Rida Fatima

Love always felt like forbidden fruit growing up. It’s not like there wasn’t plenty of it around me, there was. The problem was that it felt out of reach as a young Muslim woman, and the consequences of indulging in it had given me a stomachache I was never taught how to cure. This article is about how your cultural background and religious practices can sometimes confuse your ability to understand love –  an emotion that significantly develops one’s  adolescence. 

As a young adult I found that my desire for life experiences kept rubbing against my religious convictions until the sparks were causing malfunctions and I couldn’t help but realise that I had no idea what I was doing. 

I was always told to never be in a relationship when I was younger, and how it was fundamentally wrong for my well-being according to the cultural norms of my birthplace. Pakistan is a “religious, collectivist, and conventional society where relationships between the opposite gender individuals are not accepted or appreciated” (Ali 2011). However,  this failed to dampen the curiosity that was ignited in me  from a young age.

And so the vapid result was messiness: I found myself constantly seeking romantic attention without being able to call it what it was, to embrace what it was. A terrible case of cognitive dissonance.

Looking at Malik and Cheema’s “Expectations in Romantic Relations and Psychological Well Being of Adolescents in Pakistan: Moderating Role of Parental Support”, they  hit the nail on the head on the afflictions I still feel confronted by.  The results in their study showed that there were “significant gender differences in expectation in romantic relations and psychological well-being with girls scoring higher than boys”. However, the most notable conclusion was that there was a significant negative association between expectations in romantic relations and the participant’s psychological well being. Parental support further moderated this  association between experiencing love and displacing it with wrongdoing .

It embodied why I felt so mentally drained. Relationships for me meant going out with someone, while pretending it was platonic, or getting attached to a momentary encounter and mistaking it for love. They meant feverish desire followed by immediate dissociation – sudden nausea that tried to tell me I was doing something wrong. They meant collecting attention from as many people as possible so I could get over my fear of committing to just one, bound up in general confusion and guilt.

These feelings were echoed in “Qualitative analysis of perception of romantic relations among adolescent girls in Pakistan” by Cheema and Malik,  in which they formed a focus group of seven teenage girls from the private college of Rawalpindi to ask them about their romantic relationships. Overall, despite many of them having engaged in some form or relationship, there was a general negative attitude toward dating and non acceptance. They emphasised how they always felt dating had negative consequences for girls. Society had made them sneak around to date or bear the guilt of their actions as it painted them “characterless”, a phrase that denoted the loss of dignity and morality. Although the study found that the students were capable of understanding intimacy, passion and relationship building, they couldn’t put this into practise. Environmental pressures had clouded their judgement and paralysed their ability to develop an understanding of love. 

The revolutionary side of the study, for me, was not the findings, but the fact this was the first piece of literature to unravel “how girls in religious collectivist society perceive romantic relations” with first-hand data to fill the research gap. Women, women like myself, aren’t typically considered when it comes to evaluating adolescent development as misogynistic values in their societies prioritise their future purpose of being homemakers  over their current perspective. Mainstream feminism has failed to put a bright enough spotlight on girls from religious and community-driven sects (from a variety of racial backgrounds) who experience original forms of psychological stress. Apart from the amazing work of Amrit Wilson in “Finding a voice, Asian women in Britain”, literature on this sensation of living a double life where you are expected to choose between your normal feelings and societal pressures, for brown women in particular, is rare. 

However, we must unlearn this shame as we get older and realise that human emotion is not something that deserves punishment. Love is an integral part of our psyche and is not a black-and-white situation – you can’t be expected to be ‘all grown up’ about your emotions just because you come from a religiously demanding community. Whether it’s Sternberg’s triangular theory of love (1986) or Rubin’s component breakdown of romance, love cannot be disregarded. 

There are two parallel tracks running in my head which never let me finish a train of thought. However, as I’ve grown older I have found peace with loving my faith, and how it helps me grow in every area of my life – including romantic – without making myself feel guilty for having feelings beyond those allowed by cultural expectations. Though obedience may be the “fruit of faith”, and love may feel like being a “lily in the flood when all restraint is gone” (Rossetti), womanhood is allowing yourself to experience and make room for both.