I hate you, please love me. This is the internal monologue of a typical Gen Z—we are sparring to be loved. The blatant hypocrisy of a ‘happily’ single woman is exposed in her constant rants about the concept of men. Those who paint a horrible picture of their situationships for friends also keep going back to the same humiliation routine. Then there are those who apply Chanakya Niti in dating life—“If he takes 20 mins to reply, I will take 40.”
I have also been called out for the hater energy I bring to my romantic life. “Tumhara ghar kabhi nahi basega (You can never build a home with someone),” my aunt says whenever I talk about dating. It confuses her how I have such horrid tales to tell about every man I meet. A colleague, who asked for an update on a Hinge boy over lunch, stopped eating at one point to say, “You are actually sounding mean now.” Here I was thinking that my rants about the people I want to like are a sign of my deeper interest in them. My best friend once told me that no girl actually likes her boyfriend. I thought I was one of them.
Think about it: does Sabrina Carpenter not sound endearing when she sings, “I beg you, don’t embarrass me, m***********”? Surely she doesn’t mean the m-word. Having a boyfriend is embarrassing, Vogue has declared. So Carpenter sings about it. On the enemy side—I mean the men’s section—soldiers talk bitterly about women, call them dayans (witches), wish them dead, and want their attention. Gay men famously can’t stop talking about how much they hate other gay men, all while keeping tabs on familiar faces on Grindr. All of us go crazy for a love story with a haters-to-lovers arc.
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Love in the time of Muad’Dibs
Facing a hundred different micro rejections on dating apps builds up enough resentment that it makes people act a certain way. Then these people hear everybody and their moms declare the doom of love on Instagram and become even more jaded. It doesn’t help that world leaders make threats of genocide with the air of a Muad’Dib. Everybody is bad. Then someone shows interest in us, and we hate them for it. I’m not sure whether we hate ourselves more. That’s a question for my therapist.
A Bengaluru-based bride-to-be told me how she “pushed away” her fiancé multiple times when they started dating. The thought of getting attached to him would scare the living daylights out of her. Even after 10 years of being together, she randomly logs into his Instagram account to check if he’s swayed by the fresh attention of a girl online. It’s almost like she expects him to be a jerk who doesn’t love her, actually. As both their families are now planning their wedding, she’s convinced he won’t give her a proper proposal moment. “One day I did feel like he was trying to gauge the size of my finger, but he could just be holding my hand, who knows,” she said. If her fiancé is reading this, please put a rock on her finger already. This woman is dying for it.
Journalist and activist Ash Sarkar said in her podcast, If I May Speak, that we now date like someone going through extended adolescence. “That combination of being super judgemental and critical, but also so sensitive to rejection yourself, that’s being a teenager,” she added. According to a 2025 study from the University of Cambridge, adolescence can last until 32 years of age in Western brains. Who is to deny that the Indian mind is also Westernised in spirit?
Sarkar also said that she would talk like all jaded folks before she found her boyfriend and learned how fun it is to be vulnerable. If they were to break up, she would not die of pain like a silly teen, but only be worried about adult things, like who gets the cat’s custody. As a safety measure, she has put her name down at the vet’s clinic.
This article is part of a series of columns on modern dating in India—the good, the bad and the cuddly.
The author tweets @ratanpriya4. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)