The financial burden on Pakistani men nobody wants to discuss

A data engineer, a Volvo client, and the bit nobody asks about

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Saad Khalid as a particularly close guest — five years a data engineer at Teradata, currently consulting on Volvo Cars. Saad walks through what data engineering actually is in plain language: the architecture behind the personalised ads people receive on their phones, the location data, the call frequency, the buying patterns, and the brand deals that decide which message lands on which screen at which moment. “Basically we are writing computer codes to process the data and use it in a particular way in which the client wants,” he says.

Muzamil cuts the technical thread short, almost on purpose, and pivots: are you married? Saad is not. He is twenty-nine, approaching thirty, and the answer he gives in the next minute is the actual subject of this episode. It is not a clean no. It is the beginning of a feeling he describes as new — a quiet pressure building in his late twenties that was not there a few years ago.

Why marriage in Pakistan has been made so hard

Muzamil reframes the question with care: it almost seems like we don’t want to get married, but social pressure pushes us toward it. Has marriage in Pakistan been made artificially difficult?

Saad’s answer names the mechanism. Society, he argues, has built marriage into a rigid structure that asks the wrong question first. “The first question is always — how much does the boy earn.” From there, a benchmark stack accumulates: salary, stability, a full house, a settled life. Men feel “unaccomplished” until every box is ticked. The benchmarks rise. And the original idea — two people getting together and building a life together — has been pushed to the side. “You have made the structure too rigid,” Saad says. “That is why this thing has become hard.”

The structural critique sits on top of a cultural one. Mixing between genders has been ostracised. Engineering classes have a forty-to-two ratio, Muzamil notes wryly, which means even a hundred-percent success rate leaves most of the room single. University is hostile to the idea of meeting someone. Workplaces do not solve it either. And the alternative — a halal version of dating that respects everyone’s cultural tick marks — does not exist as a legitimate, recognised path.

Saad widens the lens to media. His generation, he says, was the first internet generation in Pakistan, raised on Gossip Girl and Hollywood romance while living in a society where ninety-nine percent of people still consider dating a bad thing. “Our expectations have become quite bad,” he says, “and finding couples has become very difficult.” The result is a confused middle: Pakistanis cannot openly find their own partner, and they cannot fully trust the arranged route either.

Muzamil shares an observation from his own circle. He has watched friends in relationships that were, by every visible measure, good — strong chemistry, real care, years of investment — fall apart not because of the relationship itself but because the conditions around it made the relationship pointlessly difficult. “Eventually,” Saad agrees, “people get messed up.”

The dead-marriages question

The conversation then turns to the talking point Pakistanis hear most often from leaders and uncles alike: our divorce rate is low, theirs is high, our family system is intact. Saad will not let the framing stand. “People say Pakistan’s divorce rate is very low. Have you ever done an analysis of how many dead marriages there are in Pakistan?” The reason divorce stays rare, he argues, is not the strength of the marriages — it is the cost of leaving. “If you are divorced, you are technically marked for life.” Divorced men and women alike, he says, are spoken about in an odd way. The social penalty does the work that the marriage cannot.

Muzamil adds a religious counterweight he finds odd in the Pakistani discourse. Growing up, he was taught that the Prophet married women who had been divorced — an explicit signal that divorce was not a permanent stain. “Somehow,” he says, “in our discourse that thing has been whitewashed.” He recounts a recent message from a woman who had been writing to him as a kind of dear-diary about a marriage where the other party had stopped responding emotionally entirely — and the question she could not answer was simply why she should remain.

The thing nobody says about being a man

The middle of the conversation is the part the episode is named for. Muzamil holds the floor for an unusually long stretch, and the framing is careful.

Discourse around women, he says, has finally given him context for things he could not previously see — and that has been good. But the equivalent conversation about men has not happened in any honest form. The assumption is that the man is in a “special heaven,” whistling along, while a success metric was quietly installed inside his head from childhood: he is the one who has to provide.

He gets specific with his own life. A partner who could earn freed him, briefly, from the constant background hum of provider-anxiety — and only in the silence after it lifted did he register how loud it had been. “When all the noise was shut down,” he says, “and that freedom came to me — I felt this thing I had no idea was even there.” The financial pressure on Pakistani men, he argues, is not a privilege wrapped in inconvenience. It is a real weight. And the discourse does not make room for it.

Saad picks up the thread without missing a beat. Even when a woman earns, he says, the structure punishes the man: in-laws look down on a husband whose wife earns more. “People will say this is a misogynist concept. But this is the reality. You can disagree with it. And this thing genuinely does burden you.” Many men, he adds, delay marriage entirely on these grounds — not because they do not want a partner, but because they have decided they cannot yet provide at the level the structure demands.

Muzamil adds the move he thinks the discourse keeps missing. The man-of-the-house arrangement is treated as a status quo all men inherently support. It is not. When a man flinches from the responsibilities packaged into masculinity, the response is “oh, he is irresponsible, he is still a child.” That framing, he says, is wrong. There are responsibilities attached to being a man, and a lot of men are honestly saying they are not ready to carry all of them as currently defined.

Saad closes the section with the move he has watched repeatedly poison the conversation: imported framings. A Western movement says straight white men complain even though they have everything. The phrase gets lifted and dropped into Pakistan. A Pakistani man who tries to name his pressure gets told he is privileged and should be quiet. “Everyone’s problems are real for them,” he says. “Awareness is needed — your feelings are also valid.”

