A man and a woman stand close, garlands around their necks, looking deeply into each other’s eyes. He is 29, and she is 19, the text on the Instagram reel says, and they have just got married. Some might wince at the 10-year age gap, but hey, at least she is of an age where she can consent, though only barely.
Except, of course, they were not always 29 and 19. Another photograph appears next. The same couple, still holding each other close. This time, the ages read 25 and 15.
This is where things are supposed to get romantic. In fact, if you find the older photo unsettling, that’s on you. Because the reel certainly does not. It frames the second photo as a fun little twist in the narrative. It’s a “see, it was always real” moment, a proof of commitment, proof that this was not some fleeting thing, but a relationship with history — even if that history involves a grown man and a school-aged girl.
At this point, the question that inevitably follows is a legal one. Under current law, a relationship between a 25-year-old and a 15-year-old is illegal, regardless of how it is framed years later. But in India, that legal clarity has rarely translated into moral or social clarity. The Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, while essential, has also been routinely misused to police relationships, enforce caste endogamy, and criminalise consensual adolescent love, particularly when caste, class, or religion are involved.
But while acknowledging that history matters, it also cannot become a reason to look away from what these reels are doing — publicly normalising adult-minor relationships and positioning children as romantic or marital material.
The trend, and what it puts on display
The aforementioned reel, which has garnered over a million views, is not an outlier. It is part of a now-familiar Instagram trend in Kerala, featuring a striking number of heterosexual couples following the same template. First, viewers are shown the couple’s present-day ages, making it clear that they are now legally married and, therefore, beyond reproach. Then comes the reveal, delivered almost proudly, that they have been “together” for years.
Across versions of this trend, the ages keep changing, but the structure does not. One reel announces a couple is now 30 and 22, before casually adding that they were also 24 and 16, and in love. Another shows a man and woman saying they are now 32 and 24, followed by an older photograph where the ages read 25 and 17. In yet another, a woman is 27 and the man 40, before the reel cuts to an earlier image of him at 28, her at 15. Sometimes the younger girl is visibly in a school uniform.
The music does part of the work. ‘Onnam kili randaam kili’ plays in the background, a song from the Mohanlal and Soundarya-starrer Kilichundan Mampazham, carrying decades of nostalgia and uncomplicated romance. It is difficult to panic when the soundtrack insists you shouldn’t.
Taken together, these reels ask viewers to suspend judgement and accept that legality in the present resolves everything in the past. Marriage becomes a moral eraser of any other discomfort that may arise, and time fills in the rest. Any lingering unease is reframed as the viewer’s problem, not the reel’s.
What constitutes as grooming
It is important to be precise here. Teenagers, and sometimes even younger adolescents, do enter relationships with older partners. Not every such relationship looks the same, and not every age gap is predatory. Consensual relationships between adolescents close in age, or between young people navigating similar social and emotional worlds, are not the same as adult-minor dynamics.
Grooming becomes a relevant concern when an adult uses their age difference — whether it be in terms of experience, authority, or power — to establish a close relationship with a minor, normalise intimacy long before the law would recognise it as consent, and shape the relationship so that when the child eventually comes of age, the outcome appears natural or inevitable.
So the problem with these reels is not simply that they document age–gap relationships, but that they erase these distinctions altogether, romanticising them into an easy binary of the “protective older man” and the “naive young girl in love.” In doing so, they are not merely ethically troubling, they are also reckless. They normalise conduct that remains illegal under existing law, while presenting it as aspirational and emotionally rewarding.
The law, and why it complicates everything
Criticism of the trend, of course, has been swift. Several content creators and viewers have rightly called out the trend for normalising grooming, with some demanding action under the POCSO Act.
But as mentioned before, POCSO itself sits at the centre of a long-standing contradiction.
Across India, the law has repeatedly been used to criminalise consensual adolescent relationships, often with devastating consequences. Young men, disproportionately from marginalised caste and religious communities, have been arrested, charged with rape, and incarcerated after relationships were discovered or disapproved of by families.
