Dear Indian Woman, You Do Not Have to Be the Perfect Bahu

Anjali Sharma
Working Mom, Founder & Editor of The Balanced Working Mom
Practical, research-led guidance for Indian women navigating marriage, motherhood & work.

She was never a person. She was a job description, and it was written to be impossible.

Dear Indian woman,

Let me tell you about the stupidest thirty minutes of my first year of marriage.

I was awake at ten to six, staring at the ceiling fan, and I did not get out of bed. Not because I was tired. Because I was doing analysis in my head.

If I went down at six, would it look like I was trying too hard? Performing? Dekho, nayi bahu, kitni seedhi hai. If I went down at seven-thirty, would somebody notice? Would it get mentioned on a call to some relative, in a tone I would never hear but would somehow know about?

Six-forty, I decided. Six-forty said responsible but not desperate.

So, I lay there for half an hour, in a house where every single person was kind to me, calculating the socially optimal time to walk down my own staircase.

And then I went down at six-forty and nobody looked up.

Nobody was watching that closely. But I had already installed the watcher.

The perfect bahu is not a woman. She is a job description

You cannot become her. Not because you are not good enough or patient enough, but because she is not a person. She is a list of requirements that contradict each other, and no human being can satisfy a contradiction.

Look at the list properly, just once. Not to get angry. To see the shape of it.

She is modern enough that the family can say proudly, “our bahu works, she is very qualified.” And traditional enough that the working never actually inconveniences anybody.

She has a career, and she is available. Both. On a Tuesday afternoon, mid-call, camera on, when the doorbell rings.

She has opinions, because opinions make her interesting, and she does not express them in front of guests, because that makes her difficult.

She is close to her own parents, because a girl who forgets her mother is a bad girl. And she does not visit them so often that anyone counts.

She adjusts. Fast. And she never once mentions the adjusting, because naming it would suggest it cost her something.

“You cannot be the perfect bahu, because she was never designed to be achievable. She was designed to be aspired to.”

Notice that every item on that list is reasonable on its own. Not one is a monstrous demand. That is exactly why you cannot argue with it. There is no single clause you can point at and say this is unfair.

You can only ever fail the total.

And so, you do the only thing a sincere, hardworking, well-brought-up woman can do with an impossible job description.

You assume the gap is you.

Two women, one house, four extra hours

One piece of research, and then I will leave the numbers alone.

Two economists, Tanu Gupta and Digvijay Singh Negi, did something clever. Instead of comparing women across different households, they looked inside the same one. Same house, same kitchen. And they compared the daughter to the daughter-in-law. Similar age. Similar education. Same four walls.

The daughter-in-law did roughly 245 minutes more housework and care work a day. Four extra hours. She also had less time for paid work, for learning, for friends, for rest.

Sit with what that actually proves, because it is not what you think.

It does not prove anyone in that house is cruel. Those two women eat at the same table and are probably fond of each other.

It proves the four hours are not attached to the woman. They are attached to the chair she sits in.

You could put the warmest, most capable woman in India in that chair and the four hours would still be there. You could marry the daughter into another house and she would inherit them.

I found that genuinely freeing, and I want you to have it. You are not tired because you are secretly bad at this. You are doing an extra half-shift that came printed on the role, and because nobody warned you it was there, you have spent months treating your exhaustion as a character flaw.

It is not a character flaw. It is a workload. And a workload is a thing you are allowed to discuss.

Nobody is grading you. You have hired an examiner

The hardest part of that first year was not the cooking, or the early mornings, or the eleven new names.

It was the background process. That thin, constant hum underneath everything: am I being liked, was that reply too short, did I sound like I was refusing, will this get repeated on the phone to somebody.

I could cook and work and smile through all of it. What I could not do was switch off the auditing. And the auditing costs more than the task does.

So, I started asking myself one question every time the hum began.

Who, specifically, said this?

Who said the tea must be offered twice? Who said you cannot go for a walk on Sunday morning, or back to bed at eleven on a Saturday? Who said this hour, this tone, this smile?

Sometimes I found her. An actual aunt, an actual comment. Fine, real things can be handled.

But most of the time, and I want to be honest about the proportion, I could not find anybody. No instruction, no complaint. Just a rule in my head assembled out of serials and cousins and a hundred overheard sentences about somebody else’s bahu, which I was now enforcing on myself with a strictness no living person in that house had asked for.

I was not being policed. I had volunteered.

“Half the rules you are breaking your back over were never issued. You inherited them, and now you are the one enforcing them.

That is the best news in this letter. A rule that came from outside has to be negotiated with somebody. A rule you installed yourself, you can simply revoke.

And still, no villains

Your mother-in-law was handed this same job description at twenty-two and was not allowed to renegotiate a line of it. Then she survived it, and was praised for it. When she tells you how it is done, she is not attacking you. She is handing you the one strategy she has personally verified works.

Your husband grew up in a house where nobody once asked him to notice what needed doing. He cannot see the four hours, not because he does not love you, but because nobody installed the eyes. (That is fixable, and it is not fixed by hinting — start here.

And your own mother taught you to adjust because adjusting was the safest strategy available in her time, and she wanted you safe more urgently than she wanted you free.

