I started dating when I was eighteen. Depending on where you come from, that’s either late or scandalously early. For me, it felt like I’d unlocked a secret level of adulthood. I wasn’t just someone’s daughter anymore; I was someone’s girlfriend. There was a thrill in that, it was a tiny rupture in the order of things. But it came with its own bureaucratic anxieties: constant reporting, emotional audits, and a strange sense of accountability that I hadn’t signed up for.

In India, love is a full-contact sport, a public performance, and occasionally, a communal crisis. In a viral Vogue essay titled "Is having a boyfriend embarrassing now?", Chante Joseph proposes the idea of Boyfriend Land in the West. But no one does that quite like India — we're a republic built on spectacle. We live in the land of the Big Fat Indian Wedding, where romance erupts, choreographed to Bollywood soundtracks and parental expectations. Love here is validated only when it’s consumable; something that can be watched, photographed, and circulated.

But before it reaches that glossy stage, it’s surveilled; policed; picked apart.

Ask any Indian woman, and she’ll tell you that her romantic life is a national security issue. The neighbourhood aunties double as RAW agents; your parents run an inquisition every time your phone buzzes after 10 p.m. For many of us, dating is about managing secrecy. (And hooking up at your friends' empty apartments — a girl's gotta eat, after all.) The collapse of public and private means you can’t bring someone home, so you post them on Instagram instead. The soft launch becomes a coping mechanism: a shadowy hand on a steering wheel; two plates at dinner; a half-cropped photo. This isn't 'embarassment'. It's survival.

When we looked at 16 of India’s biggest influencers, over three-quarters were in public relationships. The couple content is polished: manicured hands holding each other, joint skincare routines, and Diwali twinning reels. But behind that gloss is a constant calibration between love as brand equity and love as moral risk.

For most Indian women, dating is a negotiation between agency and acceptability. Class, caste, and religion still dictate who you’re 'allowe'” to love. Date someone outside your community and you’re breaching a social firewall. One of my friends says her parents don't mind her dating, “...as long as it’s someone from our background.” That background, of course, meant the unspoken but deeply entrenched social hierarchies that still shape Indian love stories.

A 27-year-old woman who lives with her boyfriend in Mumbai, told me, “My landlord knows we’re ‘flatmates’. My mother thinks I live with a girl from work. Sometimes I feel like I’m running a PR campaign for my own life.” A twenty-one-year-old recent college graduate says: “My boyfriend and I can’t even hold hands near my house. But he’s all over my Close Friends."

The shame attached to being seen as 'loose' for dating still lingers. In India, you’re either a virgin or a slut. There’s no middle ground. Girls are encouraged to be desirable but not desiring; to be coy, not curious. To post a picture with your boyfriend is to risk being called attention-seeking; to hide him is to risk being called secretive. Either way, you lose.

There’s also something uniquely Indian about how relationships become moral performances. We measure commitment in optics: “Are you serious about him?” often translates to “Will there be a wedding?” Marriage is the final stamp of legitimacy, the state-issued licence for your emotions. Until then, you’re just freelancing in love.

And yet, the irony is that the same culture that shames women for dating young also glorifies their romantic submission once they’re married. The same hands that police your WhatsApp chats will later demand you touch your husband’s feet for blessings. Indian womanhood is designed as a relay of identities: daughter, wife, mother. We’re trained to orbit around someone else’s gravity. Being single — or even being in love on your own terms — short-circuits that system.

That’s why the new ambivalence around boyfriends feels familiar. When Indian women blur their partner’s face online, it’s a small reclaiming of privacy in a country that treats your personal life as public property.

Love in India boils down to boundaries: crossing them, maintaining them, or pretending they don’t exist. At eighteen, I thought getting a boyfriend made me someone. At twenty-one, I realise it made me answerable. That’s the shift we’re seeing: a generation of women tired of being answerable to parents, to neighbours, to lovers, to algorithims.

So is having a boyfriend embarrassing now? Maybe. But only because love, like everything else here, is still a performance. And some of us are just trying to get off stage.

If you enjoyed reading this, here’s more from Homegrown:

Pooja Saxena’s India Street Lettering Zines Are An Ode To India’s Lettering Heritage

We Spoke To Four Homegrown Type Designers About The Modern Revival Of Indic Scripts

Join Type Artist Tanya George For A Day Of Street Typography Across Colaba