Sigmund Freud’s ideas about how we choose partners get talked about a lot, but most people get it wrong. Freud didn’t actually say we want to sleep with our parents. What he was trying to explain is how our early relationships with our parents shape what we look for in people later in life. In his model of childhood development, Freud suggested that during a phase in early years — the phallic stage — kids unconsciously focus on feelings and attachments within the family and work through them as they grow up. That early family dynamic becomes part of our internal map for what feels familiar or desirable in others later.

The qualities we saw, admired, feared, or depended on in them often sneak into the checklist we carry into love. That inherited list — the one we think is fully our own — is the psychological thread running through Aneesa Khan’s short film ‘Criteria Kya Hai?,’ which places this question inside the chaotic, matchmaking world of a South Asian wedding.

In the film, Sabah returns home for her sister’s wedding and walks into that battleground of intrusive relatives, small talk, subtle interrogations, remarks and unsolicited advice. In the middle of this, she receives a package from a relative containing a pair of glasses and a note that says they will allow her to see people’s true colours. Which is something most of us could use in our own homes because South Asian families are rarely direct — there is always some layer of concealment, soft manipulation, or emotional negotiation happening even when it comes from love, whether it’s us trying to tell our parents what we actually want or them trying to gently, strategically make us ‘fall in line’ without ever saying it outright.

For Sabah, the glasses are a way to gauge her mother’s real feelings about the non-Muslim man she’s dating, along with the string of young ‘eligible’ bachelors that she’s introduced to at the wedding, to see how eligible they really are. 

Sabah is already dealing with her own situation. She is dating a man who isn’t Muslim, and the question of whether he should convert is part of the ongoing family conversation. Her parents appear supportive and leave it up to her, but the truth-telling glasses tell another story – of her mother’s long list of criteria for an ideal son-in-law. Men who are presented as stable and respectable reveal themselves to be unfaithful, self-absorbed, casually sexist or emotionally unavailable. The film shows how easily families confuse surface markers like job titles, religious performance, height, and social reputation with character. 

In the film, Sabah ultimately turns the glasses to herself and finds out that she, too, carries assumptions and unresolved expectations about what she wants, many of them shaped by the very family system she is questioning. As teenagers, many of us try to distance ourselves from the entanglement of family influence, building identities that feel separate and independent. Over time, we recognise how deeply that upbringing has influenced our desires, fears and definitions of stability. ‘Criteria Kya Hai?’ uses the setting of a wedding and the mechanics of matchmaking to examine the values that we hold others up to, and how we define love and our needs in a relationshipfor ourselves. 

Follow Aneesa here and watch the short film below:

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