here was a time love used to wait outside girls’ college gates; or outside homes with low walls. Or even outside the kind of narrow street where everybody knew everybody. One wrong glance could travel faster than the Sunday paper. A message carried risk along with it like a postage stamp. It had to be folded, hidden, carried and trusted to someone who would not make it a joke... like a younger cousin, a neighbourhood child, a sister who was “only dropping something off.”

That was how love moved through the city... discreetly, quietly and with help.

Sometimes it lived in the waiting itself. A girl would come out of college and know, without looking too directly, who had been there again. A boy would take the longer way home, as if by accident. A little bit of distance made everything more intense. Lahore gave love enough corners to hide in, but never enough privacy to be alone.

Then the city changed its language.

Now love begins with a “follow” request or a message typed, deleted and typed again. What used to be passed hand to hand now arrives on a screen, bright and immediate. It still manages to feel uncertain. There is no cousin in the middle anymore, no trusted child running between houses, no folded note to hold in your palm and re-read until the paper softens. There is only the pause after “seen,” the familiar ache of being left unread, the strange modern humiliation of appearing available and still feeling ignored… This is no longer an occasional cruelty either; studies suggest that nearly two-thirds of people have both ‘ghosted’ someone and been ‘ghosted’ themselves, making this uncertainty less of an exception and more of a shared experience.

The old Lahore has not disappeared entirely.

It is still there in Liberty Market in Gulberg, where people go to buy things they do not need and end up buying time instead. It is there in Barkat Market in Garden Town, where the streets are busy enough to hide a meeting but familiar enough to make it feel like one.

These places have always been more than markets. They are where people arrive earlier than needed, linger too long, and pretend, badly, that they are only there for an errand. Notoriously called ‘date points,’ one can choose sweetness and call them spots of endearing teenage romance.

Even Lahore’s most private stories seem to need an audience, or at least a setting, like a tea stall, a college gate or a connected rooftop. In an alley a motorbike would stop for no reason at all, looking for a special passerby. In this city, a romance can begin in a glance and survive on very little: a daily route, a message sent late at night. A corny admirer may remember to send a good morning message every single day.

Lahore used to make lovers wait in the street. Now it makes them wait on the screen. Either way, the city knows how to test a heart, with the age-old question: Are you there, are you mine?

What feels different now is not the longing itself, but the strange coexistence of constant presence and emotional absence.

Earlier, people waited for news. In that waiting, even a slowly travelling letter could become precious because of the journey it had taken. Now, messages cross the city in seconds and still leave the sender feeling oddly exposed, as if immediacy has replaced distance but not uncertainty. The old romance had its barriers; the new one has its strong bandwidth, but both have their own difficulties and their own quiet ways of breaking a heart.

Still, Lahore remains faithful to the rituals of love.

It is in the way people choose meeting points that sound casual but never really are. It is in the way a person says, “Liberty chalein?” when what they mean is, let’s see each other, without naming it.

It is in the way an entire generation has moved from paper to WhatsApp, from the neighbour’s child to an Instagram DM, and now fears a different kind of watchfulness, where nosey acquaintances have been replaced by screenshots and a scandal’s scale is much bigger than what oral gossip could once achieve.

Lahore understands that love is rarely grand at the start; and rather awkward and shy, routed through other people and hidden within errands, pauses and borrowed reasons. It is a boy lingering too long outside a college gate, quite certain of the guard uncle’s wrath if he finds out his plans. It is a girl checking her phone more often than she admits, making sure not to smile too much, because transparent expressions mean raising suspicion.

In the end, the form changes, but the feeling does not.

Lahore used to make lovers wait in the street. Now it makes them wait on the screen. Either way, the city knows how to test a heart, with the age-old question: Are you there, are you mine?

Kiva Malick is an academician and a writer