‘They Never Even Thought About Me’

Loneliness, Tanhai and Empathic Dissonance in the Lives of Never-Married Muslim Pakistani Women

Abstract

For never-married women resident in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, the tendency is for their life-stages, needs and desires to be cultivated under the care of their natal families. These women are not physically isolated; neither do they consider the relationships with their natal families as meaningless. However, proclamations of tanhai – a situated form of loneliness – are still evident in their narratives. What does it mean to undergo tanhai while still remaining embedded in the everyday relationships within one’s natal household? Based on 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted with 23 never-married female Pakistani Muslims in Rawalpindi, and through a phenomenological approach, I proclaim tanhai to be a form of subjective affliction. Moral breakdowns within the web of kin relations contribute to differential forms of temporal striving among individual family members, leading to intersubjective empathic dissonance. For upper middle-class never-married women, this dissonance contributes to temporal manifestations of emotional introspection on existing intersubjective dynamics, leading to tanhai.