Love or whatever it means

She graduated with a degree in sociology on a warm July afternoon, her parents smiling in the front row, her friends cheering the loudest. Everyone said she would go far. She believed it too—not just in career, but in life.

She was a dreamer at heart. Not the foolish kind, but the stubborn kind. The kind who believed that if something made sense in theory, it could exist in reality. Years of studying society, gender roles, power structures, and family systems had shaped her understanding of love and marriage. She didn’t want a hero. She didn’t want rescuing. She didn’t want to be someone’s responsibility transferred from father to husband like a carefully wrapped parcel.

To her, love was friendship first. It was long conversations at midnight. It was quiet understanding without having to explain every emotion. It was partnership—two people standing side by side, not one ahead and the other trailing behind. It was companionship and equality. No master. No servant. No silent scorekeeping. Just two flawed humans choosing each other every day.

People admired her clarity. They said, “You think too much,” half-jokingly. Rishtas came and went. Some were impressed by her education but uncomfortable with her opinions. Some liked her smile but not her questions. A few liked the idea of an educated wife, but not an equal one.

Slowly, the fairy-tale mist she never truly believed in began to thin anyway.

Reality arrived quietly. In subtle remarks about “adjustment.” In expectations that she should bend a little more because she was the woman. In conversations that began with promises of partnership but ended with traditions she was expected to follow without debate.

She started noticing the gap between theory and practice. The world she had studied was the same world she now stood inside. Patriarchy was no longer a chapter in a book. It was in dining room discussions, in proposals withdrawn, in polite smiles that meant, “You’re a bit too much.”

Her fantasies didn’t shatter in one dramatic moment. They dissolved slowly, like ink in water.

One evening, sitting by her window with her degree framed on the wall behind her, she wondered if her idea of love was naïve. Maybe companionship without control was too modern. Maybe equality sounded good in seminars but uncomfortable in living rooms.

But somewhere beneath the disappointment, a small, steady voice remained.

Maybe the world wasn’t ready.

Or maybe she just hadn’t met someone brave enough yet.

She smiled at that thought—not with blind hope, but with quiet defiance.

After all, she was still a sociologist.

And still, a dreamer.