How many of us remember the ILOVEYOU computer worm that swept across the world in May 2000? Millions of computers were affected. An email carrying those three irresistible words could unleash digital havoc. I remember thinking less about the damage than about the curiosity those words must have awakened. How many people were tempted to open a message that simply said, “I love you”?
More than two decades later, I wonder: Is “I love you” still one of the most dangerous sentences a person can say? It may no longer corrupt computer files, but it can expose the speaker to suspicion, judgement and shame. Consider the contradictions of our patriarchal cultural landscape.
South Asian literature, poetry, folklore, art and cinema particularly in India and Pakistan offer rich examples of this contrast. We celebrate love, longing, defiance and forbidden desire in stories, songs, poems and on screen, yet often judge women harshly when they express comparable feelings in their own lives. I have explored this contradiction in several of my essays. Why is a woman’s desire so readily accepted as art, but questioned when it becomes her lived experience?
We hear of couples who fall in love and marry, and the response can be: They have had their nikah, so what is the problem? Yet other relationships are condemned before they have even been understood. Polygamy may be defended as religiously permissible, while a woman’s emotional autonomy is treated as a threat.
A man who pursues a married woman may be excused as following his heart; a woman who leaves an unhappy marriage may find her character put on trial. When a man cheats, falls in love with another woman and leaves his wife, who is accused of breaking the home? Often, it is the other woman who gets the blame, not the man who made commitments and chose to break them. If the man is older, wealthier or socially and politically influential, his desires may be romanticised while the women bear the burden of shame.
Why is male desire so graciously granted the status of a love story, while women’s choices become evidence in an audit of character? Why are women expected to preserve homes while men who break commitments are so often spared equivalent scrutiny?
Policing women’s choices can be perilous. Women and girls have been killed for choosing their partners, marrying against their families’ wishes or even being suspected of “illicit relationships.” These so-called honour killings expose the violence hidden in the idea that family reputation depends on controlling a woman’s life. A woman’s autonomy becomes an alleged offence, and violence is presented as the defence of honour. Attiya Daud’s defiant verses capture this contradiction with striking force:
Agar tumhein kari keh kar qatal kar dein
Mar jaana, pyar zaroor karna
Sharafat ke showcase mein
Niqab dal kar mat bethna, pyar zaroor karna
The scrutiny of women’s emotional lives begins long before such extremes. A woman may be judged not for betraying a commitment or harming another person, but simply for expressing a feeling that men are permitted to voice. Why should the right to say “I love you” belong to one gender?
A woman who expresses affection is not necessarily making a demand, violating a boundary or surrendering her dignity. She is expressing something she feels. The other person remains free to reciprocate, decline or draw a boundary. The freedom to express a feeling does not confer a right to another person’s affection. But neither should that freedom be denied on the grounds of gender.
A feminist examination of love, desire and emotional autonomy in patriarchal South Asian society, questioning the double standards that romanticise men’s choices while subjecting women to moral judgement, and arguing for a more equitable society grounded in consent, responsibility and mutual respect.
Of course, consent, unequal power, honesty and existing commitments matter. The language of love cannot excuse harassment, deception or harm; neither should morality become an excuse for denying women emotional agency. We can respect religious convictions without treating every social judgement as a religious imperative. We can uphold fidelity without insisting that everyone remain in an unhappy or abusive marriage. The challenge is to apply ethical standards consistently, rather than using them selectively to protect appearances or excuse power. Three male writers, from different literary worlds, offer ways of thinking about this tension between feeling, responsibility and freedom.
Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) writes in The Brothers Karamazov (1880): “Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.” Love imagined can remain beautiful because it makes few demands. Love in action requires responsibility and an encounter with another person’s reality. It is easy to romanticise our feelings; it is harder to accept that another person has an independent will.
Franz Kafka (1883–1924) offers a more intimate and complicated perspective in Letters to Milena, a correspondence written mainly in 1920 to Milena Jesenská, his Czech translator. Milena was married to Ernst Pollak. Kafka’s intense attachment to her did not become the shared life he hoped for. Their correspondence illuminates a difficult truth: the intensity of one person’s feelings cannot determine another person’s obligations. Milena had her own commitments and choices; Kafka had his hopes and limitations. Their letters should not be read as a blueprint for love, nor should their anguish be romanticised. Feeling deeply is not a moral offence in itself. What matters is how we respond to our feelings and respect the freedom of others.
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) offers a corrective to possessive love. In Letters to a Young Poet, he writes: “To love is good, too: love being difficult.” Rilke invites us to imagine love as something that allows people to grow as individuals rather than surrender their identities to each other. Love need not mean ownership, control or the demand that another person reorganise an entire life around our desires. None of these writers offers a universal doctrine. Together, however, they invite us to distinguish between feeling and entitlement, longing and responsibility, intimacy and possession.
In Pakistan, this distinction matters. We can question the destruction of marriages and the violation of commitments without pretending that remaining in every unhappy marriage is virtuous. We can value fidelity without declaring every feeling immoral. A woman’s emotional life deserves the same moral seriousness as a man’s not automatic approval, but neither automatic condemnation.
I am not suggesting that every emotion must be acted upon, or that religion should disappear from the conversation. I am asking whether our moral judgements can make room for intention, restraint, consent and compassion. Can someone acknowledge a feeling without violating a commitment, crossing another person’s boundary or demanding reciprocation?
Perhaps we need a more demanding morality: one that neither worships desire nor criminalises vulnerability; one that protects commitments without sacrificing human dignity; one that applies the same ethical standards to women and men. The computer worm exploited our willingness to open a message because we wanted to believe those words. Real love must do the opposite of a virus: it must not invade, corrupt or take over another person’s life.
Perhaps the real danger is not confessing “I love you,” nor sending a long message past midnight, nor reading and answering one with intellectual sharpness dipped in playful humour even from the privacy of a married man’s bedroom. The real danger may lie in a society that scrutinises a woman for expressing affection while leaving a man’s participation in the very same exchange largely unquestioned. My feminist argument is precisely this: a woman’s expression of desire too often becomes a verdict on her character, while a man’s participation is treated as inconsequential. Ours is a hypocritical society, so afraid of the words “I love you” that it forgets to ask what love should actually mean.