Common Hearts, Common Hurdles: Loving in Small-Town India

This Valentine’s Day, KL Hatke listens to young women from smaller cities and towns as they share what love looks like in their lives. Candid conversations with women who are in love, moving on from love, newly married, or waiting for love. We thought we were beginning with a simple idea: a hopeful story about young love, seen through the lives of young women in Madhya Pradesh and Bihar. But what unfolded was something far more layered, less romance and more reality. There were dreams, of course, and ideas of what love should feel like, what they wanted in a partner, and what a good relationship should look like. But these were not rose-tinted fantasies. They were shaped by the