TNM has also extensively reported on how POCSO has unfairly impacted tribal communities in Kerala, where lack of awareness about the law, educational marginalisation, and failure to sensitise families about early marriage have resulted in criminalisation rather than protection.
Courts have increasingly acknowledged the problem. The Madras High Court has moved to identify and potentially quash cases involving consensual relationships between minors, warning that the mechanical application of POCSO can itself be harmful to children. The Supreme Court has also called for the inclusion of a “Romeo and Juliet” clause, an exception recognising consensual relationships between adolescents close in age.
The distinction, of course, matters. A 16- and 18-year-old in a consensual relationship is not the same as a 25-year-old cultivating intimacy with a 15-year-old. Treating them as identical does not protect the children, it only distorts the problem.
But this is also where the viral reels become especially dangerous. By collapsing all of these relationships into the same sentimental narrative, they blur the very distinctions that law and courts are struggling to clarify. A relationship that should prompt careful scrutiny is instead packaged as harmless romance, leaving little room for discomfort or disagreement.
Why the trend still needs to be called out
Defenders of the reels are quick to argue that not all such relationships automatically fall under POCSO. There was no physical relationship then, some insist. Others say the girl’s parents knew. Some argue that “talking” or “being in love” is not a crime. The implication is that unless a very specific legal threshold is crossed, there is nothing to see here.
This defence also relies on a narrow, technical reading of the law, and even then, often an incorrect one. POCSO is not only about sexual assault in the most explicit sense. It recognises that minors are structurally vulnerable — to pressure, persuasion, emotional dependency, and manipulation — even in the absence of physical force. Grooming, by its very nature, does not require overt violence or immediate sexual contact. A 15- or 16-year-old does not need to be physically coerced to be vulnerable. Adolescence is a time when identity is still forming, when attention from an older person can feel affirming, and when long-term consequences are difficult to fully grasp.
Consent, too, is not a switch that flips on at 18. Nor is it meaningful when one person is still figuring out who they are, while the other already holds social, emotional, and often financial power. To point this out is not to infantilise young women, it is to recognise how power actually operates.
Kerala’s social context sharpens this problem. Despite high literacy rates and progressive self-image, early romantic entanglements between adolescent girls and older men have long been normalised, often with family knowledge or approval. The language used is familiar — “girls mature faster than boys,” “he can protect her,” “but the families are okay with it,” and so on.
Social media then strips all of this of some much-needed context, flattening it into Instagram aesthetics and feeding it directly into the phones of teenagers. For girls especially, this is a dangerous lesson to absorb in a digital space already saturated with older men seeking access, attention, and emotional leverage.
The problem with ‘it worked for us’
Perhaps the most persuasive defence of these relationships is also the weakest — that it worked out. “Look at us now. We’re happy. We’re married,” the reels happily declare.
What they do not acknowledge, however, is that individual anecdotes do not reflect social reality. For every relationship that ends in marriage, there are many that do not. Stories of control, isolation, and regret abound that are far less likely to be packaged into viral reels.
More importantly, even relationships that appear stable in the present can carry costs that are not immediately visible. Many of them hide stories of lost autonomy, narrowed choices, and even a sense that one’s adult life was decided far earlier than it needed to be. These are also real harms, and they disproportionately affect women.
At its core, this trend forces us to confront some uncomfortable questions — why are we so eager to defend adult-minor relationships when they are wrapped in the language of romance? Why is it easier to celebrate a man’s “patience” than to ask why he sought emotional intimacy with someone so much younger? Why do we frame a girl’s endurance as maturity, rather than recognise it as vulnerability? And why does marriage become a moral alibi for everything that came before it?
Calling this out is not about criminalising love or policing personal histories. It is about refusing to normalise power imbalances that disproportionately harm young women, especially in a society where their choices are already constrained by gender, family pressure, and social expectation. Because when a culture learns to romanticise grooming, the cost is rarely paid by those doing the romanticising.
Views expressed are the author’s own.
