Relationships, rewritten

There is a photograph in almost every South Asian home: a wedding portrait from the 1970s or 80s, the couple stiff and unsmiling, surrounded by thirty relatives whose names the grandchildren can no longer recall. Compare it with a wedding photograph taken last month. The couple could be in a passionate embrace, fulfilling an equally passionate request by the photographer, or laughing; mid-air, confetti frozen around them. Behind the photographer stand four people with phones raised, filming for Instagram. Propped up on a chair near the stage, two cousins are streaming it live on a video call, for another two cousins who couldn’t fly in for the wedding.

Nothing about the institution has changed on paper. Everything about how it is felt, performed and understood has.

We do not usually notice changes in our inner life while they are happening. We notice them later, when an older relative says something that sounds strange to us, or when we say something that sounds strange to them. That gap, the small, awkward silence between generations — is the clearest evidence we have that the way we think about relationships is being rewired.

Ask a man of 70, why he stayed married for 45 years and he is likely to answer with a shrug and a phrase like "nibhana parta hai" or one has to make it work. Ask a woman of 28, the same question about her marriage of three years and you will get a longer, more careful answer about respect, communication, shared goals, and whether she still feels like herself.

Both answers are honest. They come from two different perspectives or moral universes.

The older universe treated relationships as roles. You were a son, a daughter-in-law, a brother, a neighbour, and the role told you what to do. There was comfort in that. Nobody had to invent the script. If a marriage was unhappy, the unhappiness was usually regarded as a private weather condition, something to be endured, not solved. The family, the biraderi, the village, the mohalla held the structure in place from the outside.

The newer universe treats relationships as agreements. Two people, or a parent and a grown child, or two old friends, are understood to be continuously choosing each other. If the agreement stops working, it is expected to be renegotiated or ended. This is why a phrase like "we've grown apart" makes complete sense to a thirty-year-old and sounds almost like an insult to a 70-year-old, who might reasonably ask: grown apart from what? You are family.

Consider a real and very ordinary situation. A young couple in Islamabad, both working, decide after two years of marriage to move into a rented flat twenty minutes from the husband's parents' house. Their reason is simple: they want a quieter place, and both work night shifts on international projects. The husband's mother does not hear "we want quiet." She hears "we are leaving you." The son does not hear "your mother is frightened of being alone in old age." He hears "you are trying to control us." Two decent people, one house, and completely different definitions of what love is supposed to look like in practice. That is the fault line running through millions of homes right now.

The phone changed the geometry of intimacy

For most of human history, the people you were close to were the people you were physically near. Distance killed relationships slowly and reliably. Letters took weeks. A trunk call was booked in advance and spoken loudly, briefly, expensively.

Presently, a daughter in Toronto sees her mother's kitchen in Lahore every morning. A father working in Dubai reads his son's exam results before the boy has told his class fellows. Grief, gossip, illness and small triumphs travel instantly.

This is a genuine gain, and it should be said plainly: technology has kept families emotionally alive across borders in a way that would have astonished our grandparents. Migration used to mean a kind of social death. It no longer does.

But the geometry has changed in a subtler way too. Closeness used to require presence. Now it requires attention and attention is the one resource that has not increased.

A family WhatsApp group with 42 members produces an odd feeling: you know everything and you feel nothing. You learn that an uncle has had a stent placed, you send a folded-hands emoji, and you scroll on. Information arrives without the weight that used to accompany it. In an earlier era, that news would have arrived through a person, in a room, and it would have cost you an evening.

Meanwhile, presence has become strangely thin. Anyone who has sat at a dinner table where five people are physically together and mentally elsewhere knows the sensation. A friend visits after two years; within twenty minutes both of you are showing each other things on your screens rather than talking. Nobody is being rude. The pull is simply stronger than the manners.

The result is a peculiar modern condition: we are more contactable than any generation in history and, by many accounts, lonelier. Contact is not the same nutrient as company.

Fifty years ago, most people married someone from a pool of perhaps a dozen realistic options assembled by relatives. Today, a young person in Karachi or anywhere may scroll through a thousand faces in a week on matrimonial sites, on apps, on Instagram and still feel that the right person has not appeared. More options should mean better outcomes. Often they mean the opposite.

When choice is unlimited, every choice feels provisional. Psychologists call this the paradox of choice; ordinary people call it "what if there's someone better." A twenty-six-year-old woman turns down a perfectly decent proposal because something about the man's sense of humour felt slightly flat and she is not being shallow. She has been told, correctly, that she should not settle. But nobody has told her where the line between settling and expecting perfection actually lies, because that line was never something individuals had to draw for themselves before.

