Between Love and Family: Young Adults' Meaning-Making Around Marriage, Intimacy, and Intergenerational Family Experiences in Pakistan
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.62843/jrsr/v.iii.235Keywords:
Love, Arranged Marriage, Intimacy, Intergenerational Experiences, Reflexive Thematic Analysis, PakistanAbstract
This qualitative study explored how unmarried young adults in Pakistan understand love, marriage, intimacy, family relationships, and intergenerational experiences. Thirty-four participants (10 men, 24 women; aged 19–23 years) wrote experiential narratives of approximately 2,000 words each, in English or Urdu, about their perceptions, observations, family experiences, and expectations of future intimate relationships. Data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006, 2021), which involved familiarization, initial coding, theme development, review, refinement, and construction of an analytic narrative. Five themes were developed: (a) love marriage as an idealized relationship of emotional and personal fulfilment, (b) arranged marriage as family responsibility rather than individual fulfilment, (c) the social cost of choosing love, (d) marriage quality as more complex than the love-arranged dichotomy, and (e) witnessing marital suffering and reconstructing the meaning of marriage. Participants identified emotional availability, communication, respect, loyalty, reciprocity, autonomy, economic independence, and shared responsibility as essential qualities of future relationships, and described relational patterns they wished to recreate, avoid, or rebuild. The findings are discussed in relation to the cultural context of Pakistan and have implications for premarital counselling and family-based interventions
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