Love, language, and gendered expectations

The truth is, we are not always easy to love. We get angry, we fall silent, we miscommunicate. We say things we barely mean, often in the hope that someone will hear our heart even through the fracture of our words. Yet, despite these complexities, love endures because some people choose to stay.

They stay through the silences, through the emotional mazes, and through the moments when we are far from our best selves. This quiet resilience of love, in its most authentic form, is not just a matter of the heart: it is a cultural, gendered, and deeply linguistic phenomenon.

As someone who teaches English language, writing, and sociolinguistics at the tertiary level, I often find myself reflecting on the subtle ways language reveals and distorts emotion. In the field of applied linguistics, we believe that language is more than a medium of communication; we understand that words are performative, identity-shaping: they do things; but they also fail us as, at times, they are painfully inadequate.

How often do we say "I'm fine" when we are anything but? How often do we use silence as a shield, or anger as a misdirected cry for connection? In this sense, the difficulty of being loved is not just emotional; it is also linguistic. Language, shaped by our cultural norms and personal histories, becomes the very battlefield on which love is tested.

In the South Asian context, particularly in Bangladeshi society, the cultural grammar of love is heavily gendered. Women are often expected to be composed, nurturing, and emotionally generous, while men are often culturally afforded a wider range of visible latitude: anger, frustration, and even emotional withdrawal without the same social penalties.

A woman’s emotional assertiveness, however, is frequently labeled as excessive, irrational, difficult, unstable, immature, not at all graceful, or dramatic. This asymmetry in emotional freedom creates a language gap where women are both policed and punished for emotional expression, merely for being true to their authentic feelings…just for being themselves.

Such gendered expectations also extend to who is considered worthy of love. Cultural norms often idealise 'easy' love between the agreeable, undemanding woman, and the emotionally (un)available man: the love that flows frictionless and feminine. But real love, as literature has long shown us, is rarely this linear.

From Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, whose fiercely ethical, morally autonomous, and emotionally complex qualities complicate her romantic trajectory, to Tagore’s emotionally nuanced female protagonists, such as Charulata in Nashtanir and Bimala in Ghare Baire, literature reminds us that complexity does not diminish our worthiness of love; rather, it deepens it.

Love, as these narratives show, does not demand perfection; it calls for recognition, empathy, and an acceptance of the other’s emotional depth.

To love someone who is difficult to love, who contradicts themselves, who carries cultural and personal baggage, who is angry, quiet, or unpredictable: is to perform an act of radical empathy. It is also a subtle act of resistance against a culture that tells us love must always be soft, submissive, all fragrance and flowery, and easily contained.

But true love can never be a reward for perfection; it is a respect to honesty. It challenges the linguistic shallowness of "I’m fine" and instead asks, "How are you, really?" It accepts silence not as absence but as another form of language: a space that needs to be understood rather than filled.

Against a dark sky, all flowers look like fireworks because, without light, nothing blooms; nothing comes to birth. In love, too, our contradictions are not weaknesses—they are what make the bloom visible against the shadows. In this way, real love becomes a form of cultural resistance: it subverts patriarchal expectations, expands the emotional lexicon, and makes space for emotional imperfection.

So yes, may we all find someone who decides to love us, not in spite of our contradictions, but because of them. And may we, too, learn to become that someone: for others, and perhaps, most importantly, for ourselves.

Because love, when stripped of its performance, becomes a space of shared language, mutual permission, and enduring patience. And maybe that’s where all healing begins: in loving without illusion, and choosing to stay—even when it would be easier to walk away.

* Fariha Nowrin is an educationalist. She can be reached at [email protected] / [email protected]