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{Masterlist}

-an excerpt

yes, the hockey players are attractive.

but what actually makes them stand out is the emotional maturity.

the respect. the communication. the emotional safety.

maybe that's the real fantasy.

not perfection.

being chosen, respected and cared for.

because how someone treats you will always matter more than how they look.

love & positivity ✨ phi

Men mourn their mothers’ neglect, then recreate the same neglect in their marriage

Recently, a reel by a comedian has been circulating widely on social media. In the clip, he jokes about the familiar accusation that men are “mama’s boys.” The punchline arrives when the girlfriend says, “I left my home for you,” and he responds, “My mother left her home forty years ago.”

The audience laughs. The moment lands. The reel goes viral.

But for many women watching, the joke did not feel like comedy.

It felt like a reminder of something we had watched our entire lives.

But what makes the joke uncomfortable is not the humour. It is the recognition. Many people laugh because the sentiment feels familiar - almost instinctively acceptable.

Yet the joke reveals something far deeper about how relationships are structured in many Indian families.

Because hidden inside that punchline is an assumption we have all grown up hearing in different forms: our mothers sacrificed more, therefore every woman should.

The problem is not that men love their mothers. Loving one’s mother is natural, human, and necessary.

The problem is what that love becomes in practice.

In many Indian households, our mothers entered marriage by leaving everything familiar behind - their homes, their routines, their families, and often their ambitions. But when they arrived in their new households, they rarely became the emotional centre of their husband’s life.

Instead, many of our fathers simply continued the structure they had grown up watching.

Their own mothers remained the first priority.

The wife adjusted around that reality.

Anyone who has grown up in an Indian household has seen quiet versions of this dynamic play out in everyday life.

A mother waiting to eat until everyone else has finished.

A father asking his mother what should be done, even in matters that directly affect his wife.

A woman waking up before everyone else in the house and sleeping after everyone else is done.

A disagreement that ends with the phrase: “She is older. Adjust.”

These moments rarely appear dramatic. They rarely look like cruelty.

But slowly, over years, they establish something powerful: a hierarchy of emotional importance.

And our mothers learned exactly where they stood within it.

They adjusted. They absorbed. They endured.

Over time, endurance itself became the measure of virtue.

We grew up hearing it casually: She has sacrificed so much.

But we rarely asked why that sacrifice was necessary in the first place.

Often the truth was uncomfortable but simple.

Our mothers were not the emotional priority of their husbands.

So they built their emotional world somewhere else.

In us.

When a woman spends years in a marriage where she is not fully seen, where her loneliness remains unspoken and unresolved, her children naturally become the centre of her emotional life. Her hopes, her tenderness, her sense of purpose begin to revolve around them.

And children notice this; even when nothing is explicitly said.

We see our mothers waiting for attention that rarely arrives.

We see them quietly stepping back when our fathers prioritise their own parents.

We see the small disappointments that no one acknowledges.

But children cannot repair their parents’ marriage.

So they do the only thing they can.

They love their mother fiercely.

For sons especially, that love often carries an unspoken promise: to make up for everything she never received.

At first glance, this looks like devotion.

But what happens next is where the cycle quietly begins.

Instead of recognising the imbalance their mothers lived through and ensuring that their own marriages are different, many men recreate the same structure - only with reversed emotional loyalty.

Their mother becomes the unquestioned priority. Because of her sacrifices and the neglect from her own husband.

The wife is expected to adjust.

The hierarchy remains intact.

The loneliness simply moves to a different woman.

When a girlfriend or wife says, “I left my home for you,” she is not competing with the mother. She is expressing something deeply vulnerable: the hope that the relationship she has entered will offer partnership, emotional safety, and mutual priority. Something her mother never received in her marriage.

But the response she often receives invokes the mother’s sacrifices as a benchmark.

My mother endured even more.

In that moment, sacrifice stops being a warning about what went wrong in the previous generation.

It becomes a standard the next woman must live up to.

That is why the comedian’s joke resonates with so many people. It reflects an idea already embedded in our cultural imagination: that a woman’s suffering proves her virtue.

In this framework, a “good woman” becomes someone who absorbs neglect without complaint.

If she asks for emotional partnership, she is demanding.

If she prioritizes her own happiness, she is selfish.

If she refuses to silently endure, she is disrespectful.

And so the pattern continues.

Our mothers’ sacrifices are praised but rarely examined. Sons grow up admiring those sacrifices without questioning the marriage that required them. When they marry, they often carry forward the same emotional structure - believing they are honouring their mothers while unknowingly recreating the same conditions that once hurt them.

The neglect that shaped our mothers’ lives does not disappear.

It simply shifts generations.

What began as one woman’s loneliness quietly becomes a family tradition disguised as values.

Breaking this cycle does not require men to love their mothers less.

It requires recognising that the sacrifices of previous generations should not become expectations for the next.

If anything, those sacrifices were meant to teach us what should never have been normal.

If a man truly honours what his mother endured, the most meaningful tribute would not be glorifying her suffering.

It would be ensuring that the woman he marries never has to experience the same quiet loneliness.

Because the real tragedy is not that our mothers sacrificed.

The real tragedy is that we watched those sacrifices all our lives - and still built marriages that require them.

And perhaps that is the uncomfortable truth hidden behind the joke.

Many men do not marry their wives.

They simply continue their mothers’ marriages.