07 December 2025

All legal references are stated as they exist at the time of this article’s publication.

Public discussion in Pakistan has recently started to recognize the quiet but noticeable growth of “living relationships,” also known as live-in relations or cohabitation, within certain segments of society. The subject has sparked curiosity, discomfort, and debate, yet remains mostly unexplored through a structured analytical lens. As this type of close association becomes more visible, it encourages a deeper look into the social, moral, and legal questions it naturally raises. When harm occurs in a relationship that lacks legal acknowledgment, finding a remedy becomes complicated. This uncertainty shapes the discussion that follows.

1. Legal Perspective

To understand where this controversy really lies, it helps to examine how civil and criminal law each define, recognize, or completely overlook such relationships and the role of Islamic principles.

A. Civil Law

Pakistani family law rests on a single foundational institution: marriage as an enforceable contract. Virtually every statutory protection available to women, such as maintenance, residence, inheritance, guardianship, and custody, assumes a legally recognized marital relationship. Because non-marital cohabitation lacks legal status, a woman in such an arrangement cannot invoke the protections that are granted to a spouse. She cannot claim maintenance, residence, guardianship, inheritance, or any rights associated with the marital bond. 

The Domestic Violence (Prevention and Protection) Bill 2025 (awaiting President’s assent) provides civil remedies of protection orders, residence and custody orders, maintenance, and restraint orders, but only for those who fall within a recognised “domestic relationship,” which includes marriage, former marriage, kinship, consanguinity, adoption, or lawful family co-residence. Because living partners do not fall within this statutory definition, they cannot ordinarily seek protection under domestic violence legislation. Consequently, women in such arrangements fall outside the legal category of “aggrieved persons,” rendering them invisible in situations of coercion, exploitation, or abuse. Contrary to popular assumptions, such arrangements are often not voluntary.

B. Criminal Law

The Pakistan Penal Code (PPC) already criminalises much of the conduct that arises in coerced cohabitation of living relationships. Chapter XVI-A (sections 339–348) deals with wrongful restraint and wrongful confinement, including prolonged confinement, confinement in secret, or confinement for purposes of extortion or compulsion. Sections 365–367 criminalise kidnapping and abduction. Section 365-B specifically criminalises abducting, kidnapping, or coercing a woman through force, intimidation, abuse of authority, or any method of compulsion for forced marriage or illicit intercourse. Offences such as criminal force and assault to a woman's modesty in public or in private (sections 354 and 354-A), insulting or harassing a woman's modesty (section 509), and criminal intimidation (sections 503–506) further supplement this framework, along with provisions addressing hurt and sexual violence. 

Where the PPC does not already criminalise an act, the Domestic Violence Bill prescribes punishments of six months to one year of imprisonment and a fine of Rs.100,000, with at least Rs. 20,000 paid directly to the survivor of domestic abuse. Anyone aiding or abetting abuse faces the same punishment. 

2. Constitutional and Islamic Constraints

Any meaningful analysis must confront an unavoidable doctrinal truth: Islamic Shariah law does not recognise non-marital cohabitation. Nikah is the only legitimate framework for intimate relations, defining enforceable rights and duties and regulating sexual ethics. Cohabitation outside marriage lies wholly beyond this normative structure. Pakistan’s constitution entrenches this position. Article 227 of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan mandates that all laws must conform to Islamic injunctions. Thus, any attempt to legally legitimise living relationships either by equating them with marriage or crafting quasi-marital categories would likely be unconstitutional. This is not merely a formal legal constraint, but it also reflects Pakistan’s broader social and moral fabric. Unlike India or other secular jurisdictions, where courts have recognised “relationships in the nature of marriage”,  Pakistan cannot craft such a category without colliding with both its constitutional and theological boundaries.

3. The Persistent Human Reality

Yet despite these prohibitions, the phenomenon itself exists. Human impulses and interpersonal dynamics do not vanish because the law refuses to name them. Islamic injunctions may prohibit cohabitation, and state law may deny its recognition, but neither theology nor legislation can prevent the phenomenon and the manipulation of women into hidden domesticity, the use of dependence and isolation as tools of control, or situations where refusal of marriage is weaponised to evade obligations in non-consensual and consensual cohabitations. The state may condemn the relationship, but it cannot ignore the harm emerging from it.

4. The Islamic Imperative to Prevent Harm

Islamic jurisprudence, however, does not require that victims be left without remedy. Classical doctrines emphasise preventing mafsadah (harm), advancing maslahah (public interest), and protecting vulnerable individuals even when circumstances fall outside ideal normative structures. Recognising harm is not equivalent to legitimising the relationship. This opens a crucial conceptual middle ground that the state can extend protection without granting recognition.

5. The Deeper Structural Harm

Beyond doctrinal gaps, coerced cohabitation produces profound social and psychological harms. Patterns emerging from studies reveal incidents of kidnapping, emotional manipulation, social isolation, abduction masked as elopement, coerced sexual relations, and long-term dependency without contractual safeguards. Men can exploit the absence of Nikah not out of ideological rebellion but because it releases them from legal obligations of maintenance, accountability, and moral responsibility.

Here, the law’s silence becomes a strategic tool as non-recognition of the relationship leads naturally to non-recognition of the exploitation occurring within it. Women often cannot leave due to dependence, threats, and fear of disgrace. Stigma discourages them from seeking help. Evidentiary barriers may prevent successful prosecution. Some face honour-based retaliation or digital blackmail. Powerful men may further exploit this gap through fabricated or informal “marriages,” maintaining control while avoiding legal obligations. Children born from such relationships are born with a dismissive title of ‘illegitimate’ attached to them. This way, the right of a child to live a life of dignity and a father’s protection is also infringed in contravention of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. With no institutional refuge available, such women and children are often left with no option but to seek shelter in NGOs. In a patriarchal society, these men remain largely untouchable. The phenomenon thus reveals a disturbing pattern of exploitation in which men may leverage their power and the law’s blind spots to silence women and evade accountability.

6. Ending Note

Living relationships remain prohibited by Islamic law and unrecognised by state law, yet they persist in Pakistan's social reality. The issue is not their legitimisation, but whether the harms arising from them can still be overlooked. Their endurance exposes deep gaps in protection and accountability. Pakistan’s reflective minds must now consider how these harms may be addressed without disrupting constitutional boundaries. If an experience produces harm but not ‘crime’ because the relationship does not fit a legal form, what does that say about the gap between lived harm and the state’s definition of criminality?