Settled Doesn't Mean Married

Mental health & culture · By Anushka Phal  ·  Umeed Psychology

On the pressure to "settle down," the quiet grief it causes, and why your fulfilment gets to look different from your parents' plan for you.

Let's set the scene. You're at a family gathering. You've barely finished chewing your first samosa when it happens. A aunty you haven't seen in four years locks eyes with you across the room, does a quick ring-finger check, and asks the question that haunts your very soul: "So, beta- when are you settling down?"

You smile. You deflect. You eat another samosa. And somewhere in your chest, a small, tired part of you sighs.

If you're South Asian, you know this scene intimately. It's practically a cultural rite of passage - right up there with being told to become a doctor and having your academic results announced at the dinner table like a sports score. The "settling down" conversation is baked into the fabric of how many of our families understand success, safety, and love. And if you've spent any time sitting with a psychologist (hi, that's me), you'd know it also quietly underpins a whole lot of anxiety, depression, identity confusion, and grief.

So let's talk about it. With warmth, with honesty, and without throwing our parents under the bus - because frankly, they were just doing their best with what they knew.

Why our parents believe what they believe

Here's the thing about the aunties and uncles and grandparents who ask about your relationship status before they ask how you're actually doing: they're not being malicious. They're operating from a map that was drawn in an entirely different world.

For many of our parents — and their parents before them — marriage wasn't just a romantic choice. It was economic survival. It was community standing. It was protection, particularly for women, in societies where your access to housing, healthcare, social status, and basic security was directly tied to whether you had a spouse. The family unit wasn't a lifestyle preference; it was the infrastructure through which life happened.

Migration added another layer. When you uproot your entire life to move to a new country — as so many of our parents and grandparents did — community becomes everything. The extended family network, the shared cultural rituals, the bonds forged through arranged introductions and wedding celebrations? These were the scaffolding that held people together in unfamiliar places. "Settling down" wasn't just about love. It was about belonging. About continuity. About not disappearing into the anonymity of a country that didn't entirely know what to do with you.

"They built their safety from the outside in — security first, fulfilment later, if at all. It's not that they didn't want happiness for you. It's that happiness looked different when survival was the baseline."

Understanding this doesn't mean accepting it uncritically. But it does mean we can hold our frustration alongside compassion — which, as it turns out, is much healthier than just holding the frustration on its own.

When inherited expectations meet modern lives

The problem is this: the world our parents' expectations were built for no longer exists — at least not in the same form. And yet the expectations persist, sometimes intensifying across generations, becoming less about genuine care and more about cultural habit. About what it looks like. About what people will say.

Meanwhile, many of us are navigating entirely different realities. We have careers that require years of building. We're grappling with student debt, housing markets that laugh in our faces, and a global mental health crisis that nobody really prepared us for. We're coming to understand ourselves in ways our parents never had language for — our neurodivergence, our queerness, our complex relationship with cultural identity, our need for more than just stability.

We want meaning. We want to feel like ourselves. We want to build something that actually reflects who we are — not just tick the boxes that signal to the community that we've done the right things in the right order.

And when those two worlds collide — your actual life and your family's script for it — the friction doesn't just cause awkward samosa moments. It causes real, clinical-level distress.

The mental health cost nobody talks about

In my clinical work, I see this pattern constantly. A person in their late twenties or thirties, high-achieving, deeply caring, often the first in their family to prioritise their own wellbeing — sitting across from me (or on my screen, hello telehealth) with anxiety that's been running at a low hum for so long they've started to think it's just their personality.

When we dig into it, there's almost always a version of this underneath: a persistent, internalised belief that they are not yet enough. That the life they're building — which might be genuinely rich and purposeful and joyful — is somehow incomplete because it doesn't match the picture their family holds.

This shows up as anxiety — the constant background noise of "am I running out of time?" It shows up as depression — a flatness that comes from spending years living for an imagined future rather than your actual present. It shows up as a fractured sense of identity — not quite knowing who you are outside of the roles you've been assigned. And it shows up as grief — a very real, very quiet grief for a version of yourself that was never allowed to fully exist.

None of this is dramatic or unusual. It's incredibly, heartbreakingly common. And most people carrying it have never had anyone name it out loud for them.

"You are not broken for wanting something different. You are not selfish for prioritising your own sense of meaning. And you are absolutely not 'unsettled' just because your life doesn't look like it did in your parents' wedding album."

What "settled" could actually mean

Here's my reframe, and I offer it gently: what if settled meant something internal, rather than external?

What if settled meant knowing yourself well enough to make choices that actually fit you? What if it meant having community — in whatever form that takes — where you feel genuinely seen? What if it meant work that connects to something you care about, a home that feels like yours, relationships (romantic or otherwise) where you don't have to perform a version of yourself that was designed for someone else's comfort?

A fulfilling life is not one-size. It never was. Some of us will find deep joy in partnership and family. Some of us will build meaning through creative work, community service, or chosen families that look nothing like a traditional household. Some of us will do all of the above, just not in the order the aunties had in mind. And all of that — all of that — is legitimate.

The research backs this up, by the way. Happiness and wellbeing are strongly tied to autonomy, meaningful relationships, and a sense of purpose — not to marital status. The version of "success" that gets handed down through generations is often more about social signalling than it is about genuine flourishing. Which means we have not just the right, but honestly the responsibility, to author our own version.

Navigating this with your family (and yourself)

I'm not going to tell you it's easy. It's not. Disappointing people you love, or feeling like you have, is genuinely painful — even when you know, intellectually, that you're living your truth. Cultural renegotiation is hard work, and it rarely happens in a single conversation. Often it's slow, iterative, and requires you to tolerate a lot of discomfort before anything softens.

But a few things I've seen help: getting clear on what you actually want, separate from the noise. Building a community around yourself that reflects your values. Finding support — a good therapist, culturally responsive ideally (yes, I'm biased, but also correct) — to process the grief and the guilt that often come with choosing differently. And practising compassion for your family without collapsing into their expectations. You can understand where they're coming from and still say, lovingly, this isn't my path.

You are allowed to want a life that feels alive to you. You are allowed to define your own version of thriving. And you are — I promise — enough, exactly as you are, at every stage of the journey.

Even with the samosa still in your hand.

#SouthAsianMentalHealth #CulturalIdentity #Anxiety&depression #FamilyDynamics #Fulfilment