Unhappily Ever After: Self-Knowledge, Living and the Reluctance to Divorce in Contemporary Middle-Class Pakistan

Abstract

This article centres on the emotional self and its relationship with the wider structures that it inhabits to understand why middle-class Pakistani women stay in unhappy marriages. While the reluctance to divorce in this setting is often understood as ‘conservatism’, I argue for an understanding that acknowledges how the structures of and repertories around marriage – even when it is unhappy – are anchoring in that they generate emotions, logics and sets of reciprocity and affective ties that make life comprehensible and for a coherent sense of self to emerge. Through a focus on the sharing of stories of marital unhappiness as an ‘emotional practice’, I uncover how the emotions elicited and generated through these narrations guide women and anchor the self, offering an interpretation of what has happened, a way of making meaning of circumstances and, most importantly, a recognition of the labour and endurance through which they have built their lives. Many of the narrative and rhetorical motifs that women draw on in these contexts are those of a self that is subsumed in service to patriarchal family structures. Yet the cumulative self-recognition that emerges through these narratives is of a self that exceeds these normative categories, even as it is dependent on them.