LOVE AS ENJOYMENT: Hopelessness, Play, and Desirable Futures in Ghaziabad, India

Some young middle-class women in Ghaziabad have little hope that love will lead to a desirable future. Therefore, they kindle desire in casual encounters that they describe as “enjoyment” and cultivate a sensibility of living in the moment. Enjoyment departs from love (pyaar) as depicted in mass media like Bollywood that leads to marriage. Instead, through enjoyment, college-attending women move through fantasies of love (pyaar) leading to marriage under conditions of urbanization, the rise of women's education, and pervasive unemployment. In the process, they uncouple flirting and erotic play from its progression to love (pyaar) or marriage. In so doing, women ironically and unintentionally create an alternate form of love (enjoyment). This version of love is playful, creative, and fun. It allows women to access pleasure and to enact a version of love not latched to marriage. By paying attention to these alternate forms of love, this essay shows how women work past the “cruel optimism” of love, reconstituting it as a site for self-affirmation, pleasure, and play.