Adolescent Girls and Love in Unequal Contexts

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In her PhD thesis, ‘Girls’ Constructions of Love in Dating Relationships: A Narrative Study in a Rural KwaZulu-Natal Secondary School’, Dr Nonhlanhla Dube reads adolescent romance not as innocence, but as a socially produced language shaped by inequality, expectations, and survival. 

Supervised by Professor Relebohile Moletsane and Professor Daisy Pillay, the study reveals that love is not only spoken about in whispered conversations and teenage diaries, but learned, performed and sometimes dangerously mis-learned - in homes, churches, peer groups and everyday gendered life.

One participant’s voice captures the emotional intensity that frames much of this learning: “Every time you see him, it makes you feel like you could melt. And when he touches you, you just feel like you are entering heaven.”

Another reflects how affection is often measured materially, saying: “She appears to be really loved because her boyfriend is really taking good care of her. That is why I say this girl is really loved… she gets everything she wants.”

Across these accounts, Dube identified six overlapping ‘discourses of love’: love as beauty and feeling; material care; emotional belonging; loyalty and jealousy; virginity and reproduction. Each is not merely descriptive - it is instructive, shaping how young people imagine futures, relationships, and even self-worth.

Love, in this setting, is also deeply tied to recognition and identity. One girl explained: “A girl deserves to be treated like a queen so that she can’t have doubts about her relationship.”

Another adds the emotional surveillance embedded in modern intimacy: “He phoned me all the time, even checked up on how I was, even when I went to sleep.”

Yet beneath these expressions of affection lies a sharper structural reality. The thesis argues that these constructions of love can render girls vulnerable to gender-based violence (GBV), particularly where affection is tied to provision, loyalty, or control. Material care, for instance, may open pathways to age-disparate relationships, including so-called ‘sugar daddy’ dynamics, where agency is constrained by economic dependence.

Dube situated these findings within a wider global frame. Similar patterns, she noted, appear across contexts such as Japan and Canada, where gendered expectations, household labour divisions and fears of violence continue to shape girlhood. The implication is unsettling but important: rural KwaZulu-Natal is not an exception, but part of a wider global architecture of unequal gender socialisation aligned with broader development concerns, including Sustainable Development Goal 5 (SDG 5) on gender equality.

Community narratives also reveal how traditions and expectations intersect with aspirations. One participant describes the cultural celebration of virginity. “I also love this umemulo a lot, as that is when you can showcase virginity as a girl.”

Another frames love through future motherhood. “In him, I see a father of my children because of the amount of love he shows to me.”

What emerges is not simply romantic imagination, but social scripting where marriage, fertility and respectability remain central markers of ‘successful’ girlhood.

Yet the study is not only diagnostic. It also reveals moments of unexpected agency. When asked how GBV could be addressed, participants proposed community education, stricter policing of taverns, self-defence training and stronger parenting structures. Some even suggested extreme measures against perpetrators, an alarming but telling reflection of how normalised violence has become in their environments.

At the same time, Dube notes moments that unsettled her own assumptions. Modern rural girlhood, she reflected, now includes aspirations shaped by media exposure. “I was stunned to learn that young rural schoolgirls had expectations of being pampered through being taken to a spa by their boyfriends.” Even more striking were aspirations influenced by television narratives, including fantasies of criminal glamour, illustrating how global media enters local imagination in complex and sometimes troubling ways.

Ultimately, her study indicates that these patterns cannot be understood without the “agents of socialisation” that surround girls daily. Families, peers, schools and communities, sometimes even as sites of harm, shape how love is understood and enacted.

Dube asserts that meaningful change requires more than awareness campaigns. It demands a co-ordinated response across families, schools, NGOs, and law enforcement, one that engages young people not as passive recipients of norms, but as participants in reimagining them.

In these rural narratives, love is never just emotion. It is instruction, expectation, risk and, sometimes, resistance.

Words: Rakshika Sibran

Photograph: Sethu Dlamini