New Delhi, Sept. 12 -- One Sunday evening in Bengaluru, Rohit Nair, a 28-year-old IT professional, sat at his dining table staring at the rent receipt. For the past eight months, he had been paying it on his own. His partner, who had moved in after just six weeks of dating, had stopped contributing. "He'd say things like, 'I'll pitch in once work stabilises' or 'You earn more than me anyway,'" Nair recalls. "At first, I brushed it off as temporary. But I began to realise this was the arrangement. I wasn't his partner, I was his provider."

He is not alone in facing this predicament. What initially feels like romance or intimacy can reveal itself to be a pragmatic arrangement: a roof, shared bills, a way to reduce the expenses of urban lif...