Kaisar Ahmad Malla
Sometimes the heaviest heartbreaks are not our own, yet they weigh on us as if they were. There is no pain quite like seeing love alive, yet powerless to survive. Pablo Neruda once wrote, “Love is so short, forgetting is so long.”It was meant to describe the ache of parting, the wound of memory. But here, in our Society, towns and villages, forgetting is not the real tragedy, it is watching love end while it is still alive. The saddest goodbyes are no longer caused by fading feelings, they are caused by empty pockets, unemployment and the crushing weight of customs we call “tradition.”
I have seen it too many times. Two people in love, bound not by casual attraction but by years of shared dreams, end up strangers, not because they stopped caring, but because he did not have a job yet, or because her family could not afford the gold, society demands. Love, in our time, has to fight the ugliest enemies: a rising gold rate, inflated dowry lists and an obsession with “status.” Too often, love loses.
Once, it was enough for a man to be good, honest and kind. Now, that is only the beginning of the checklist. The modern suitor must come with a salary slip, a permanent job, a vehicle and preferably his own house. The unemployed lover who may have been there for her when nobody else was finds himself replaced by the man with a government post and a four-wheeler. It is not betrayal, not really. It is a surrender to the practical demands of life and perhaps that makes it even sadder.
I know this pain not just as an observer, but through the heartbreak of someone I call a friend. I have watched him lose the woman he loved, not because their hearts changed but because his employment status did not. I have seen him sit in silence, holding back tears, pretending to be strong while breaking inside. In those moments, you realise you can do nothing except place a hand on his shoulder and whisper empty consolations, knowing they will never fill the void. This is one of the saddest things one can ever witness, a love story collapsing, not under the weight of mistakes but under the burden of an empty wallet. And sometimes, these wounds cut so deep they push young men into darkness, depression, drug addiction, even suicide.
A father of a daughter lives with a quiet dread. He knows that her marriage will not be measured by her happiness but by the number of copper utensils, the size of the bed furniture, whether the washing machine is automatic or semi-automatic and whether the feast was “grand enough” for relatives to boast about. Many fathers sell their land, break their lifetime savings, or borrow money they cannot repay, all to avoid the shame of being labeled “inadequate” by neighbors who will forget the wedding within a week.
The boys suffer in their own way. They work, save and still fall short as prices climb beyond their reach. Gold rates rise, inflation eats away at their earnings and the dream of buying jewellery for the bride becomes a painful joke. Without a steady income, they watch the woman they love walk away, not because she wants to, but because her family insists she needs “security.”
We do this to ourselves. We turn a marriage meant to be a blessing into a public performance. We measure respect by the weight of the gold, the size of the feast and the make of the car. We drain our savings and sometimes sell the very land that feeds us, just to protect “status” in a society that will still find a reason to gossip. And all the while, we ignore what Islam has taught us: that the best marriage is the simplest one and that a union built on faith is far stronger than one built on furniture and copper.
The cruelest heartbreak is not when two people stop loving each other, it is when they still love each other deeply but cannot be together because the world around them put a price tag on their union. That is what delayed marriages do, they take away not just time, but chances and eventually hope. They make love a privilege of the financially stable, not a right of the human heart.
We are losing more than love. We are seeing marriages pushed so late that infertility rates climb. Medical science tells us that delayed marriages lead to reduced fertility, yet our customs push couples into that very trap. By the time they are “financially ready, ”their biological clock has ticked away their best years. What was once a dream of laughter-filled homes becomes a silent ache, a reminder that love delayed can sometimes be love denied, not just to each other, but to the children they never had. We are watching young people’s mental health collapse under the weight of expectations. We are eroding community bonds and replacing compassion with competition. And we are forgetting our faith’s call to make marriage easy, not impossible.
The truth is harsh, until we unshackle ourselves from these customs, love will continue to bow before employment, gold prices and dowry demands. And perhaps, in this age, the longest kind of forgetting is not about moving on from love, it is learning to live in a world that would not let it survive.
If we do not break these chains now, we will be remembered as the generation that traded love for furniture, copper and a false sense of status. one day, when the feasts are forgotten and the furniture gathers dust, we will realize we traded something priceless for things that were never worth it.
(The author is a health worker and can be reached at [email protected])
