When people talk about broken marriages in India, they point to court cases—divorces, dowry disputes, alimony battles. But these are only the tip of the iceberg. The majority of marital breakdowns never reach the courtroom. They happen silently, behind closed doors, in middle-class homes where couples continue to live together, but not really with each other.
In this 49% of society [ read disclaimer]—the educated, ambitious middle class—the real storm is brewing. The poor don’t have the luxury to dramatize their failures; the rich treat marriage openly as a contract and escape easily. But the middle class, stuck in between, clings to illusions. And those illusions are cracking from within.
The Evaporation of Love
The crisis begins when the fantasy called “love” evaporates. Young men and women marry with dreams shaped by Bollywood reels and Instagram feeds. They think compatibility means liking the same music or laughing at the same jokes. They mistake attraction for loyalty and thrill for permanence.
And it doesn’t matter through which channel the marriage was fixed—whether through a matrimonial website, a marriage bureau, a dating app, a college romance, or even an office affair. Even so-called “arranged marriages” are no longer arranged in the true sense, because in today’s middle class the final decision rests with the girl. Parents may suggest, but she approves.
At every stage, the sugarcoating is thick. Boys pretend they are independent decision-makers, exaggerate their assets, boast of a bright future, talk as if promotions are guaranteed. What they hide are the liabilities—the loans, the EMIs, the family dependencies, the real pressures of life. Girls, on their side, present themselves as endlessly humble, caring, and beautiful, carefully dressed and made up, projecting their families as wealthy and generous, hinting they will share wedding costs or support in life. Parents, especially in this class, avoid talking openly of dowry because it is humiliating, but the same expectations return in disguised forms—through rituals, gifts, or social pressure.
In the middle-class marriage market, parents discuss, but they have less power than before. The boy’s side especially has little say unless the groom himself is exceptionally successful—like a civil servant or senior corporate professional. For the rest, the boy’s family watches silently as the girl’s preferences decide the outcome.
But after the sugarcoated entry, reality soon begins to show. The boy is not the flawless provider he promised, nor the girl the angel of patience and care she portrayed. Both are human beings—flawed, tired, vulnerable, driven by evolutionary psychology, weighed down by hidden weaknesses and lies.
This is when the true selves emerge. No more silver coating, no more acting. What remains is boredom, loneliness, and constant complaints. The husband wonders why she is never satisfied. The wife wonders why he has turned indifferent. Both feel cheated, but in reality, neither had visualized reality—they had only visualized fantasy.
The Silent Trap
The tragedy is that most couples don’t leave even when they know the marriage is broken. They can’t. Social pressure, fear of judgment, financial dependence, and children keep them bound. The husband feels trapped but powerless. The wife feels unloved but entitled. The marriage drags on, but in silence.
This silence is the breeding ground of resentment. Affairs, secret online flirtations, and digital escapism thrive here. Social media becomes a substitute for intimacy. Validation from strangers feels more thrilling than conversation at home. The marriage remains intact on paper but hollow in reality.
The Dangerous Role of the Girl’s Parents
Into this fragile equation steps the girl’s family—especially her mother. And here lies an often-ignored but powerful influence.
In most middle-class families, very few mothers openly respect their husbands. Daughters grow up watching this quiet erosion of marital harmony. They hear their mothers casually tell them: “Beta, don’t live life like mine.”
At first glance, this seems like advice to empower. But it is a dangerous seed. Because the core reasons for the mother’s frustration—hypergamy, boredom, unmet expectations—are the same reasons her daughter will face. But instead of learning to navigate them, the daughter inherits her mother’s resentment as a script. She enters marriage half-prepared to distrust, half-trained to feel cheated.
This is not the first generation of broken marriages; it is the second and third. The cracks were already there in the parents’ homes, but nobody spoke of them. Now, their children repeat the cycle—except this time with louder voices, bigger aspirations, and social media amplifying every grievance.
The Psychology of Hypergamy
One of the biggest unspoken truths is that many women feel dissatisfaction not because their husbands have failed, but because their expectations, fueled by hypergamy, have grown uncontrollably.
Hypergamy—the instinct to seek a partner equal or higher in status—drives women to constantly compare. Before marriage, the man’s salary, education, and lifestyle seem acceptable. After marriage, when she sees peers living better or scrolling through curated Instagram lives of others, what once felt sufficient now feels insufficient.
This dissatisfaction rarely comes out openly, because admitting it would make the woman appear shallow or materialistic. Instead, it emerges as generalized anger: “You don’t care,” “You don’t give me time,” “You’ve changed.” The truth is simpler but harsher—her perception of value has shifted, and what she settled for no longer excites her.
This silent hypergamy-driven discontent is one of the biggest reasons for marital breakdown in the middle class, but it is rarely acknowledged. To name it is to expose a raw nerve.
Escape Routes and Illusions
When boredom and dissatisfaction meet, escape routes multiply. Women find them in social media validation, hobby classes, “girls’ nights,” and endless digital distractions. Men, trapped by cultural programming, are told to respect “her freedom” and remain providers, even if that freedom is being used to escape him.
This creates a double alienation: the man feels redundant in his own marriage, and the woman feels validated everywhere except at home. The couple lives under one roof but walks in two different worlds.
The Tip Revisited: Courts See Only the Surface
What reaches the courts is only the fraction that collapses entirely. Dowry cases, domestic violence complaints, and maintenance disputes dominate headlines, but they represent the visible minority. The silent majority remains hidden—couples trapped in loveless arrangements, too scared to break, too proud to admit, too exhausted to rebuild.
This is why the middle class is most at risk. The elite divorce easily, the poor endure quietly. The middle class pretends. And in that pretense, marriages rot from inside long before they reach lawyers or judges.
The Final Words
Strip away the layers of excuses and the core becomes clear. Middle-class marriages collapse—loudly or silently—not because love disappears, but because love was never the foundation to begin with. It was always a transaction.
When illusion collapses, boredom arrives. And boredom is not neutral—it is corrosive. It fuels anger, hypergamy, and escapism. It makes men feel trapped and women feel cheated.
So yes, divorces are rising. But the bigger truth is that millions of marriages are already broken—silently, invisibly, rotting from within. The courts see the corpses; the middle class lives with the ghosts.
The fantasy called love ends where reality begins. The wedding is the carnival, but the marriage is the cage. And until the middle class learns to replace illusion with honesty, marriage will remain what it has become today: a trap where the bait was fantasy, and the punishment is reality.
by: Rajan Veda