A decade ago, dating anxiety mostly meant wondering whether someone would text back. Now, before a first date has even happened, the group chat has already convened: the friend who checks the profile, another who interprets the red flags and the one who says, with alarming confidence, that it sounds like love bombing. The vocabulary of dating has expanded, but so has the suspicion around it.
Dating apps did not invent uncertainty or mixed signals, but they have made them easier to organise. There are prompts, labels, preferences and debriefs. Romance, once allowed to remain vague for a while, is now expected to explain itself early. Where is this going? Is this a situationship? Am I seeing a pattern? The questions are useful, but sometimes I wonder if we’ve become so good at naming the behaviour that we have lost the patience for the feeling.
Prateek Kuhad has built much of his songwriting around the very opposite impulse. His songs rarely sound like conclusions. They speak to longing, hesitation and the parts of love that do not immediately become clear. His lyrics—‘Do you have a 100 words for me? / ’Cause I have only three’ (‘100 words’); ‘Kho jaane ki zid na karo / Khwaaish hai yeh dil ki’ (‘Tum Jab Paas’); ‘I wish I could leave you my love but my heart is a mess’ (‘Cold/Mess’)—have, for years, given listeners a language for crushes, break-ups, almost-relationships and emotions they haven’t been able to say out loud. Today, Kuhad is one of India’s most recognisable indie voices: tender, self-aware and full of feelings that are easier to sing along to than say plainly.
With his new album Full Moon Chamber, however, the mood feels slightly different. Kuhad is still writing about love, but there is a sense of distance in the way he speaks about it now. As always, he submits to the loss of identity that can follow a break-up, but also makes a case against surrendering too much of yourself to another. “You are your own person,” he tells me as I sit across from him, and I get the feeling that he’s saying this more to himself than to me. “If you accept that and embrace that identity, then nothing else can faze you that much.” Kuhad considers my questions about modern dating carefully, pauses often and answers with the same unhurried quality that runs through his music. He does not rush to condemn apps or defend old-school romance. Instead, he stands somewhere in the middle, which is also where most of his best songs live: between knowing and not knowing, wanting and letting go, saying too much and not saying enough.
Love is as simple as how someone looks at you. If you think about it, it’s very distinctive from how anybody else looks at you and is really where it all starts. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder—so is love.
