Practices of 'Living together' in Kathmandu Valley

Abstract

In this dissertation, I am going to focused on living together relationship between urban people, particularly focused on Kathmandu valley. Conceptually, living together is a relationship between two individual living as a couple without socio-cultural and legal recognition, and they haven’t socio-cultural and legal right and responsibility too. They shared everything such as household responsibility, economic condition, sexual desire and pleasure without socio-cultural and legal recognition. There are various words as synonyms of “living together”. In this Thesis time and again these all name will be use as synonyms of living together as a relationship between two individuals who live in same private sphere for more than a six month, share physical, economic and emotional attachment without social, cultural and legal recognition. Methodologically, information of this paper are field based qualitative data through the in-depth interview with 20 respondents who are living in living together relationship and Key Informant interview with those individual who are directly engage on this issue. Respondent and Key Informant were selected through the propulsive sampling specially snowball sampling. This thesis first, covers social factors which encourage individual to practices of living together; such as how the introduced first, development of love between Partner, how they decide for living together, which factor encourage to live together (such as not clear in long time relationship, interest to live without family relationship, gender division of labor, symbolic domination toward women in marital relationship, legal hurdle to get marriage, economic support in living, economic burden on marriage, skip from the child birth and bearing or trust issues). And in second the everyday reality in the process of living together, such as how they introduce their relation with in a society, who work the domestic work, what and who work for earning, their interest to get marriage, challenges in a living together, possibility of extra affair while they are in living relationship with partner’s family member, (such as parents, sibling, children), expectation of children, use of Contraceptive, management of misunderstanding. In preliminary finding there are a huge diversity within living together relationship. They have different experience in various part of the research. Key words: Marriage, Living together, Social realities.