Maria Platt's book Marriage, Gender and Islam in Indonesia: Women Negotiating Informal Marriage, Divorce and Desire offers insight into rural Sasak patterns of marriage and divorce. Located on the island of Lombok in the province of West Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia, Sasak are a staunchly Muslim ethnic group. An estimated 70 percent of marriages in this area are legitimated through Islamic ceremonies but remain unregistered with the state. Platt is interested in understanding why Indonesian marriage law has largely failed to gain traction in the region.

In the western part of the island, where Platt conducted her research in a village she calls Teduk, she found women had few alternatives other than marriage. Most people in Teduk worked as farmers or laborers; whereas men had the option of migration, women were expected to stay close to home. Other employment opportunities required at least a high school diploma, but educational levels in West Nusa Tenggara Province are among the lowest in the Indonesian archipelago and are especially low for women—who average only five years of schooling. Correspondingly, the age of first marriage for rural Sasak women (at 21.4 years) is two years below the national average of 23.4. Divorce rates in Lombok are also among the highest in the nation, with divorce easily attained (particularly by men) and remarriage common. Platt describes this pattern of the relatively early age of first marriage and the ease of divorce in Sasak society as the two ends of a continuum that she refers to as the “marital continuum” (p. 3). Employing this notion of a continuum, she argues, allows for the recognition of women's varied experiences of marriage throughout the lifespan—and underscores the fluidity and mutability that is central to marital unions and their dissolution in rural Sasak communities and is facilitated by community-based law (p. 35).

Key features of the Sasak marital continuum, as Platt describes it, are the widespread practice of kawin lari or “spontaneous elopement” and the nonregistration of marital unions. The two phenomena are linked and have serious implications in turn for divorce. Traditional Sasak courtship, called midang, consists of a young man calling on a young woman at her parents’ home, where the couple's interaction can be supervised by family members. Kawin lari typically involves the young man convincing the young woman to meet somewhere away from familial oversight. He may wait there with friends; when she arrives, he hustles her off to his own home, where she stays for a period of three days. The young woman may or may not be completely aware of or in agreement with the process, but once she has spent time in the young man's home, both Islamic tradition and local custom require that she marry him. Her father appears sometime during this three-day period to ask if she consents to the marriage, but in most cases, the matter is a forgone conclusion. The couple is then married in a religious ceremony by a local Islamic official.

Platt is at pains to point out that women may also use kawin lari as a means to exercise their agency, for example, in situations where her parents may refuse a young woman's choice of partner. But whatever the case, the practice of kawin lari complicates the process of officially registering the marriage, which requires the filing of paperwork ten days prior to the wedding ceremony. While it is possible to arrange for a retroactive marriage certificate at a later time, the cost is often prohibitive.

Marriage registration, however, poses its own problems, particularly with regard to women's experience of divorce. Ambiguities arise for women whose marriages are registered and whose husbands divorce them by talak (stating “I divorce you” three times), as they are still married according to the state but are divorced in the eyes of the community. Moreover, Platt argues that official marriage registration hinders women's easy exit from an abusive or unhappy union and the possibilities of pacaran lagi, that is, following their desires by engaging in an extramarital affair (though this practice is more common among men than women).

In all of this, Platt presents a view of the 1974 Indonesian marriage law as a failed “project of modernity,” one that was supposed to inject a measure of equality for women in marriage and particularly in divorce (p. 9). Challenged by the strength of Sasak community-based law, she argues, state regulations have been unable to match the dynamism of the Sasak marital continuum. Platt hints at, but does not focus on, possible changes on the horizon, changes long evident in other areas of the archipelago. Schools that once accepted children without legal papers are increasingly demanding that students have birth certificates as a requirement for admission. Couples who want to relocate for work or family find they need to prove they are legally married and not “living in sin” in order to obtain residency papers. International labor migration (in which women now outnumber men) may also require evidence of legal marriage registration as a condition of employment. It is likely these developments, along with continuing pressures for increased Islamic normativity, will only continue to erode the Sasak marital continuum described by Platt.