Meanwhile, the older system of arranged marriage has not disappeared. It has quietly mutated into something new, what might be called the arranged introduction. Parents find the family; the two young people then talk for three months on WhatsApp, meet twice at a coffee shop, and make their own decision. Two systems, once opposed, have merged into a hybrid that neither the grandparents nor the dating apps quite predicted.

The same shift shows up in friendship. Friendships used to be inherited; the boys on your street, the girls in your class, your cousins. You did not choose them and you could not easily escape them, so you learned to tolerate people who irritated you. That was a skill. Today friendships are increasingly curated: chosen by interest, by profession, by online community. They are more satisfying and more fragile. A curated friendship can be quietly dropped by ceasing to reply. An inherited one turns up at your door.

Today, when a friendship becomes uncomfortable, it can be easier to distance ourselves. When a conversation becomes difficult, we can leave it unanswered. When a relationship does not match our expectations, we may begin looking for something else.

A new vocabulary — powerful, and easy to misuse

Perhaps the biggest change is in language. Words that lived inside therapists' offices thirty years ago are now used at family dinners: boundaries, toxic, trauma, love bombing, gaslighting, closure, emotional labour, and red flag.

This vocabulary has done real good. A woman who once had no word for what was happening to her can now say "this is emotional abuse" and be understood. Young men who were raised to treat every feeling as weakness are learning that anxiety has a name and a treatment. Naming a thing is the first step to changing it.

But borrowed language cuts both ways. A word designed to describe serious harm can be used to describe ordinary friction, and once it is, it ends the conversation instead of opening it.

Furthermore, a few seconds of someone’s “happy” life on social media can make us question our own relationships. We see perfect couples, surprise gifts, family dinners and endless smiles, forgetting that we are watching only a carefully chosen moment, not the whole story. Slowly, comparison replaces contentment, and expectations replace understanding. We start wanting relationships to look perfect instead of simply being real.

A twenty-four-year-old tells his mother, "I need to set a boundary. Please don't comment on my weight." That is clear, specific and fair. It names a behaviour, not a person.

His cousin tells her mother, "You're toxic, I'm going no contact," because the mother pushed too hard about her career choice. That may be justified. It may also be a heavy word doing the work of a lighter one and it may cost her a relationship that a difficult conversation could have repaired.

The honest position is that both over-tolerance and over-diagnosis cause damage. Our grandparents' generation stayed too long in situations that were harming them. Ours sometimes leaves too early, mistaking discomfort for danger. Neither error is more virtuous than the other.

Time poverty and the shrinking of the circle

There is an unglamorous economic reason relationships feel different: people are simply busier and more scattered.

A generation ago, a government clerk finished at two in the afternoon, came home, ate, slept, and sat outside in the evening while children played in the street. Relationships were maintained in that dead time, the unplanned hours when people were merely available to one another.

That dead time has been sold off. It now belongs to a second job, a commute, a side hustle, a phone. Friendship has become an appointment: let's plan something next month. Anyone who has tried to arrange dinner with four working friends knows that the plan will be postponed twice and eventually cancelled by someone's work emergency.

When relationships require scheduling, the circle shrinks. People keep the two or three connections that survive logistics and let the rest thin out into occasional birthday messages. This is not coldness. It is arithmetic.

The Covid years accelerated all of it. Millions discovered that they could work, shop, study and be entertained without leaving a room and also discovered, painfully, what a funeral attended over video call actually feels like. Some people rebuilt their social lives afterwards. Many quietly never did.

It would be a mistake to read all this as decline. Some of the changes are straightforwardly good, and it is worth naming.

A father who hugs his son and says he loves him would have been unusual in 1980 and is now unremarkable. A woman who leaves a violent marriage is now more likely to be supported by her siblings than shamed by them not universally, but far more than before. Grandparents in villages video-call grandchildren in Melbourne and know their faces. Young men talk to each other about mental health in ways their fathers could not.

And beneath every shift of form, the substance has not moved an inch. People still want to be known. They still want someone who notices when they are quiet. They still want to be forgiven for something they are ashamed of. No app, no vocabulary and no generational theory have altered that, and nothing is likely to.

What has changed is only the machinery: who chooses, how we speak, where we live, how fast news travels, how easily we can leave.

If there is a useful conclusion, it is not "technology is ruining us" and not "the old ways were better." Both are lazy.

The more useful conclusion is that relationships used to be held together by external structure; proximity, obligation, community pressure, and lack of alternatives. That structure has largely dissolved. What holds relationships together now is deliberate effort, and deliberate effort is a skill that nobody explicitly teaches.

This means small, unfashionable habits carry more weight than they used to. Calling instead of texting, because a voice carries information a message cannot. Visiting the relative who is difficult rather than the one who is easy.

 

Rabia Khan is a freelance writer and researcher focusing on social issues, gender rights, and current affairs. She can be reached at rabiayousufzai26@gmail.com

All facts and information is the sole responsibility of the writer