Even as Twisha Sharma’s case moves through courts, consuming news cycles, sparking Supreme Court intervention, and igniting a familiar national debate about dowry harassment and marital abuse, somewhere in the noise of investigations, competing family narratives, and social media outrage, a quieter and more uncomfortable question keeps surfacing - the one that has less to do with the accused and more to do with all of us.
Why do so many women still grow up believing that leaving an unhappy marriage is more shameful than suffering inside one?
The answer doesn't begin at the wedding mandap. It begins much, much earlier. In the living rooms, and whispered conversations of otherwise loving homes. It begins with us.
India takes enormous pride in how far it has come. We celebrate our daughters' academic achievements, cheer them on in careers, and speak at length about gender equality. And yet, in the same breath, in the most educated and "progressive" households, a parent leans over to their young daughter and says: "Sit properly.Speak softly. Your in-laws will blame us if you don't." Or, more subtly: "Don't argue, you'll have to adjust to a new family one day."
It seems like guidance. It is anything but.
What we are really doing across millions of such moments, over years, is teaching our daughters where their existential worth lives. We are raising girls whose sense of self is located entirely outside of themselves, tethered to the approval of in-laws they haven't yet met, measured against standards set by a family they don't yet belong to. By the time a young woman walks into her marriage, she doesn't just carry her suitcases. She carries a lifetime of conditioning that tells her: Your value will be determined there. Don't lose it. Don't embarrass us.
And so, when that home becomes a place of suffering, she does not think first of herself. She thinks of the verdict. She thinks of what they will say. She thinks: If I walk out, I have failed them. Failed everyone who raised me to fit into this mould.
Then there is the wedding itself.
This is where the story gets more complicated, because it is no longer only the parents who are complicit.
Somewhere between Instagram and Bollywood, the Indian wedding stopped being a ceremony and became a production. We live in an era of Mehendi-Sangeet-Haldi-Reception-Farewell itineraries. Of destination weddings. Of bespoke bridal trousseau shoots. Of couples who drain their savings, break fixed deposits, and take personal loans. Not because their parents pressured them, but because they genuinely, deeply want the spectacle. Young Indians today aspire to the wedding far more than they prepare for the marriage. The event has eclipsed the institution.
The result is a trap with two doors. Parents who spend everything they have on their daughter's wedding inadvertently load her with emotional debt she cannot shake. The sacrifice becomes a weight she carries into every moment of marital difficulty, whispering that she cannot afford to walk away from what they could not afford to give. She absorbs the sacrifice and cannot bring herself to "waste" it by walking out. Then there is that young woman who invested not just money but her identity into this one day, curating her own vision board and performingher happiness for hundreds of guests, facing a different version of the same trap. The bridal lehenga, the carefully curated guest list, the photographs that will live on social media foreverbecome the anchors. To admit the marriage has failed is to admit the entire performance was a lie. The bigger and more Instagrammable the wedding, the heavier the weight of its wreckage. The more impossible it becomes to acknowledge that the story that elaborate production told, was not true.
We have glamourised the wedding so thoroughly that leaving the marriage feels like a personal catastrophe, not a reasonable decision.
There is a third pattern. Quieter, less discussed, but structurally more potent and as damaging.
Many Indian families, out of genuine devotion, never quite allow their children to become adults. Decisions are made for them. Conflicts are resolved around them. The message, delivered through years of well-meaning intervention, is: you do not need to trust yourself, because we are here. This produces grown men and women who have strong families but weak internal compasses. People who, when placed in situations their parents cannot navigate for them, find themselves genuinely unable to act alone.
Nowhere is this more damaging than in how conflict is handled. In most Indian homes, when a child faces a dispute with a friend, a teacher, a sibling, and eventually with a partner, the instinct is parental intervention. What the child never learns, as a result, is how to sit inside a difficult conversation without fleeing or freezing. How to hold their ground without aggression. How to hear something hard and respond with clarity rather than collapse. Conflict resolution is not a personality trait some people are born with. It is a skill, learnt and imbibed over years of practice. A young couple who was never allowed to work through friction on their own terms will find, inside a troubled marriage, that they have no toolkit for it.
Mental independence is built the same way. Through practice. Through being allowed to face hard things, make imperfect choices, and survive them. A woman who has never been trusted to handle difficulty will not suddenly find that capacity in the middle of a dangerous marriage. Mental independence is not a personality trait. When parents shield their children from all of that in the name of love, they are not protecting them. They are ensuring that when protection is most needed, it will have to come from someone else. And that someone else may not come.
But this conversation cannot stop at daughters. Because there is also a son being raised, and in most homes, nobody is paying nearly enough attention to how.
He is not being taught to run a household, because that is not framed as his responsibility. He is not being taught to sit with discomfort or communicate through conflict, because male emotional reticence is still widely mistaken for strength. He is not being told, in clear terms, that the woman he will marry is a complete person, with professional ambitions, personal limits, and a life she has not agreed to dissolve into his. He is handed, instead, a narrow brief: provide, protect, preside. The inner work that makes a person a genuine partner: empathy, self-awareness, the willingness to be wrong, is simply not on the curriculum.
Raising a son differently actually requires more specific notions than "teach him to respect women," a phrase so broad it has become almost meaningless. It means teaching him to do his share of domestic labour without being thanked for it, because it is not exceptional. It is ordinary. It means letting him be accountable, rather than defended. It means talking to him about what a marriage actually is: not an acquisition, not a performance of family honour, but a daily negotiation between two people who have both given something up to build something shared. It means showing him what equality looks like in practice rather than merely in principle.
And then there are the parents themselves, who will, one day, become in-laws.
This is perhaps the least examined part of the entire system. Families that spend years calibrating their daughters to be acceptable to in-laws rarely ask whether they themselves are prepared to be acceptable to a daughter-in-law. The authority expected over a son's household is rarely questioned; it is inherited, assumed, exercised as though it were simply part of the arrangement. The young woman who joins the family is observed, evaluated, compared. Her adjustment is expected. Her discomfort is her problem to manage.
Becoming a good in-law is not passive. It requires a conscious decision to enter a new relationship without the assumption of hierarchy. It means understanding that a son's primary loyalty, once he is married, must appropriately shift. And that this is not a loss but the natural order of things. It means creating a home where a daughter-in-law's voice carries actual weight, where her choices about her own life are not subject to veto, and where her distress, if it ever surfaces, is taken seriously rather than managed away.
A family that raises a self-aware son and then becomes a set of overbearing in-laws has only solved half the problem. Both halves matter.
None of this erases the genuine fear that drives families to condition their daughters the way they do. The society that stigmatises divorce, that treats a woman who leaves as a cautionary tale, and in doing so creates the very pressure families are trying to protect their daughters from. The grooming is often a rational response to an irrational system.
The change required is structural, yes. But it is also granular. It lives in a sentence not said to a daughter. In a wedding planned to a scale that does not become a debt. In a son handed accountability instead of exemption. In a set of parents who choose to become in-laws with humility rather than entitlement.
The courts will determine what happened in Twisha Sharma's case. That is their function. But the conditions that make such cases possible: the conditioning that keeps women inside situations they should be able to leave, that is not a courtroom problem. It is a household one. And it will only change when we are honest enough to look for it in our own.
