When marriage ends, numbers fail

WHEN the Delhi High Court recently observed that a wife’s interim maintenance cannot be determined with mathematical precision, it put into words a reality that family courts confront daily. Marriage is not an economic contract governed by neat ledgers, and its breakdown cannot be resolved through arithmetic alone. Yet Indian courts are increasingly required to assign numbers to dependency, dignity and fairness, often with incomplete disclosures and conflicting narratives.

The case before the court was unremarkable in its facts and revealing in its reasoning. A woman sought enhancement of interim maintenance, while her husband challenged the award. He was employed in the United States, earning in foreign currency. She was unemployed. While enhancing interim maintenance from Rs 50,000 to Rs 1 lakh per month, the court rejected two simplistic approaches that dominate public debate. It declined to mechanically convert foreign income into Indian rupees. It also refused to ignore the economic vulnerability of a spouse without independent income. Instead, it relied on a broad and reasonable assessment, grounded in available material, surrounding circumstances, lifestyle indicators and admitted earning capacity.

This approach unsettles those who expect legal certainty to resemble mathematical exactitude. But it reflects the reality of maintenance law in India, which is being asked to resolve economic and social questions that policy has largely left unanswered.

Maintenance is frequently miscast as charity or moral recompense. In law, it serves a narrower and more practical purpose. Marriage functions as an economic partnership. One spouse’s earning capacity is often sustained by the other’s unpaid labour, whether through caregiving, household work or emotional support that enables career continuity. These contributions rarely appear in income statements. When a marriage breaks down, maintenance seeks to prevent abrupt economic exclusion, not to adjudicate virtue or failure.

The judiciary has long recognised this. In Rajnesh v Neha, the Supreme Court of India laid down uniform guidelines on maintenance to address delay, inconsistency and overlapping proceedings. Importantly, the court emphasised that maintenance is meant to prevent destitution and to preserve, as far as possible, the standard of living during marriage. It acknowledged that income disclosure is often imperfect and that courts must rely on reasoned assessment rather than rigid formulae. The Delhi High Court’s recent observation flows from this understanding. It does not create new law, but articulates the limits within which courts already operate.

Public discourse, however, tends to flatten these nuances. Maintenance debates are routinely reduced to binaries, dependent versus independent, earning versus non-earning. Education is treated as proof of self-sufficiency. Potential earning capacity is equated with present financial security. Courts have consistently resisted this logic.

As early as 2008, the Supreme Court clarified in Chaturbhuj v Sita Bai that the statutory test is not whether a woman is theoretically capable of earning, but whether she is actually able to maintain herself. The law does not require a spouse to be destitute before maintenance is granted. A woman’s education or prior employment does not erase the economic effects of career interruptions, skill depreciation or lost professional networks that often accompany marriage and caregiving. Re-entry into the workforce is shaped by age, health, location and social constraints. Treating employability as independence ignores these realities.

At the same time, courts have also resisted the opposite simplification, that a husband’s income can be proportionately redistributed without context, particularly when it is earned abroad. In the recent Delhi case, the court rightly noted that a person residing overseas incurs expenses in foreign currency and operates within a different cost of living structure. Mechanical conversion of foreign income would distort rather than reflect economic reality. The court’s refusal to do so was not indulgence, but restraint.

This problem recurs across jurisdictions. High Courts have repeatedly noted the difficulty of assessing income where one spouse is employed overseas and disclosures are partial or contested. Salary structures abroad often include bonuses, stock options or benefits that are not easily quantified. Faced with informational gaps, courts rely on lifestyle indicators and reasonable inference. What critics dismiss as guesswork is often the only practicable method available.

The deeper issue is not judicial discretion, but institutional absence. Maintenance litigation has become a stand in for social security, labour policy and family support systems that India does not provide in a coherent form. There is no structured framework for rehabilitative maintenance that links temporary support to skill rebuilding or re-employment. There is no statutory recognition of unpaid domestic labour as an economic contribution with measurable value. Family court proceedings move slowly, turning interim arrangements into long running disputes.

Judges themselves have acknowledged this distortion. Interim maintenance is designed as a stopgap measure, based on limited material, to prevent immediate hardship. It is not meant to resolve final entitlements. Yet prolonged litigation means interim orders often function as de facto long-term solutions. This fuels resentment on all sides. Spouses paying maintenance view it as indefinite liability. Spouses receiving it experience uncertainty and discretion rather than predictability. Courts are criticised regardless of the figure they fix.

Read in this light, the Delhi High Court’s emphasis on reasonableness over precision is not an abdication of responsibility. It is an honest recognition of the limits of adjudication in deeply personal economic disputes. Family law cases involve layered histories, unequal access to information and competing accounts of contribution and sacrifice. No mathematical model can capture these complexities without flattening them.

What would meaningful reform look like. First, maintenance law needs clearer statutory guidance that explicitly recognises unpaid care work, rather than leaving it to inference. Second, interim maintenance should be time bound and, where feasible, linked to pathways for economic rehabilitation through education, training or job placement. Third, disclosure norms, especially in cross border employment cases, need stronger enforcement to reduce asymmetry. Finally, family courts require faster timelines so interim relief does not harden into permanent grievance.

None of this will eliminate conflict. Marriage and separation are inherently complex. But better policy can reduce the burden currently placed on judges to act as economists and social arbiters simultaneously. 

The recent Delhi High Court ruling does not settle the maintenance debate, nor does it pretend to. Its significance lies in its clarity. It acknowledges that fairness cannot be reduced to arithmetic, yet insists that dependency cannot be dismissed as choice or failure. As Indian marriages evolve, with more dual income households and transnational careers, maintenance law will face sharper tensions. Courts can only respond within the frameworks available to them. It is now for lawmakers to recognise that when a marriage ends, the cost is not merely emotional. It is economic. And it demands policy, not just discretion.

The writer is a legal affairs columnist. She writes on law, governance, and institutional reform.