Not one of them woke up planning to make you smaller. Which brings me to the real skill of this chapter, and it is a hard one.

You can decline the job description without prosecuting the people who handed it to you.

You do not need anyone to be the villain in order to change something. Nobody has to be wrong for you to be free.

How to stop trying to be the perfect bahu

I love you like a sister, and sisters do not only speak in poetry. Four things. Pick one and let it be the only one for a month.

1. Trade perfect for consistent: Perfect is not sustainable, and everyone can feel it is not, which is why it does not even buy the security you are hoping for. In the first year you are not adjusting to a household, you are *teaching* one, whether you mean to or not. Every time you do something you cannot keep doing forever, you write it into the expectations. Be slightly less impressive today so you are not resented in year four.

2. Pick your three: Choose three things you will genuinely be good at, because you enjoy them or because they matter to someone you love. Be wonderful at those. Be ordinary at the rest. Let the almirah be untidy. This is not laziness — it is how every competent person operates, and men have done it openly for centuries without apologising.

3. Say the warm no early, and let it be a whole sentence: Not because saying no is empowering, but because a woman who says nothing for three months does not stay neutral. She becomes a woman with a case file, and case files come out sideways, at weddings, in tones. “I would love to, but not this Sunday.” “I need an hour before the house starts.” Now the actual technique, which I wrote about in Becoming a Wife: none of those is rude, and none ends with but it is okay. That trailing phrase is where boundaries go to die.

4. Let him be his family’s son: I treated adjustment as my private project for far too long, negotiating with his mother, about his family’s traditions, alone, while he stood pleasantly in the middle wanting everyone happy. Wrong shape. When he pushes back he is a son being a son; when you push back you are a bahu with an attitude. That is not fair, but it is the room you are in, and you may as well use the furniture. Ten minutes a week, the two of you: what worked, what was heavy, what you are changing.

If this is not adjustment

I have been writing to the woman whose house is kind but crowded, whose family means well in a dialect she has not learned yet. That is most of us.

But some of you are not in a hard adjustment. Some of you are being controlled, demeaned, frightened, hurt, or cut off from your own people. I do not want one woman reading this tonight to think the answer is to be good more convincingly, because a blog told her there were no villains.

Sometimes there are.

If that is your house, this is not your letter, and none of the advice above applies. Please tell one person outside those four walls. You are not being dramatic and you are not failing at marriage. Start there, and come back to me when you are safe.

Come down when you are ready

The perfect bahu does not exist, and even if she did, she would not be loved for it. Being valued for what you provide is a different thing from being loved for who you are, and only one of the two survives a bad year.

The women I have watched become permanently, genuinely loved in their husbands’ families were never the ones who scored highest in year one. They stayed recognisably themselves long enough for everyone to get attached to the actual person — the temper about one particular thing, the job she cared about, the friend nobody had met, the Sunday that was hers. The family learned all of it, grumbled about some of it, and then loved her. Not her output.

“A good bahu and a whole woman are not opposites. But only one of them is being graded, and the grade was never the point.”

So. One small thing, and I will let you go.

Tomorrow morning, come downstairs when you are ready. Not early to prove something. Not late in protest. Just whenever you happen to be ready.

Nobody in that house will notice.

You will.

With you,

Anjali

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FAQs

Why do Indian daughters-in-law feel so much pressure to be perfect?

Because the expectations attach to the role, not the individual. Research inside Indian households found a daughter-in-law does roughly four hours more domestic and care work per day than a daughter of similar age and education in the very same home. Add unwritten rules about timing, tone and availability, and most women end up trying to satisfy requirements that quietly contradict one another.

Is it normal to feel exhausted by my in-laws even when they are kind?

Yes, and it is widely misunderstood. Kindness does not remove the load. Most women describe the heaviest part as the constant self-monitoring — checking how everything looks, sounds, and will be reported — rather than the work itself. Being exhausted in a loving house says nothing bad about you or about them.

How do I set boundaries with my in-laws without being rude?

Be specific, early, and warm. Vague unhappiness invites argument; a small clear request usually does not. “I would love to, but not this Sunday” is a complete sentence and can be said gently. Two things matter most: say it while the issue is still small, and do not tack *but it is okay* onto the end, because that cancels the request.

Should my husband handle his own family’s expectations?

It helps enormously, and most couples realise it late. When a son raises something with his parents he is being a son; when a daughter-in-law raises the same thing she risks being read as difficult. A standing ten minutes a week turns adjustment from a solo performance into a shared project.

Can I be a good daughter-in-law without losing myself?

Yes, but not by aiming for perfect. Consistency serves you better than an impressive first year you cannot sustain, because the first year is when a household learns what your normal is. Be genuinely good at a few things that matter, ordinary at the rest, and protect one habit or friendship that has nothing to do with being anyone’s wife.

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If this letter found you at the right time, I hope you will stay. Here at The Balanced Working Mom I write about marriage, career, motherhood, home, and the quiet transitions nobody prepares us for. If you are still early in this,I Got Married… But Why Did I Feel Like I Was Losing Myself? is the letter most women read first.