A bouquet of roses, a handwritten card and a slice of cheesecake to share — this was the ideal I once believed made up the perfect Valentine’s Day. Growing up with Bollywood movies and romance novels, I once believed love was about affection, excitement and finding “the one.” I thought love meant catching someone’s eye across a crowded room and the kind of devotion that made people cross oceans. I searched for love everywhere, in every interaction, every possibility. But as I got older, I realized love, at least for women like me, was never only about love. In many South Asian households, love is about duty. It is about family expectations. It is about marriage.
Rigid expectations
Somewhere along the way, love stopped being about what I wanted and became about what was expected of me. I quickly learned that for South Asian girls, love is secondary to responsibility. Romantic relationships were never just my own business; they were something to be monitored, scrutinized and, if necessary, forbidden. While my male peers were encouraged to explore, make mistakes and eventually “settle down” on their own terms, I was reminded that my choices would reflect on my family. A love that didn’t align with their expectations wasn’t just a bad decision, it was a threat to my character, upbringing and future.
The ideal wife
As I grew older, I saw how love was shaped by forces beyond feelings. Marriage was not about finding a partner to share a life with but about fitting into another family and becoming someone else’s definition of an ideal wife. Love, if it existed, was something that came after marriage, something that had to be earned through patience, compromise and sacrifice. I often wonder about the women who came before me — my grandmothers, my aunts, the countless nameless others — who never had the chance to live for themselves before they were forced to commit to their families. They put their own happiness second, sometimes never even realizing they had a right to claim it in the first place.
I wish I could say these ideas existed only in the past, but they still echo in our culture today. A woman’s ability to “adjust” is still seen as a measure of her love, while a man’s failures are things she must accept. The idea that love should be about mutual respect, about choosing each other every day, is rarely the focus.
Love is a privilege
Beyond the emotional weight of it all, there are also real-world limitations. Love is a privilege not all of us get to experience freely. Family approval, financial dependence, caste and religion are all external factors that decide whether love is even an option. Then even when love does exist, it comes with conditions: Is he suitable? Will your families align? Will this love bring stability or shame? Love becomes a decision to be negotiated, a risk that must be calculated. No Bollywood romances here.
How can we love?
And yet, things are changing. More South Asian women are choosing to define love on their own terms. Some are choosing independence over marriage, choosing to love themselves first in ways that were never an option for the women before us. Others are pushing for relationships built on mutual understanding rather than obligation. The idea of love is evolving, but the weight of its past — the expectations, the sacrifices, the contradictions — still lingers.
For many of us South Asian women, love remains a cynical concept, not because we don’t believe in it, but because we’ve seen how it has been shaped by forces beyond our control. Love is not always about choice; sometimes, it is about compromise. I can’t help but wonder if love can exist at all within a culture that defines it as a duty.
So, forgive me if I’m a little cynical about love — it’s not all roses and cheesecake.
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