Love, Or Something Like It In Love, Or Something Like It, our new Metro.co.uk series, we’re on a quest to find true love. Covering everything from mating, dating and procreating to lust and loss, we’ll be looking at what love is and how to find it in the present day.

As a South Asian, Muslim girl growing up, I was always curious about love. I was brought up on love. I loved the idea of falling in love.

South Asian poets taught me about the kind of love that was expressed in palm trees and mangoes: ‘Drunk on the honey of mango blossoms, the koel rapturously kisses his mate…’ (from Ṛtusaṃhāra by Kalidasa).

No matter who I fall in love with, someone somewhere always has something to say (Picture: Afshan D’souza-Lodhi)

Bollywood films taught me that love and desire could only be portrayed by two flowers lightly brushing up against each other in the wind followed by high-pitch singing and heavy tabla beats.

And my mother taught me about unconditional love: that expectations can lead to disappointments, so it’s better to love fully and love properly and to never expect anything back. Why should we live in disappointment when we can live in love?




But it took me coming out and becoming visibly queer and Muslim to understand that love, for me, is a political act.

No matter who I fall in love with, someone somewhere always has something to say: if I fall in love with a woman, I am gay. If I fall in love with a man, I am straight. If I fall in love with someone who is not Asian then I am a traitor and if I fall in love with someone who is Asian, I am a stereotype.

I am seen as a submissive Muslim girl devoid of sexuality, while simultaneously being sexualised by the western media. I cannot ‘just’ fall in love.

For me to find love I must wade though the homophobes and the Islamophobes and the sexists and the racists and then, maybe, I’ll find someone who will stand beside me during protests and wipe my face when bigots spit on me.

I am a queer Muslim who has had to justify her own existence and am forced to do the same to others every day – just as I cannot simply fall in love, I cannot find love easily.

Even when I manage to step away and not care about the identity labels people give me there are other considerations I have to make, other questions I have to ask.

Will the woman I love be content with not holding my hand in public because I’m scared of being beaten up by homophobes?

Will the man I love stand by my side holding up rainbow flags at Pride parades?

My true love needs to understand that sometimes I want to pray, and sometimes I want to party, and sometimes I don’t want to hate myself for not doing either or doing both.

If the person I fall in love with is from another race, will I have to explain racism to them or can I just give them Reni Eddo Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race and hope that they will understand?

If the person I love is from a different faith, will I have to argue my own God into existence?

To find love, I need to be many different things.

I need to be powerful, for being a Muslim who is desiring is taboo.

I need to be strong, for being queer and loving women may get me beaten up.

For me to find love I must wade though the homophobes and the Islamaphobes and the sexists and the racists and then, maybe, I’ll find someone who will stand beside me during protests and wipe my face when bigots spit on me.

Despite the conditions and labels that other people may put on my love, I will always love (Picture: Afshan D’souza-Lodhi)

Some people are scared that spouting racism will get milkshake thrown on them. Me, I’m scared that loving someone, and showing the world that I love them, will get me killed.



In spite of it all I’d still like to be a romantic. At 27, I still love talking about love and still find myself endlessly swiping left and left (and sometimes right) and then chickening-out before actually meeting anyone.

I have downloaded, swiped, deleted and re-downloaded so many dating apps that I could probably start a review site. But right now, love exhausts me.

Ultimately it is my mothers love that I come back to. The unconditional love for her family, her friends and her work are what keeps me going.

Like my mother, I have a lot of love to give. And I’ve now written and performed too many of my own poems about love and desire for love to just give up on me now.

Despite the conditions and labels that other people may put on my love, I will always love. I will always look for it. And hopefully, one day it will find me too.

Last week in Love, Or Something Like It: I met my husband on a sex website

Write for Love, Or Something Like It Love, Or Something Like It is a brand new series for Metro.co.uk, published every Saturday. If you have a love story to share, email rosy.edwards@metro.co.uk

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