Last year in Kerala, 25-year-old Thanima was scrolling through Instagram when she stumbled on videos about lavender marriages — marriages between a man and a woman where one or both partners are queer. Thanima, who knew she was asexual, had begun wondering what marriage might look like for her as questions about her future started creeping in. Her parents had not given her an ultimatum, but she could not imagine marrying a straight person. Then she began to wonder if there was another way.So Thanima scoured Google, Instagram and Facebook for a place where people like her could find each other. She found dating apps and matrimonial sites, but almost nothing specifically for people seeking lavender marriages.In April 2025, she secured the Instagram handle @lavendermarriagekerala_india and started building a space for them. At first, the page had just 20 or 30 followers. Today, it has more than 6,500.That growth also caught the attention of people outside the small community Thanima was trying to reach. I first came across the page when one of its reels seemed to have “reached the wrong audience”, as the cool kids say. It read: “Female lavender partner needed” for a 27-year-old gay staff nurse from Madurai looking for a lesbian or bisexual woman. The post had more shares than likes and had become something of a joke among some urban queer Instagram users. I understood the reaction. Lavender marriage can initially sound like everything queer liberation was supposed to move beyond.But then I started going through the entries on Thanima’s page.A 27-year-old nurse in Madurai was looking for someone who might also want children, while making clear that religion, caste and language were not barriers. A 28-year-old software engineer from Kozhikode, who described himself as gay but romantically attracted to women, wanted a lesbian or bisexual woman with whom he could build a “friend-cum-partner” life. A gay man from Kolkata was looking for a lesbian, bisexual or asexual woman for a long-term platonic partnership, with IVF as one possibility. A government school teacher from Imphal was open to IVF, surrogacy or adoption. A transgender woman from Delhi, living in stealth, wanted a financially stable male partner with whom she could potentially build a life and raise a child. An intersex applicant from Mumbai was looking for an educated, self-reliant partner and was open to someone divorced, widowed, asexual or gay with children.Different lives, certainly. But they were all dealing with the same uncomfortable fact: marriage was coming, whether they wanted it or not.Thanima’s page began by posting profiles only from Kerala, but messages soon started coming in from outside the state. People wanted to be listed too, so she opened the page to applicants from across India. The numbers grew gradually until, three or four weeks before we spoke, the page suddenly took off. More than 800 people followed in a single day. At one point, Thanima was fielding more than 200 DMs at once, leaving her hands and shoulders “numb” from replying.The surge also made it clear that Thanima was not the only one trying to create a space for these arrangements. I found several other Instagram accounts using similar descriptives, including @moc_telan, @lavendarmatrimony and @lavendarmarriagetamilnadu. Together, they form an emerging online ecosystem for people trying to negotiate marriage around heterosexual expectations.The page has also travelled far beyond the people who might actually need it. Macy Walczer, 25, an insurance underwriting analyst from Omaha, Nebraska, came across the account on her Instagram feed and followed it simply because she found the idea fascinating. She is out, has a supportive community around her, and says she does not expect to ever need a lavender marriage herself. But she was drawn in and followed the page because it was a glimpse into a world that has historically been almost entirely private.“I am very into [people’s] hidden lives,” they told me. Seeing an account openly organising lavender marriages, she said, was unusual precisely because these arrangements have traditionally been out of sight. “Seeing an account organising them was really neat and something that usually isn’t done out in the open.”But while the page is an object of curiosity for Macy, it can be a lifeline for the people actually using it. One such user messaged Thanima on a July evening: “Got the intended person… gonna deactivate this ID.” Another said: “We are good now. I hope we end up together.” They have since agreed with the person they met through the page that they will get married six years from now.For a page built around a marriage of convenience, however, what’s most unexpected is real connection, if orientations allow. Thus, one message Thanima shared with me flipped the purpose of the page: “Lavender marriage is converting into actual love marriage. We are getting along very well and are from the same city.”But the page has always come with its own set of risks. Even in its early days, Thanima was clear about what she could – and could not – offer. In a November 2025 call for applicants, she invited LGBTQ+ people looking for a “marriage of convenience” to send their details by DM. Profiles would be posted anonymously and for free. She also drew a line around what the page was for: this was not a hookup platform. Thanima made it clear that she