The Intimacy Contract in Action: How Indian Courts Determine which Extramarital Relationships Deserve Recognition

How do states decide which intimate relationships are “family"? In India, extramarital relationships lack default legal standing. Yet appellate courts sometimes extend spousal entitlements to women in these relationships. To understand this puzzle, I develop the Intimacy Contract: a conceptual framework illuminating how states reward relationships resembling their ideological vision of marriage. This framework addresses a blind spot in social science scholarship that neglects how states extend and deny entitlements to relationships. Using large language models (LLMs) with human oversight, I analyze 2,721 Indian appellate court cases from 2000 to 2024. I find that when relationships resemble the state’s ideal marriage—a conjugal life, a traditional gender dynamic, and shared religiosity—, courts are 56 percent more likely to recognize them and when these features are absent, the likelihood drops to 22 percent. This stark difference reflects a broader ideological logic through which states regulate intimate life.