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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........

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