Maqsood, A. (2021). Love as understanding. American Ethnologist, 48(1), 93-104. doi:10.1111/amet.13000

The author reviews marital practices in Pakistan with a focus on understanding in love. Premarital contact between the sexes is discouraged in middle-class Pakistan. Marriage is the prescribed future for all women. Finding the ideal mate without breaking social standards, then, necessitates a deft balancing act between individual goals and desires, as well as between public representations and collective concerns. Young women frequently negotiate these competing needs by forming what they refer to as an understanding—a hidden premarital relationship that they legitimize by involving their family late in the process of organizing an arranged marriage. Understandings, which are deeply embedded in the social life of joint families, are neither an example of resisting patriarchal standards nor of pursuing self-cultivation within them. Instead, they give us a glimpse into the lives of young women as they try to find new ways to do things in a traditional way.