LOVE LAW AND LONELINESS
Mainly, the discourse of gender equality is framed around wages, workplace opportunities, political representation, or access to education. Yet one domain remains an obstinately unequal one despite reform: the domain of love. Romantic relationships, marriages, and families are not immune to the asymmetries of gender. They are culturally inflected residues that weigh heavily on women and men in different ways. The paradox of contemporary time is that even as laws attempt to create fairness, love generally reproduces inequality, which perhaps explains the most subtle consequences of loneliness.
India’s legal trajectory related to gender equality has been transformative. With the outlawing of dowry and child marriage and the criminalization of domestic violence and sexual harassment at workplaces, the law has managed to protect women from structural harm. Progressive judgments on privacy, live-in relationships, and same-sex rights have also indicated that intimacy is no longer outside the reach of justice. However, limitations of law are inherent.
Law may outlaw exploitation, but it cannot legislate the everyday dynamics of affection, care, and responsibility. A marriage may be legally equal, yet if the woman carries the invisible burden of emotional care and domestic labour, the relationship continues to reproduce inequality. As situations change with women’s access to income, the law does not demand that men be breadwinners; social expectations often chain them to the role of financial provider.
This imbalance becomes pronounced when taking into account the unquestioned emotional labour that women in our society perform. The emotional labour of remembering birthdays and anniversaries, initiating difficult conversations, acting as a mediator in conflict, and sustaining the emotional architecture of intimacy. What looks like a voluntary expression of love is, in truth, a deeply socialized expectation that women must be careers both within and outside the household. Even as they achieve professional success and economic independence, the demand for emotional care giving rarely diminishes. Independence often doubles the pressure, as women are expected to excel at work while simultaneously managing the invisible scaffolding of love and family.
In contrast, men face the burden of affordability. Even with the rise of working women, masculinity is still evaluated in terms of financial stability, the income to afford gifts, pay for weddings, provide housing, and sustain lifestyles. Many men delay marriage not because they are unwilling to love, but because they feel economically unprepared. Others withdraw emotionally because they internalize the belief that their value lies in their capacity to provide, not in their ability to nurture. In a culture shaped by consumerism, a man’s worth is still too often tied to his wallet.
The result of these dual burdens is a strange type of loneliness in today’s times. Women become isolated even in established relationships because the work of intimacy disproportionately rests with them. Men, in contrast, have the burden of economic weights and the loss of the cultural liberty to be vulnerable and to experience emotional need. Both are alone together, being in relations that express inequality, not transcend it. The result is a culture in which love is tenuously visible in postponed weddings, speeding divorces, casual affairs, and the booming business of dating apps. What was imagined as a respite from the world comes to increasingly resemble the world itself.
If gender equality is to be realized, it must extend into the sphere of intimacy. Law can only provide a framework; culture must complete the project. A more equal love would require men to share emotional labour actively—to listen, empathise, and take responsibility for sustaining relationships. It would also require women to be freed from the expectation that caregiving is their natural duty. Affordability, too, must be shared. The ability to sustain a relationship cannot be measured by material display. A gift or a wedding should not define love; rather, mutual recognition and care should.
Sociological imagination states that love is not just a private feeling but a social institution and is shaped by gender, culture, and popular media. The personal is always political, and inequality in relationships is not simply an individual failing or a relational issue but a structural concern. Until we understand that emotional labour must be both acknowledged and shared, love will always reflect and reproduce hierarchies, not dismantle them.
Loneliness, in this sense, is less about individual isolation and more about the unfinished project of gender equality. If the twentieth century was about securing women’s rights through law, the twenty-first must be about achieving emotional and relational justice. Only people can love if they are able to move beyond the cultural burdens imposed, becoming what they expect from each other. The ideal love is when people are able to form a partnership of equals, free from the hidden hierarchies of gender.
(Author is Assistant Professor of Sociology at UILS, Chandigarh University Punjab. Feedback: [email protected])
