Love should not be synonymous with sacrifice.

Now, that is such a loaded statement, and we need to unpack so much here. Let’s start with love.

What is love? How do you define it in this context? Let me attempt it.

Anything or anyone or any idea that excites you and makes you look forward to experiencing it, is love. So that love could be towards a partner, kids, a business idea, a career, or even a hobby. Anything that stirs passion within you is love.

And sacrifice?

Sacrifice is when you unwillingly or reluctantly, let go of who you are. Who you want to be. What gives you joy. What makes your life worth living. Where you want to be.

But I do not think sacrifice begins in adulthood. It begins much earlier.

When my mother came back from school, she would put rice on the stove before going off to change her clothes. When my father came back from office, we offered him water after he had put his work shoes away and washed his hands. I never remember offering a glass of water to my mother. Guess I was never conditioned to do that.

Nobody sat me down and explained this or asked me to behave a certain way. Nobody said your father is tired in a way your mother is not. Nobody said one person comes home to rest while the other comes home to continue. But children do not always learn through instruction. They learn through rhythm. Through repetition. Through what is done so routinely that nobody even thinks of questioning it.

Three decades later, my husband and I come back from office, he switches on the AC to relax after changing into casual clothes while I rush into the kitchen to put on dinner or the kettle for evening tea, depending upon the time.

It is not about my parents. Or about us. It is about the way society has managed to remain where it was three decades ago. That is why I often say that the so-called changes w.r.t. gender equality are skin deep. Scrape the surface and you see the old expectations festering away.

Yes, women are working now. Earning now. Leading now. Travelling for work now. Running businesses now. Sitting in boardrooms now. But who puts the rice on the stove when they come back home, in most of the families?

That answer to that question will tell you more about change than any slogan about empowerment ever will.

Just sending women out into the workforce is not sufficient. We as a society need to accept it from the heart. And mind you, when I say society, I mean both men and women. I need to say this explicitly because often it is assumed that when I talk about unequal behaviour towards women, it is men who perpetrate it. But nothing could be further from the truth.

Women are often more in a position of authority to perpetuate it. Not always, but often enough. Because they are the ones who were trained in the same system. They absorbed the same rules. They survived the same expectations. And many of them, knowingly or unknowingly, pass those expectations on to the next generation as wisdom, discipline, duty, tradition, or love.

That is how sacrifice gets normalised.

That is how it becomes culture.

That is how it stops looking cruel and starts looking respectable.

We need to pause and reflect on this. Not every act of giving is sacrifice. Not every inconvenience is sacrifice either.

If you would rather go watch a movie than accompany your partner to a soccer game, but you still go for soccer because you know it matters to them, that may simply be love. Or compromise. Or flexibility. Relationships need those things. Families need those things. No two people can stay together for years and always choose exactly the same things at exactly the same time.

But the picture changes when one person is always the one adjusting. When one person’s preferences are always the easiest to dismiss. When one person’s tiredness is invisible. When one person’s rest is treated like a luxury.

Because that is when compromise slowly turns into sacrifice.

Getting up at 5 AM to prepare lunch for everyone despite coming back home at 11 the previous night from a work trip. That is sacrifice.

Attending an investor meeting when you would rather be at your partner’s dance recital is sacrifice.

And no, the tragedy is not always that someone made the wrong choice. Sometimes there is no good choice. Sometimes there is only a collision of roles, responsibilities, and expectations. But when I look at these examples, I realise that sacrifice is when you lose your choice, whatever the reason.

That loss of choice is the real wound.

Because once you lose choice often enough, you stop even noticing that you had one.

I often think of that story about Indra Nooyi’s mother telling her to leave her crown in the garage before entering the house as a wife, mother, and daughter-in-law. I agree with part of it. Titles should not make anyone arrogant. Success at work should not turn us into tyrants at home.

But I also wonder how someone can leave their body, mind, and soul behind. Because when you are working, a bit of those get chipped away. You need to rejuvenate and nourish them back to be ready for the grind the next day. So what better place to do this than at home?

Home, ideally, should be where your tiredness is understood without explanation. Where your labour is not measured only by what you produce for others. Where care is not demanded from you before it is offered to you.

Unfortunately for many women, it is not a luxury they can take for granted.

And that is the real issue.

Not that women are incapable of sacrifice. Women have demonstrated that for generations.

The issue is that sacrifice is still expected of them so casually that it is mistaken for character.

If she is a good wife, she will adjust.

If she is a good mother, she will manage.

If she is a good daughter-in-law, she will not complain.

If she is ambitious, she will still make sure nobody else feels the weight of her ambition at home.

If she is exhausted, she will recover quietly and quickly.

And if she does all of this without resentment, then she is celebrated.

But should love really require that?

Should family?

Should success?

Should a woman keep proving her worth through depletion?

I do not think love should make you smaller. It should not repeatedly ask you to abandon your needs, your rest, your desires, your pace, your joy, and then call it maturity. Love may ask for patience. It may ask for inconvenience. It may ask for flexibility. It may even ask, once in a while, for deep and painful choices.

But if it consistently asks for self-erasure, then something is wrong. Very wrong. Because love should expand life, not reduce it to duty. It should make room for your humanity, not demand performance from it. It should not rest so comfortably on your exhaustion.

Because in the end, the real question is not whether women can carry more.

They can. They always have.

The real question is why love, family, and society still feel so entitled to ask it of them. And until that changes, we will keep glorifying sacrifice while calling it love.