as inherently vulnerable children of the state whose choices require supervision. This reinforces patriarchal control that undermines autonomy and dignity under the garb of welfare. Intimate relationships may often be sites of gender inequality and consequent power imbalances. While the state should address power imbalances, regulation must not convert into surveillance. Laws that question the choice of partner or mandate familial consent do not empower individuals. Even if the state creates such laws, the courts must fulfill their role as guardians of fundamental rights. This piece highlights that the courts have not always undertaken this task and many times even initiated paternalistic scrutiny. However, there are also instances where the courts have meaningfully examined law created by the State. In Safiya Sultana v. State of UP, the Allahabad High Court read the requirement of a thirty-day notice to the public before marriage under the Special Marriage Act 1954 as optional. It held that the mandatory application of these provisions violates the fundamental right to privacy and liberty, including the freedom to choose one’s partner without state interference. It also noted that such a notice requirement was peculiar to the SMA and no other personal laws required this. Therefore, courts ought to follow this trajectory and adopt robust methods to defend fundamental rights.

The tension between talaq, khula, and dissolution of marriage (faskh) has long been a central part of Muslim jurisprudence. The reasoning adopted in this judgment, however, strikes closer to the core of the problem than most prior judicial attempts, suggesting the beginnings of what might be called a decolonial jurisprudence in the field. I will unpack the doctrinal background of these forms, albeit briefly, below.

The distinctions among talaq, faskh, and khula are subtle and often lost upon those not acquainted with Islamic legal tradition. Classical Islamic law granted men a unilateral right to divorce (talaq) exercisable extra-judicially. For women, a right to divorce existed, but it could only be realised with the husband’s consent in the same extra-judicial space (extra-judicial khula). If consent was refused, a woman’s only recourse was to the court, which could grant dissolution either through khula (judicial khula) or through grounds of faskh.

The two forms, judicial khula and faskh, differ in their structure of exchange and proof. A woman seeking dissolution (faskh) is required to establish one or more recognised grounds such as cruelty or failure to maintain. If successful, she retains her dower (mahr) or may claim it if unpaid. In contrast, khula requires no proof of fault: a woman’s mere request suffices, but she must typically forgo or return her dower in return for release from the marriage.

Pakistan’s courts have long struggled to maintain a coherent relationship between faskh, the statutory path to dissolution, and khula, the judicially developed mechanism for unilateral exit. In Khurshid Bibi v Muhammad Amin PLD 1967 SC 97 and its progeny, the judiciary introduced khula as a progressive solution to liberate women from intolerable marriages. Yet this innovation did not address the central problem, which was the evidentiary burden that made faskh practically unattainable for most women under colonial evidentiary standards. Instead of reforming the rules that rendered dissolution rights largely illusory, the courts constructed a parallel escape route through khula, providing relief in some cases while leaving the original evidentiary structure intact. The result was a jurisprudence that appeared reformist on the surface but remained doctrinally uneasy, with khula and faskh sitting side by side in unresolved tension.

It is in this context that Justice Malik’s judgment in Dr. Seema Hanif Khan assumes significance. Her reasoning signals an incipient decolonial turn, for she identifies the true source of injustice: the evidentiary and epistemic standards that have historically silenced women. She observes that in cases of dissolution of marriage, courts should apply not the criminal standard of proof beyond reasonable doubt but the civil standard of balance of probabilities – requiring only that the evidence make a fact more likely than not. On this basis, she faulted the lower courts for ignoring testimony relating to cruelty and for insisting upon documentary corroboration, such as First Information Reports. Equally striking is her rejection of the patriarchal vocabulary that pervades family litigation, such as the use of expressions like ‘disobedient wife’, declaring them inconsistent with constitutional guarantees of dignity.

Verily, the judgment could have gone further in clarifying the doctrinal independence of khula and faskh. Yet what it achieves is no small feat. It reopens interpretive space within Islamic jurisprudence by dislodging colonial habits of proof and patriarchal presumptions of guilt. In doing so, it gestures towards a decolonial jurisprudence – one that recognises both khula and dissolution as distinct and coexisting rights available to women, grounded not in imported liberalism but in the integrity of women under Islamic law.

Within this restrictive socio-legal milieu, what role does queering marriage law in India play? The concept of queering refers to the practice of challenging identity categories and disciplinary boundaries in order to unsettle hegemonic and oppressive notions of ‘normal’ towards greater inclusivity. Although the marriage equality case, argued before the Indian Supreme Court in 2023, did not challenge the heteronormative institution of marriage itself, simply seeking recognition of queer marriage can be seen as an initial step in a long process of ‘queering’ by challenging the framework of marriage law.