Thailand, a beach, and the trap of perform-perform-perform

Before they leave the marriage and burden thread, Saad tells the story that anchors his own version of it. His father was army; he was an army brat; his life was defined for him through FSc. He applied to the army, was medically rejected over a sternum issue, took a gap year without direction, and ended up at FAST in computer science largely because someone told him it was good. He nearly failed out the first year. He nearly left.

He stayed because the swimmer who jumps in has to learn to swim. Three or four years of professional life followed with no break. Then a pre-COVID trip to Thailand — his first international trip — sat him on a beach in front of the sea. “I was sitting there and I thought — there is so much more to life. I cannot sit in this fear every moment.” Muzamil names it: fear of failure. Saad confirms it. The rut he describes — perform, perform, perform — is exactly the rut the earlier conversation had been circling. The Thailand beach is the moment he saw it from outside.

Revolution, fascism, and the trap of rooting for the underdog

The conversation shifts into politics through Saad’s reading habits. He talks about Sidney Sheldon, Harry Potter as the gateway, his father’s staff course books, and then — at length — the French Revolution.

The story he tells is precise. France was a great power in the late 1700s. Ordinary people lived in extreme poverty while clergy and monarchy held the wealth — a structure Saad compares directly to Pakistan’s elites and feudals. The people rose. The revolution succeeded. And then, he says, the revolutionary leaders became fascist. The reign of terror was led by people whose original cause had been just. Robespierre rose, the violence widened, the assembly turned on him, he died, counter-revolutionaries arrived to stop the revolution itself. “After studying it,” Saad says, “you start thinking — maybe revolutions shouldn’t happen.”

Muzamil pulls the thread into Pakistan. The country’s left-leaning discourse asks people to support whoever is currently weak. But what is to say that when those parties get power, they will not become fascist themselves? He extends it globally: the same logic that says abandon America for China assumes China will behave better. “I think China is going to do exactly the same thing,” he says. Saad agrees, and brings up Israel as the cleanest case of a population that suffered terribly and then, in power, became the thing it had escaped. The pattern is consistent enough to be a rule: absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The final move in this section is the one that most clearly distinguishes the episode from the standard online debate. Saad argues that the only difference between far left and far right is street power. In the United States, the far left currently has it; the far right does not. The behaviour, given the opportunity, would be the same.

Pakistan is not fascist — it is weak

Muzamil asks Saad directly: is Pakistan a fascist or authoritarian state? Saad’s answer is firm. No. Freedom of speech in Pakistan exists in a way it does not in Saddam-era Iraq or in North Korea, where a journalist who criticises the government disappears the next day. “Fascist” and “authoritarian,” he says, are not words to be thrown around lightly.

Muzamil sharpens the point with a contradiction he finds in the loudest critics. The same voices call Pakistan authoritarian and complain about law-and-order failures in the same breath. “How can a state have a law-and-order issue when it is apparently authoritative?” An authoritarian state controls its populace; Pakistan visibly does not. Saad gives the on-the-ground version: people physically push police officers here. Try touching a police officer in any Western country.

The diagnosis they converge on is different — and more useful. Pakistan is a weak state. Saad gives the Saudi comparison: Mohammed bin Salman could remove the abaya requirement overnight because the Saudi state has the capacity to make a culturally integral decision stick. Pakistan does not. China locked down forty million people at a time during COVID; in Pakistan, parties continued through every lockdown. “The state’s writ is weak. But authoritarian or fascist — I don’t think so.”

Why development in Pakistan keeps getting strangled

The last substantial section is Muzamil’s argument about why nothing moves. Every development creates a loser. The state cannot tell that loser they are the loser this round. The instant the Supreme Court orders an illegal structure removed from a drain, the noise begins: you are crushing the poor. McDonald’s would have been built illegally on the same logic, he notes, but only the cart vendor’s removal becomes a public outrage. The state retreats. The structure stays.

The human rights minister, he says, tweets condemnations of things she is constitutionally responsible for preventing. The state behaves like a spectator. Court decisions get challenged, criminals get bail, every executive action gets reversed on appeal. “It is like a jungle.” The point is not that Pakistan needs more authoritarianism. The point is that the discourse has confused weak governance with overbearing governance, and the two require opposite fixes.

Saad agrees and adds the political-economy version: feudals have not been broken in seventy years. All income still flows to a handful of hands. The structural reform that would actually move Pakistan forward is the reform no party has been willing or able to execute.

Pakistan in 2050 — evolutionary, if at all

Muzamil closes by asking the question he says he asks every guest: what does Pakistan look like in 2050, when Saad will be around sixty?

Saad’s answer is conditional. The potential is real — global industrial shifts, the rise of China, the moment available to the third world. But it depends on whether Pakistan can fix the issues inside its own system. If the bureaucratic stack and the weakness of state governance remain unchanged, nothing else will move.

Muzamil presses on whether the fix should be evolutionary or an overhaul — a new constitution, a presidential system, a clean break. Saad chooses evolution, and for a reason worth holding onto. New systems do not change underlying mindsets. The faces at the top rotate. The people below continue in the same patterns. “Only the faces change,” he says. The harder, slower work is the one that matters.

By the end of the conversation, the title’s question has been answered without ever being phrased as a slogan. The financial burden on Pakistani men exists because a rigid structure asks one party to carry the entire weight of providing, treats the assumption as a preference, and punishes deviation from either side. Naming that, Saad and Muzamil suggest, is the first piece of work. Everything else — marriage, governance, the country in 2050 — sits on top of it.