In the first fine careless rapture after our wedding, my husband and I sailed forth into the uncharted waters of house-hunting in Delhi. The fact that we had different surnames didn’t even register, nor did it enter our heads that anyone would be concerned with something as apparently irrelevant as our marital status.

A week into househunting, though, our bank papers and office ID cards had been supplemented by the three-volume edition of the Roy-Datta Wedding Photo Album. Landlords who didn’t need to be reassured that we were not going to squat in their houses forever, throw orgies every weekend or set up do-it-yourself terrorist groups were desperate to know that we were legally contracted.

Another couple we knew were also looking for a house. They weren’t married, but they had been living together for three years. After two months of fruitless hunting, they invested in cheap mangalsutra-wedding ring combos and forged a fake marriage certificate. They found three flats in the next two weeks.

Perhaps this is why I’m inclined to forgive Laxmi Pandit, all too briefly Miss India, for the confusion over her marital status. The moral position vis-à-vis Ms (Miss? Mrs?) Pandit is stern: if she wasn’t married but “cohabiting”, then she lied to her Mumbai landlord, and if she was married, then she lied to the pageant organisers. The immoral position, which I’m happy to endorse, is: get real, people.

I know almost as many couples who’re living together as I know married couples. Many of the weddings I go to are celebrating the union of couples who have lived together for a while and decided for tax purposes, or for children, or just to keep their families quiet, to tie the knot. (Unmarried couples don’t have weddings; they have better parties.)

All the same, couples who choose to make a social, personal, often moral but not legal commitment still face the wrath of the conservative. If the only thing that stands between a couple and living space is their willingness to tell a white lie, then many people take that route out, as Laxmi Pandit and her partner apparently did. It doesn’t make a difference to your relationship; it merely soothes someone else’s irrational fears. What was delightful was the position of the organisers of the Miss World pageant. Most beauty pageants insist that candidates should be unmarried and below a certain age. The image they want to project is of accessible beauty. Marriage is not exciting in the same way; married people are boring, stodgy, not footloose and fancy-free.

But Pandit’s predicament put the pageant organisers on the spot. Those dutiful burbles about world peace and loving Mother Teresa are about projecting the right kind of goodness. By explaining that they would prefer a (tch, tch) cohabiting Miss India to a (boring) married Mrs India, the organisers placed themselves in a morally ambiguous position. What they were saying is that an invisible boyfriend is okay, so long as we can still pretend you’re young, free and available. The moment he pops up as a husband, the deal’s off.

Future Miss Indias, be warned. Or go on strike and demand a Ms India competition, where all that counts is the chocolate-box appeal of your face, which is what the whole unfeminist crapshoot was supposed to be about in the first place.