The 2023 Supreme Court hearing thus challenged existing legal regimes in India in multiple ways. Among other arguments, petitioners challenged the secular SMA as discriminatory against non-heterosexual couples; challenged the notification provision within the SMA which requires couples to provide written notice to the district Marriage Officer, which is then displayed publicly, soliciting any legal objections to the marriage. This provision acts as a barrier even to heterosexual couples marrying against their family’s wishes. It also challenged the law of adoption as discriminatory for including provisions that effectively bar queer couples from adopting and raised questions about the primacy of biological family which mediates access to healthcare, inheritance, insurance and financial autonomy, adversely affecting queer folk who face violence and discrimination within biological families. Though the Supreme Court judgment declined to read gender neutral rights into the existing legal framework, it was constrained to provide its reasoning for doing so. And it is this reasoning that is particularly illuminating, illustrating the radical nature of the challenge that queer marriage poses to existing legal structures in India.

The judgment dwelt on questions of whether marriage was indeed a fundamental right, whether legislative intent would be served by including queer marriage under the SMA, whether the interest of the child would be served if queer parents could adopt and, centrally, whether the judiciary was the appropriate forum for seeking marriage equality. However, one of its key lines of reasoning rested on existing gendered provisions within the SMA and the danger of losing those hard-won protections for women. This raised the question: in the context of a queer marriage, who would these provisions apply to?

The court’s reasoning thus inadvertently highlighted the centrality of gender unequal roles within marriage. For example, the age of consent is 18 years for women and 21 for men, upholding an asymmetry in life experience and entrenching gendered roles. Further, while the court was rightly hesitant to alter gendered protections – such as gendered provisions for alimony and regarding domestic violence – these issues demonstrate the radical nature of the challenge marriage equality poses to marriage laws. Taking these issues seriously, would force law to grapple with questions of financial, mental and physical abuse outside the neat categories of male (abuser) and female (abused).

The judgment noted that several other statutes’ operation would be affected by making marriage gender equal. Though it did not explicitly point this out, these statutes include the recently enacted ‘Love Jihad’ laws. Additionally, the particular use of Habeas Corpus along with statutory rape provisions to criminalize young men and ‘recover’ young women from unions of their choice against their families’ wishes would also be affected. Thus, making marriage gender neutral would result in several legal avenues for policing intimacy being lost to familial networks of control.

In the course of the Marriage Equality judgment, the Supreme Court also upheld the right of trans people to marry, as secured through the Arunkumar judgment in the Madras High Court in 2019, under the Hindu Marriage Act. As several commentators have argued, this was possible because of several preceding judgments, including the NALSA judgment and the passage of the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019. Arguably, the space for securing rights is hard-won and incremental, through repeated petitioning and legal manoeuvres.

As the messy history of personal law bears out, the law both entrenches systems of power and provides tools and means to challenge them. For instance, Christian women in India secured divorce rights denied to them under the law through the judiciary. Similarly, under Muslim law, women were granted more secure maintenance rights through creative interpretation by the judiciary. The securing of marriage rights for trans people (in apparently heterosexual marriages) can be seen as a similar instance of incremental change in the longer process of queering.

While the judgment did not secure marriage equality, could the process of seeking it itself be seen as a queering that challenges the policing of marriage, its gendered nature and creates ways to democratize family?

Bhagwati Pathwar’s case was no different from the ones that came before. She and her partner, an inter-faith couple in a live-in relationship, approached the Allahabad High Court apprehending harm from her family. The couple said to the court that they are adults who intend to marry and need protection as the police had not taken cognizance of their complaints so far. The Allahabad HC relying on The Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Act, 2021 (UP Act) rejected the request of the couple. The court stated that the couple had not applied for conversion under the UP Act, which is applicable to both married couples and those in a relationship ‘in nature of marriage’. It added that ‘it is not considered desirable that live-in-relationship of the petitioners be protected’ as it contravenes the UP Act and that ‘the petition has no force’.

The UP Act has a very specific stated intention – to criminalize forced religious conversions. It requires any intended conversion for marriage to go through an approval process. However, it nowhere states that conversion is mandatory for marriage – India has a secular law under which inter-faith heterosexual couples can marry without converting. The UP Act also does not mention or deal with, in any manner, state protection for inter-faith couples. To apply the UP Act to a petition for protection, is therefore at best absurd and at worst, incorrect in law. That the judgement does not engage with constitutional rights of privacy and choice, and instead prioritizes statutory compliance, also makes it susceptible to criticism.

