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 crumbling and specially the big cities offer a lot of anonymity so you can afford to be together without seeking the sanction of family or society and that you call as live-in relationship. In fact, many, if not most of the live-in partners would probably not have moved into live-in had it been possible to somehow get married.

Given a choice they would get married but because marriage is being opposed on grounds of caste, religion, economics, or something so they decide to live in an anonymous way. I am not saying this happens in all live-in cases but in a large number of cases this too is the story. So, all said and done, it is about the desire to be with a person whether in the married way or in the unmarried way.

Why is there such a great desire to sleep on the same bed and live in the same room? What the hell is that person bring into your life? Must that question not be asked?