“I was 15 and Amal was 21 when we felt a romantic spark. For three years, we continued to be in a relationship, but my parents went to the police and tried to separate us. It was at that point that I decided to elope with him,” says Pooja, who hails from Kerala, in a recent interview.
Pooja, now 19, married Amal last year. The couple say they are sure of each other and the life they have chosen. Pooja eloped from her grandmother’s house, where her parents had put her up as she was writing her school exams. She says her family was also planning to send her away from Kerala for studies so that she would not be able to see Amal.
“Amal and I lived in the same neighbourhood. We met at a wedding. He saw me, and then he tried to pursue me. He is good-looking and persistent. I felt I would be happy,” Pooja is seen saying in several interviews.
The couple was apprehensive about speaking to TNM, worried that extensive coverage might adversely impact them. However, they say, if Pooja’s family had not threatened them, they may not have married so soon. They now live at Amal’s home with his parents.
The couple has a YouTube channel with over 90.6k subscribers. The first video on the channel, uploaded a year ago, is titled ‘Me and my child wife’.
The channel has over 290 videos, including content that showcases their domestic life, outings with Amal’s family, small celebrations, and more. In some videos, Pooja cooks, reiterating how she does not know how to cook at all. Amal reassures her, saying she is still young and will pick up.
Of late, after the couple went viral, Pooja has been doing paid promotional videos where she reviews skincare and makeup products.
For Amal and Pooja, YouTube videos and Instagram reels are avenues to earn, considering that she has just joined college this year, and they are trying to find a financial footing. However, Pooja’s is not an isolated case of a ‘child wife’ making money off social media.
Spend enough time on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube, and it becomes apparent that the teenage wife or young wife lifestyle is gaining momentum worldwide, and in India too. There are videos of several young wives like Pooja, who are seen cooking in school or college uniforms, making pregnancy announcements before college graduations, and declaring that life’s tribulations cannot ever break their rebellious love for each other.
There is something deceptively ordinary about these videos. But beneath the easy intimacy and the apparent domestic bliss lies a more complicated story – of girlhood giving way to marriage, of social media turning private choices into public performance, and of boundaries blurring between consent, vulnerability, and agency.
The teen wife phenomenon on social media is a subset of the traditional wife or trad wife movement, which encourages women to go back to traditional gender roles like birthing, nurturing, care-giving, and so on.
However, the teen/young wife conversation is more complex in the Indian context. The same imagery of the teen wife as it exists in the West exists against an entirely different backdrop here.
The conversation here is not just about young women being swept into a global conservative gimmick, but about agency and what it means to make life-altering choices before life itself has had a chance to unfold.