did not personally know or verify the people whose profiles she posted, and anyone choosing to connect with them would have to proceed with caution.Despite how much the page has grown, Thanima has still kept verification limited. She does not ask for government IDs or real names, partly because many users do not even follow the page from their actual Instagram accounts. They are afraid of being exposed. There is also no practical way for her to verify someone’s sexual orientation. If someone says they are gay, lesbian or asexual, one has to take them at their word – knowing, of course, that they could lie.Thanima did consider a more formal verification system. While building the website, she thought about adding photo verification, but software engineers she consulted warned her about the risks of storing personal photos without being able to guarantee their security. She is also the only person running the platform, which means if users’ photos, identities or other information leak, it could have a myriad of consequences.For now, she has kept the profiles minimal, listing only a nickname, profession, religion and a few other basic details instead of real names or identifying information. Applicants pay a one-time Rs 30 registration fee. She has rejected around 25 applications so far, mostly because of issues such as incomplete details or social media IDs that could not be verified. In such cases, applicants can edit their profiles and resubmit them. Some applications, however, are rejected for not meeting the platform’s policies and may not be eligible for resubmission. Once a profile is approved, if two people are interested in each other, they can choose to exchange phone numbers, social media handles, email addresses and other contact details and continue the conversation privately.Thanima is aware the system is not foolproof. But for a platform whose users often cannot safely be identified, she knows privacy has to come first.That vulnerability has also made the page a target. Some Instagram users have called for people to “infiltrate” the community and “name and shame” its participants.On that note, I approached several queer activists for comment, and some rejected the idea of lavender marriage altogether. One person with a sizeable social media following simply told me, “I strongly condemn it.”The criticism is not baseless. Lavender marriages have a long history with closeted queer people who have fought to live openly, and use marriage to keep up the appearance of heterosexuality. It can understandably feel like a step backwards.But that is not the whole picture. As Koyel Ghosh, an educator and volunteer with Kolkata-based queer activist organisation Sappho for Equality, said, “Platforms and communities that facilitate lavender marriages are, in many ways, a reflection of the social realities that many queer people in India continue to navigate.” They pointed to the continuing pressure around heterosexual marriage, even as queer visibility has grown and some legal progress has been witnessed.For some LGBTQIA+ people, marriage remains tied to family acceptance, financial dependence, safety and social respectability. “The emergence of dedicated matchmaking spaces for lavender marriages highlights how people are trying to negotiate these pressures,” they said.Still, Ghosh cautioned against treating lavender marriage as an easy answer. “These arrangements are complex and should not be romanticised,” they said. Their existence, they argued, reflects the conditions that can make conventional marriage difficult – and, for some queer people, coercive.Those pressures can be extreme. For example, during the Supreme Court hearings on petitions seeking recognition of same-sex marriage, family violence and forced marriage entered the discussion about the lives of queer people in India. In one case, a trans man, Manoj, was beaten, confined and threatened with death by his family before being forcibly married to a man twice his age. It was only after his partner, Rashmi, sought help from a resource group and a police women’s cell that the couple could escape the family home.In another case, a young gay couple from Barasat, West Bengal, went into hiding in 2019 after alleging that their families had physically abused them and threatened to kill them. They also said relatives and locals forced them in front of a “kangaroo court” that ordered them to separate. For some queer people, then, pressure to conform to heterosexual norms through marriage is the only thing that saves their lives.To that end, I approached Raghavi, a lawyer who works on queer rights, who told me that this is why she would hesitate to describe lavender marriage as a “necessity” in 2026. Instead, she sees its emergence as evidence of how much social pressure remains despite the visibility and legal changes of the past decade.She said the acceptance of queer people that appears in newspaper stories about parents coming to terms with their children’s sexuality does not necessarily reflect the reality across rural and suburban India. Family structures also play a role, she said, with parents often remaining involved in intimate decisions about their adult children’s lives.