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What the six-month cooling-off period really means

Between the first motion and the second in a mutual consent divorce, section 13B(2) of the Hindu Marriage Act sets a wait of at least six months. It is there so that a couple who might still repair the marriage has room to.

For most people it is simply the shape of the process. For couples who separated years ago and settled everything long before they came to court, it can feel like being asked to wait for something that finished a long time ago.

The law recognised that.

It can be waived

In Amardeep Singh v. Harveen Kaur (2017) the Supreme Court held that the six-month period under section 13B(2) is directory, not mandatory — a family court can waive it.

The Court also said when. The waiver is appropriate where:

  1. The statutory six months of 13B(2), and the year of separation under 13B(1), are already over before the first motion was even filed.
  2. Mediation and conciliation have failed, and there is no likelihood of the parties coming back together.
  3. The parties have genuinely settled their differences — maintenance, custody, and anything else pending between them.
  4. Waiting further would only prolong the agony.

Read those four together and the picture is specific: this is relief for couples whose marriage ended long ago and who have already done all the work, not a shortcut for a couple who filed last month. The first condition assumes the year under 13B(1) is behind you — which, in Delhi at least, is no longer necessarily a given. See below.

What a court actually looks at

A waiver application is decided on the record in front of the judge, which is why preparation matters more than argument.

Proof of how long you have lived apart. Dated, not asserted. Separate addresses on documents, rent agreements, bills, anything that fixes the timeline.

A complete settlement. This is where most applications fail. Every term settled and written with figures and dates — maintenance amount, mode and schedule; custody and access; property, and who carries the loan; what happens to jewellery and accounts. A settlement with an open term reads as unfinished, and an unfinished settlement is the opposite of what the Court described.

Nothing left running. Any complaint, application or proceeding between you should be addressed in the settlement.

A reason the wait serves nothing. Sometimes it is simply time. Sometimes there is a specific reason — a party who must leave the country, a remarriage, a job posting, health.

How strong is the right?

Stronger than "discretion" suggests. High Courts have held that where all four conditions are satisfied, the discretion should ordinarily be exercised in favour of waiver, and family courts have been corrected on appeal for refusing in such cases.

The Supreme Court then said it directly. In Misha Somani v. Rituraj Somani (2 February 2026) a High Court had refused a waiver by treating the four conditions as a checklist every one of which had to be met. The Supreme Court set that order aside, holding the High Court had misconstrued Amardeep Singh: the factors are illustrative, not exhaustive. It repeated what it had said in Amit Kumar v. Suman Beniwal (2023) 17 SCC 648 — where there is no possibility of reconciliation, prolonging the agony of the parties is meaningless.

If a family court refuses your application on the footing that one of the four boxes is unticked, that is the authority to put in front of it.

That does not make it automatic. It makes the settlement the whole argument.

It is still refused

A court may decline. Practice varies between courts and between judges, and a refused application costs weeks that a straightforward six-month wait would not have cost. That trade is worth thinking about honestly: if you are three months from the second motion anyway, an application may buy you very little.

Your city's page carries what the local benches have actually been doing with these applications.

The year before the petition moved too, in Delhi

Everything above is about the six months between the two motions. The year of separation before a petition can be filed at all — section 13B(1) — was treated as a hard precondition, and for most of the country still is.

On 17 December 2025 a Full Bench of the Delhi High Court, Justices Navin Chawla, Anup Jairam Bhambhani and Renu Bhatnagar, held that the year under 13B(1) is directory, not mandatory, and can be waived where there is exceptional hardship to the petitioner or exceptional depravity on the part of the respondent — the language section 14 uses for leave to file within a year of the marriage. The Court invoked Article 21, and said plainly that the waiver is not to be granted merely for the asking.

Two details matter in practice. The waiver of the year under 13B(1) and the waiver of the six months under 13B(2) are considered independently of each other, so one does not carry the other. And where both are waived, the Court indicated the decree may be made effective immediately.

This is a Delhi judgment. In Delhi it binds; elsewhere it is persuasive, and how readily other High Courts follow it is not yet settled. It is recent enough that anybody relying on it should ask what their own court has been doing with it since.

The Supreme Court's own power is different

In Shilpa Sailesh v. Varun Sreenivasan (2023) the Supreme Court confirmed it can dissolve a marriage on the ground of irretrievable breakdown using its powers under Article 142 of the Constitution, including where one party does not consent, and can dispense with the waiting period entirely.

That power belongs to the Supreme Court alone. A family court cannot grant a divorce on irretrievable breakdown, because it is not a ground listed in the Hindu Marriage Act. People read about these judgments and arrive expecting their own family court to apply them; it cannot.

What the wait does not mean

What to do next

If you have been apart for years and everything is settled, a waiver is worth considering — and the settlement is what carries it. A guided session is where that gets drafted properly for your own court.

If you are earlier in this, read mutual consent divorce, step by step.