THIS year, I turned 30, and I felt proud of what I had built. But it also made me wonder: why does this milestone evoke dread for so many single women, instead of pride? Economic reasoning offers one way to understand and rethink this.

‘Prospect theory’, developed by Kahneman and Tversky, suggests that we evaluate our lives relative to social benchmarks rather than in absolute terms. In South Asia, where early marriage remains the dominant norm, that reference point is often fixed well before 30. Research using Pakistan Demographic and Health Surveys (Rasul et al., 2022) shows that age at first marriage varies systematically with education, region and socioeconomic characteristics, reflecting social norms around timing. The result is a quiet mismatch: lives that are objectively progressing are often experienced as falling short. Part of the answer lies in how slowly social norms adjust to changing realities. As Douglass North shows, social norms are often path-dependent and persist even as conditions change. In Pakistan, this lag is visible: while women’s education has increased over time, their labour force participation remains below 25 per cent, according to the Labour Force Survey 2024-25. This creates a disconnect — women’s lives........

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