JURJ

Building a Discourse for Pre-Marital Counselling in India

Author: Pardeep Singha, Narinder Khubber

Abstract:

"Let us try to offer help before we have to offer therapy. That is to say, let's see if we can't prevent being ill by trying to offer a love of prevention before illness." Maya Angelou

Marriage is a social institution and happy married lives of citizens can rightly be said as one of the parameters for happiness index of a country. However, in the recent past, society has witnessed a threat to this social institution from growing rate of divorce and development of other emerging concepts like: live-in-relationship, incompatibility, modern life styles, nuclear family structure, lack of quality time to spend together, impact of social media, professional ambitions and adultery. For saving this social institution from falling-off, no law will come to rescue as law cannot be a panacea for all the problems rather it demands civil society to introspect and to go for saving marriages.

Counselling of would-be couples by experts may be one such via media/ platform for orienting and sensitizing youngsters about this holy social institution. The present write-up is an attempt to build a discourse for the need of such pre-marriage counselling so as to save this social institution which seems to be under threat of falling-off. Counselling can be carried out under the purview of free Legal services/legal aid which inter alia includes legal literacy, empowerment and counselling of citizens towards their basic rights, duties and contribution in realizing access to justice for all.