The Female Loneliness Epidemic: When A Socially Unwell Culture Prioritizes Marriage And Romantic Love

It’s not every day that a radical feminist agrees with Sahil Adeem, and by some sick prank of nature, today is that day.

A clip of the motivational speaker is reportedly going viral in which he says Pakistani women are “more accessible than cats.” As a woman in my mid-20s, I find myself agreeing with him.

He says it used to be hard to marry a woman. I don’t believe it was ever hard to get married, because all you had to do was call your mom to find you a spouse. What I keep asking is why women are still getting played in an era when we are fully aware that we have high standards. Here are the reasons that come to my mind.

1. The Upsurge in Romance Consumption

As Pakistanis consume foreign media, they are introduced to foreign standards of love and sex. With the rise of romance and “spicy” books, and the general notion of “a man written by a woman,” the story twists into an ordinary woman being loved fully, inside and out. But the setting of this media is not the poverty-stricken, patriarchal, soul-killing Pakistani society, so it results in shallow, unrealistic or uninformed “standards.” It’s like wanting to bake a cake without knowing how to bake a cake. We end up with “high” standards that have no real merit or value behind them, and it’s easy for predatory men, who consume the same content, to use women’s limited knowledge and loneliness to their advantage.

2. Devaluing Female Friendships

Our culture devalues friendship of any kind. For both men and women, it’s common to say you have no time for friends while in a romantic partnership, especially after marriage. Society itself devalues female friendship by not acknowledging it as necessary, or by infantilizing it. Women are often not allowed by their parents to meet up with their female friends, the same parents who marry them off to strangers with no problem.

3. Fear of Loneliness

Because the culture devalues friendship and glorifies marriage, friendship naturally isn’t fulfilling to a Pakistani woman, both because marriage is glorified and because she is forced into isolation from her female friends. To a Pakistani woman, not being married is synonymous with dying alone. In her early to mid-20s, she watches her friends get married, envious, and panics about her own future, because marriage in Pakistan is seen as a secure future, owing to the long history of women not being financially secure. The fear of financial insecurity we held for generations now translates into a fear of loneliness. Our marriage structure is built purely on economics, and layering the newfound financial security and the prioritization of romance on top of it is damning for our culture.

4. Marriage as a Life Stage, and the Fear of Singledom

Even with women getting closer to financial equality with men, marriage is still seen as mandatory. Combined with the previous three points, the reason becomes “marrying for companionship,” while marriage remains an essential life stage, especially one to be fulfilled in your 20s. Our culture contributes to it, with families viewing marrying off daughters as a responsibility to be completed, cementing the fear of singledom.

What Marriage Doesn’t Protect Women From

The irony is that the “secure future” marriage promises is often where the danger is. According to the UN Population Fund, 28 percent of Pakistani women aged 15 to 49 have experienced physical violence, and 6 percent sexual violence. And the most recent numbers show that nothing has improved:

3,172 cases of gender-based violence were reported in the first six months of 2026, according to the NGO Sahil’s Six Months Cruel Numbers Report, including 644 murders, 462 abductions, 280 rapes and 132 so-called “honour” killings
In 13 percent of cases the alleged abuser was the victim’s husband, and 27 percent were acquaintances. Punjab accounted for 74 percent of all cases
More than half of the reported incidents occurred inside the victims’ own homes
Punjab police registered 20,114 cases of crimes against women in just the first half of 2026, including 940 gang-rape cases
In 2022, 395 women in Punjab were killed in domestic violence and 176 for “honour,” and only 4 percent of gender-based violence cases ended in a conviction

Sahil’s figures come from media monitoring, so the real numbers are almost certainly higher. A woman who panics about dying alone is being told, in effect, to trade one risk for another.

The Bottom Line

At the end of the day, I shudder to agree with Sahil Adeem, because he is right that society treats an unmarried woman as a sin in Pakistan. The statistics for domestic violence, rape and honour killing remain as high as ever. Men really do get married very easily, and as a radical feminist, it’s baffling to me that a “good” man is held to the same standard as a below-average female friend.