Apart from doctrinal matters, it is interesting to consider the emotional norms of love and companionship being created and reproduced by this case. Renata Grossi argues that various theoretical works that define legal objectivity do not exclude emotional thinking. In fact, emotional thinking and analysis is a method in law, as per which judicial reasoning is seen to be firmly located in the subjective positions, cultural mores and societal values of judges. Empirical works on law and emotion by scholars such as Anleu & Mack, Bergman Blix et al. who have worked with judicial officers and lawyers, have shown that ‘objectivity’ in law is constantly emotionally managed by judges and all others involved in legal processes. Even maintaining an outward neutral appearance requires significant amounts of emotional labour.

A literal reading of this case and the terms used reflects the emotional choices made by the judge. The judge calls the petitioners’ relationship as not one ‘desirable’ to be protected. What is desirable vs. not desirable appears to be emotionally informed as the word ‘desire’ (also understood as want or need) reflects a choice made by the judge, informed by her moral notions of which relationship is deemed appropriate by her. This also brings up the question of – whose emotions are incorporated, deemed relevant in legal processes and decision making. Protection petitions are often filed by couples who want to live together, perhaps marry and share a life. While it is easier to just call this a matter of choice of a person, I’d argue that this choice is firmly located in the emotion of love.

Here by ‘love’ I do not mean a stereotypical, linear notion of individualistic romance and rebellion, but embodying a much more complex role, what Mody calls ‘an intimate and political subjectivity, as an aspect of self-making, as the making of kinship’ and Veena Das calls ‘repudiating politicisation, while inhabiting certain norms and still sustaining intimacies and love’. This emotion of love finds no space in Bhagwati Pathwar’s case and instead the case becomes about compliance with statutory law. In this way, an emotional hierarchy is created by the judge where, whose emotions are acknowledged and whose are discarded, is clearly a matter of power. Arguably, a constitutional matter such as this ought to be ‘about’ the rights bearing citizen and her rights to life, liberty, which are inextricably connected to her emotions of love, intimacy and desire. The noncompliance with the UP Act is only a facade under which the judge’s own moral disgust takes the center and it’s the judge’s emotion that decides the case.

Across courts, including the Supreme Court, judges have deliberated on the nature of live-in relationships. In judgments like Khushboo (2010), the Supreme Court dismissed criminal charges against an actress for endorsing premarital cohabitation. The court stated that consensual adult relationships are constitutionally protected under Article 21 and deliberated against using criminal law as an instrument of moral policing. In Badri Prasad (1978), the Court presumed a marriage from five decades of cohabitation, thus validating long-term live-in relationships. The ruling in Velusamy (2010) clarified that live-in relationships could be recognised for maintenance. These judgments show a trajectory where courts have acknowledged intimacy outside marriage and placed the rights of the partners within domesticity and under the ambit of the state. Live-in relationships mimic the notion of marital domesticity, without the legality and recognition of marriage. Thus, one might think of the act as the state’s head turning toward the not-community aspect of the non-marital. In law, judicial precedents have seen such relationships tested at the altar of courtrooms.

Now, with the implication of Section 69, a relationship is visualised as one with marriage as its natural telos. A betrayal or breakup is framed as a failed relationship, which is construed not as an outcome of the shifting nature of relationships or personal choice, but as sexual mischief “not amounting to rape.” Section 69 can thus assume that a live-in relationship failed because it was brought about by a man who manipulated but did not assault the woman. So, does that mean a scheming man misled women into a relationship, and in their virginal naivete, they faltered? But lo, in this tight-knit familial economy, the benevolent and punishing state, the parens patriae, will avenge the woman and punish the conniving man. With this law, live-in relationships can face the implications of Section 69 upon breakup or be forced to break up. When the relationship does not have clear legal recognition or the respectability of marriage, it becomes easier to turn the law on its head to criminalise love and agency.

Judicial precedents had gradually developed an approach to deal with cases involving false promises of marriage by classifying them contextually under rape law. That said, there have been critiques. Many see them as ‘fake’ rape cases, relationships went wrong, and feminist scholars have also contested this, as it only keeps marriage as the legitimate site of sexual relationships. The promise of marriage as a ground for rape itself is problematic, as it pushes as if it is more acceptable to be seen as a rape victim than to admit to consensual sex outside marriage.

