Love as understanding Marriage, aspiration, and the joint family in middle-class Pakistan

In middle-class Pakistan, marriage is the prescribed future for all women, but premarital contact between the sexes is discouraged. To find the right partner, then, without visibly flouting social norms, requires a skillful balancing act between private interests and aspirations, and between public representations and collective concerns. Young women often navigate these conflicting demands by developing what they call an understanding: a secret premarital relationship that they normalize by involving family at a late stage to orchestrate an arranged marriage. Firmly enmeshed within the social life of joint families, understandings are an instance neither of defying patriarchal norms nor of pursuing self-cultivation within them. Instead, they offer a window into how young women live and explore new possibilities within the vestiges of normative structures. [love, marriage, desire, morality, consumption, joint family, Lahore, Pakistan]