Marriage, Law & Communication — Advocate Akash Thatte on Ek Soch

How a Street Vendor Inspired a Legal Career

Advocate Akash Thatte's path to family law was not planned. It was, by his own description, an accident.

As a child, he witnessed a policeman instilling fear in a street vendor — a moment that revealed to him the power of authority and the vulnerability of people who have no recourse. But the realisation that changed his direction came when he understood the hierarchy of power: police listen to judges, judges listen to advocates. If he wanted to be on the side of people who could not be pushed around, he needed to become an advocate.

He initially pursued criminal law, but over time, matrimonial cases began arriving. Clients facing marriage dissolution, custody disputes, alimony questions, and property divisions sought his guidance. What began as a subset of his practice gradually became his primary focus — not because he planned it, but because the need was relentless and the consequences for people navigating it alone were severe.

Why Modern Marriages Are Failing

Advocate Akash identifies several interconnected reasons for the rising divorce rates he observes in his courtroom daily.

The most significant is the absence of communication and genuine listening. A person unheard at home begins seeking comfort elsewhere — confiding in a colleague, sharing their frustrations with a friend. The emotional intimacy that should be within the marriage moves outside it, creating the conditions for infidelity and, eventually, for irreconcilable breakdown.

The post-COVID work-from-home effect accelerated this significantly. Couples found themselves physically present together while emotionally disconnected — working in different rooms, managing separate professional responsibilities, inhabiting the same space without genuine engagement. The friction this created spiked divorce filings notably in the post-2020 period.

A third factor is the impatience of the digital era. In a world of quick solutions and rapid exits, the willingness to work through relationship problems has atrophied. Couples seek a quick exit rather than investing the time that genuine resolution requires.

A fourth, perhaps most underestimated, is the pattern of taking each other for granted. Before marriage, partners invest in looking good, impressing each other, and demonstrating care. After marriage, this effort often vanishes — and the relationship loses the daily reinforcement that made it functional before.

The Legal Mistake: Remarrying Without Investigation

Advocate Akash identifies one of the most consequential mistakes people make when remarrying: failing to investigate why their prospective partner's previous marriage ended.

Even if a divorce was officially filed as "mutual consent," the reality beneath that label may be far different. There may have been domestic violence that was strategically hidden. There may have been false criminal charges filed to pressure the ex-spouse into accepting the divorce. There may have been property disputes disguised as simple irreconcilability.

The person entering a second marriage without understanding what actually happened in the first is setting themselves up to repeat the pattern or to discover, too late, that they married someone with a history of using legal systems as a weapon. The investigation is uncomfortable and it feels suspicious, but it is far less uncomfortable than discovering three years into a second marriage that you married someone with unresolved patterns.

Before Marriage: Verify Property and Assets

A related and equally important precaution is verifying the actual ownership and legal status of property and assets that a partner claims to own.

A property may be mortgaged. A business may be entangled in litigation. A bank account may be frozen. The person who takes ownership claims at face value and enters marriage based on them may discover, at the point of separation, that the assets they believed were marital property are either non-existent or encumbered with liabilities they were not aware of.

The verification is simple: ask for documentation, run a property title search, check with the relevant authorities. The awkwardness of doing this before marriage is minimal compared to the legal nightmare of discovering post-marriage that what was promised was never actually available.

The Legal Reality of Remarriage During Pending Divorce

Advocate Akash is emphatic about a law that many people either do not know or choose to ignore: it is absolutely illegal to remarry while a divorce proceeding is still pending in court.

The person who remarries before their current divorce is legally finalised is committing bigamy — a criminal act that can result in imprisonment. The second marriage is void in the eyes of the law. The person who enters this second marriage, even unaware of the pending divorce, is legally complicit.

The protection is straightforward: do not remarry until the previous divorce is formally concluded and the legal certificate of dissolution has been issued. The timeline is not something to circumvent — it is something to respect.

The Alimony Reality: Courts Are Getting Stricter

Advocate Akash addresses the issue of alimony demands — and the courts' increasing resistance to unrealistic ones.

He cites a viral case where a woman demanded ₹66 lakhs per month in alimony, along with luxury cars and other provisions, to maintain her lifestyle. The court's response was pointed: if her lifestyle requires that level of spending, she is capable of earning it herself. The court was not being unsympathetic. It was being realistic about what alimony is designed to provide — basic maintenance for a spouse who cannot support themselves — versus what some people have begun demanding — a continuation of married-life luxury indefinitely.

Courts are becoming stricter because the law is being stretched beyond its original intent. Alimony is not meant to be a punishment or a wealth transfer. It is meant to provide basic support during the transition to independence. Judges are increasingly enforcing that distinction.

Live-In Relationships and Their Legal Ambiguity

Despite the media attention given to live-in relationships in India, Advocate Akash clarifies that they do not carry the same legal standing or protection as marriages.

A live-in relationship, no matter how long it lasts or how committed the partners are, is not legally recognised as a marriage. This means there is no automatic succession of property, no inheritance rights, no spousal protection under many laws, and no framework for alimony or maintenance.

However, the law has made certain adjustments to prevent false criminal charges from being weaponised in live-in situations. A woman in a live-in relationship has certain protections against false accusations of theft or criminal intimidation, precisely because the absence of marriage documentation created opportunities for misuse.

The practical reality is that people in long-term live-in relationships should have legal documentation clarifying their understanding — not marriage, but something that specifies intentions around property, succession, and support, so that the relationship is not entirely unprotected in law.

The Bizarre Cases That Reveal Hidden Patterns

Advocate Akash shares specific cases that illustrate how strange the reasons for marriage breakdown can become once the relationship has actually deteriorated.

One case involved a highly educated woman whose husband sought divorce, claiming she was practising occult rituals (tantrik vidya) and destroying household idols. Whether the claims were true was almost immaterial — they were symptoms of a marriage where communication had broken down completely, where partners had developed such different worldviews that they could no longer coexist, and where neither was willing to address the actual issue through conversation.

These cases illustrate that by the time a marriage reaches the courtroom, the real problem — loss of communication and mutual respect — is usually already terminal. The specific grounds for divorce are almost always a symptom rather than a root cause.

The Court Visit That Changes Everything

Advocate Akash's most provocative recommendation is something almost nobody does: visit a family court for a couple of hours before getting married.

Sit in the courtroom. Watch marriages dissolve. Listen to the stories of people whose relationships have collapsed. See the emotional toll on both partners. Understand what actually happens when a marriage reaches the point of legal dissolution. The experience is sobering, and it is often exactly what couples need to recognise how much care, communication, and effort are required to prevent that outcome.

The recommendation is not meant to discourage marriage. It is meant to make marriage a consciously chosen commitment rather than an assumption that it will work out on its own.

The Core Issue Across All Marriages

When asked to identify the single factor that appears across both arranged marriages and love marriages that fail, Advocate Akash's answer is consistent: lack of communication.

Arranged marriages fail because partners were never given the opportunity to truly communicate before marriage, and they do not develop the skill once they are married. Love marriages fail because partners assumed communication would be automatic, and they allowed it to deteriorate once the initial intensity passed.

The denominator across all marriage breakdown is the same: two people who have stopped genuinely listening to each other.

The Unspoken Reality: Compromise Still Wins

Advocate Akash's final observation, drawn from his daily presence in family courts, is that compromise still outweighs divorce in India.

More marriages survive through compromise than through legal dissolution. The ones that survive are the ones where partners are willing to negotiate, to listen, to adjust expectations, and to prioritise the relationship above individual demands. The ones that fail are the ones where that willingness disappears.