Section 69 goes ahead and solidifies this rigid framework, razing any interpretive discretion to the ground by further decontextualising intimate relationships. By invoking suppression or concealment of identity, inter-caste, inter-faith and live-in relationships grow more susceptible to retroactive allegations when ending in bitterness or facing familial disapproval. In a caste patriarchal society, this statutory framework stunts the possibility of a nuanced, thought-out doctrine. Even if the promise-to-marry doctrines were to work, arguments around breach or deceit will inevitably be read through the lens of a failed live-in relationship. Scholars have argued that heavy reliance on the criminal law to address all ‘sexual wrongs’ traps the marginalised into a perpetual state of victimisation and curbs the articulation and exploration of sexual rights. The carceral energy of the state amplifies as it gives a free hand to prosecute in the name of protecting the victims and to police the choices of already marginalised communities.

The new law devours the breathing space with an overbroad legislative intent. But do we need a new law? Deterrence could be achieved through judicial deliberation without sweeping punitive measures. The ingredients of deception under Section 69 explain themselves as the suppression of identity or the promise of employment, which has a perilous history. The claim of having sex by suppressing identity could easily be brought into play in the context of live-in relationships, or love jihad. Section 69 revives a deep suspicion around non-marital intimacy, doubling down alongside state legislations like Uttarakhand’s Uniform Civil Code, all working in tandem to increase surveillance of the security state around love. The law threatens to collapse the fluidities of relationships into a disciplinary, punitive framework, shrouding them in legality and suspicion.

First, by bringing private relationships under state surveillance, the law reinforces the state’s patriarchal control. The UCC requires couples in live-in relationships, regardless of marital status, to register with district authorities and the local police station. The couple must submit a “statement of live-in relationship” to the Registrar within one month of beginning or ending cohabitation, which the district officer would use to “verify from her/his own sources or from community heads or from religious leaders” the possibility of marriage between them. The 16-page application also includes submission of personal documentation such as Aadhaar cards, evidence of home addresses, details of previous relationships, etc. Under the UCC, live-in relationships face significantly heavier regulation than marriages: they must be registered within a shorter deadline (one month versus two), involve far more intrusive documentation, certifications, and official scrutiny, and carry steeper penalties, including longer jail terms for non-compliance. Marriage registration, by contrast, has simpler procedures and lighter penalties.  This move effectively brings private non-marital relationships under state surveillance, with the nature of that surveillance being increasingly repressive, curtailing the space for personal autonomy in matters of love, cohabitation, and intimacy.

Second, by creating familial notification requirements and religious approvals for consenting, adult interfaith and inter-caste couples, the UCC, like India’s religious personal laws, empowers orthodox family and religious institutions. By mandating religious approvals akin to those in personal laws, the UCC also slots interfaith couples within one or the other religious group – thereby defeating the idea of a secular marital or live-in union. These developments in the UCC, however, do not stand alone, as India’s legal landscape has already been hostile to interfaith unions. The secular Special Marriage Act of 1954 (SMA) is a bureaucratic maze. It requires a 30-day public notice before marriage, exposing couples to social stigma, administrative delays, and sometimes, even violence by dissenting groups. Individuals seeking to marry across religious boundaries under personal laws must convert to their partner’s religious identity to make marrying possible. This process, essential to interfaith marriage-making (except when it’s under the SMA) becomes perilous under state-level anti-conversion laws, enacted in Uttarakhand, among several other states. These laws mandate declarations, official permissions, and proof that conversion is not being done for marriage, effectively criminalising the personal and spiritual decisions of consenting adults.

The combined effect of the anti-conversion law and the UCC is to restrict the freedom of individuals, particularly women, to choose their partners and to live without interference from the state or society. Since the passage of the anti-conversion law in Uttarakhand, the police have arrested numerous interfaith couples, often based on complaints from the woman’s family and community members. In many cases, the woman herself denied coercion, yet the authorities proceeded with legal action, reflecting the deeply patriarchal assumption that women lack agency in choosing their own partners. A recently proposed amendment in the law also penalises “inducement” as digital propaganda over social media or messaging apps, including acts such as “praising another religion”. Women in such relationships are not only portrayed as passive victims, but also as security threats, narratives that either strip them of agency or see them as devious and anti-state. By mandating parental notification for live-in arrangements, the UCC also heightens the risk of honour-based violence and familial coercion in a society where a woman asserting independence can face fatal consequences.

