Is live-in relationship better than marriage?

Following is an excerpt from a samvaad (dialogue) session with Acharya Prashant.

Questioner: There is a growing trend of having live-in relationships as opposed to marriage, so we are finding more people falling in live-in relationship. Is that a movement forward? Would that be considered something that would take us towards Freedom?

Acharya Prashant: We are very good at playing with names. If you are married to someone you live with him or her in a live-in relationship too, you live with somebody, how does it matter? Ultimately you are living with somebody. Why are you living with anybody? You can choose the marriage route, you can choose the live-in route, you can choose some other route, you can decide to be part of a commune or some setting, some other kind of gathering, a club or something. But the thing is about company and relationship.

Why is there such a hungry need to be with someone? And when I say, why, It’s a question not an allegation. Why is there such a need to be with someone? We need to answer this.

It’s mostly about men and women being together, right? There is a man, there is a woman. When they are married then they have obtained some kind of a social license, a sanction. The hold of the society is now loosening, the old barriers of religion and caste are slowly…