“I think it comes from a place of people being compelled,” Raghavi said, adding that a lavender marriage is a possible “last resort” for people to reconcile the lives they want with their parents’ expectations.Raghavi said she has seen matrimonial disputes in which accusations about a spouse’s sexuality have been weaponised. People have wanted divorce by claiming that their partners are gay or do not engage in sexual intimacy, she said, though she did not point to a specific lavender marriage case in her professional experience.Legally, she said, lavender marriages do not have a separate type of protection. “The concept of lavender marriage in itself is not recognised as something different from the hetero marriage,” she said. As long as a marriage is legally recognised between a man and a woman, the same matrimonial protections apply regardless of the couple’s private understanding of the arrangement.In such cases, a consensual lavender marriage can offer two people a measure of protection when both understand exactly what they are agreeing to. But the line between choice and pressure is not always so clear, especially when the alternatives feel dangerous or financially and socially impossible.Ansh Singhal, 22, from New Delhi, does not want to get married. Still, he supports Thanima’s page because he believes some people from conservative families simply cannot refuse marriage without consequences. “I believe that the development of such pages really brings the possibility to enjoy life for people who essentially cannot deny marriage,” Singhal said. For those caught between social expectations and the life they actually want, he sees a lavender marriage as one possible way to meet that social expectation without completely giving up their own lives.Similarly, a 25-year-old follower from Gujarat, who didn’t want to be named, called the page “a great initiative to stop souls from suffering”. But they “dream of gay marriage if [they] can find [their] male life partner”.Meanwhile, a 24-year-old Haryanvi Jaat man is looking specifically for a lesbian Haryanvi Jatni. He has spoken to two or three women through the page, he said, but they do not align. He prefers this arrangement to a conventional marriage with someone who may not know what they are signing up for.“Lavender is a better option than a straight marriage for gay and lesbians,” he said. “We don’t want to destroy any straight [person’s] life.” When asked why caste remains important to him despite choosing an otherwise unconventional arrangement, he said, “Because I am from a Jaat family. And I am from a village. So my parents and relatives only agree to a same-caste marriage.”The search still feels familiar on a page created to work around heterosexual marriage; caste, religion, language, profession, location and expectations around children continue to shape who can be a suitable match. Thanima acknowledged she said she can understand some preference around religion, but considers being rigid about caste “outdated”. For people who already have a limited pool of potential lavender-marriage partners, she said, such restrictions only make finding a compatible match harder. So while the marriage may be different, its framework is remarkably similar to conventional marriages.The strictly legal picture is way more complicated, Sahil Bansal, a lecturer at Jindal Global Law School, O.P. Jindal Global University, told me. Lavender marriages raise questions about how Indian matrimonial law understands intimacy and consent. Under Section 12(1)(a) of the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, a marriage can be annulled if it has not been consummated because of the respondent’s impotence. In Yuvraj Digvijay Singh v. Yuvrani Pratap Kumari, the Supreme Court recognised that impotence can arise from mental as well as physical conditions.Bansal said that in the case of a consensual lavender marriage, what the law might treat as an inability to consummate a marriage could simply be an accepted part of their relationship. Section 12(1)(c) of the Act deals with fraud involving a material fact concerning a spouse. But in a genuine lavender marriage, Bansal said, both partners may already know each other’s sexuality. The concealment, then, is not necessarily between the couple. It is between the couple and the outside world.Then there is the question of privacy. “If a particular [law] becomes publicly associated with facilitating lavender marriages, even the fact of using [it] may reveal precisely what the arrangement was intended to conceal,” Bansal said.And Thanima is already grappling with that tension. People come to her page because they want parts of their lives kept private, yet the platform needs to know enough about them to help them find each other. The more information it collects, the easier matching may become, but the more there is to expose if it falls into the wrong hands.For now, she is keeping the process deliberately simple. Applicants submit their details, and those who are approved pay to access the website and browse profiles. An application walk-through shows the site asking for an Instagram ID for verification while keeping contact details private until a match. It is, in many ways, an attempt to make an unconventional marriage fit into the usual matchmaking system without asking its users to give up the need for secrecy that brought them there in the first place.Sohini Sengupta (they/she) is a journalist, writer and essayist. Their bylines include Hindustan Times, Feminism in India, India Today, and other niche U.S.-based publications.