And third, perhaps the most troubling, is that the UCC creates a legal framework that enables extra-legal actors and vigilante groups to take violent action against the couple. As reported widely, the mandated public notice of an intended interfaith union in the Special Marriage Act or anti-conversion laws, and now, even the UCC, creates actionable records that right-wing vigilante groups use to track and disrupt interfaith unions. Reports indicate that such groups gain access to registration data, through public, police, or legal sources, and use it to harass couples. The UCC provides an opportunity to vigilantes to attack those couples who aren’t even married yet.  Reports of young couples being attacked, harassed, or forcibly separated have become disturbingly common in the north Indian states.

In summary, the law, instead of protecting these individuals, provides legal cover for such extrajudicial interventions, often with police complicity. The framework, thus, not only legalises surveillance of intimacy but facilitates a culture of intimidation, echoing historical regimes where the state sought to preserve social divisions by policing personal relationships.

Nidah Kaiser and Swapnil Singh chart legislative developments. Nidah writes about impacts of new legal restrictions on non-marital and interreligious relationships in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand, brought about through the Uniform Civil Code of 2024 and the state’s anti-conversion law. Swapnil speculates over the meaning of a newly defined offence of deceptively induced sexual intercourse in the new penal code Bhartiya Nyaya Sanhita (literally, Indian Justice Code) of 2023. Soumya Saxena and Surabhi Singh reflect on how administrative and legal changes interact with existing structures of support. Soumya reflects on her experience of managing a One Stop Centre (OSC) in the central Indian city of Bhopal, where the integration of civil society initiatives into the formal state machinery places constraints on the Centre’s ability to provide support to women in socially unacceptable relationships. Surabhi writes about the emotionally volatile judicial adjudication of the police protection request by an eloping interfaith couple in the context of anti-interfaith-love law and rhetoric in Uttar Pradesh. Despite these legislative shifts and the negative impact on freedoms in romantic partnerships, Gitanjali Joshua’s piece makes space for hope; it centres the possibility that in the process of seeking marriage equality, the law may be forced to confront the gendered inequality and communal and casteist control of sexuality at the heart of marriage. Perhaps through this queering of law, some of its power to police can be undone, even if only incrementally.

Here, we pose some questions that the reader might consider when reading the pieces in this series.

First, the authors centre the concepts of love (emotion), and agency (individual capacity) in making choices (action) in an attempt to conceptualize political and legislative responses to romantic relationships that disturb the social order. Surabhi shows how the emotion of love – the desire to make kin – and the constitutionally protected rights that enable it, take a backseat in the face of a judge’s disgust towards interfaith unions. Nidah and Swapnil imagine new laws as constraining choice in who one can love. As Soumya’s reflective account illustrates, the likelihood of financial instability often dictates the limits of “choice” and “agency”. But she speaks about this assessment by OSC staff with guilt – as if in assessing this, the OSC counsellors look beyond the “choice” of the woman sitting across from them. Feminist counselling, in this imagination, would entail respecting her choice even when it seems unpragmatic (in actively entering a financially unstable family unit) or anti-feminist (converting to be accepted by the affinal family or embracing gendered restrictive religious practices). These concepts of love, choice, and agency find centre-stage in attempts at understanding the governance of seemingly misoriented desires and intimacies, respond to and/ or critique it. Yet these concepts elude easy definitions. Their conceptualization in the law often meets the limit of material realities that shape the possibilities of choice in loving and sustaining that love. Agency – amorphous and fragile – is sought to be protected but is often relinquished in narratives constructed by women and their lawyers of deception, as Swapnil’s account of “promise to marry” litigation shows. What then is the theoretical purchase of these concepts in legal analysis? How do they shift perspectives of the neoliberal legal structures that can de-contextualize individual liberty? What are their limitations? Are there other ways of thinking about freedoms in romantic-sexual relationships in the law?

Second, as many of our authors show, laws that claim to protect are also used to police relationship-making. Denial of agency is at the centre of this façade of protection. In conceptualizing their invocation by parents, police, and judges as “misuse”, do we encourage the very same discourse that denounces gendered-legal protections (for example, under section 498A of the Indian Penal Code) as susceptible to misuse by angry women? What is misuse of law? How can one distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate uses of law, when cases rarely fall within the pigeon-hole legal categories of acts that warrant remedies in the law? Who decides when the law’s invocation is wrong? Is misuse, or its possibility, a good enough reason for dismantling a law in its entirety, or should our attention lie in rethinking how laws operate on the ground and who bears their costs? Does such framing obscure the more fundamental question of how laws are designed, who applies them, and toward which ends?