| Sumario: | This article centres on the emotional self and its relationship with the wider structures that it inhabits to understand why middle‐class Pakistani women stay in unhappy marriages. While the reluctance to divorce in this setting is often understood as 'conservatism', I argue for an understanding that acknowledges how the structures of and repertories around marriage – even when it is unhappy – are anchoring in that they generate emotions, logics and sets of reciprocity and affective ties that make life comprehensible and for a coherent sense of self to emerge. Through a focus on the sharing of stories of marital unhappiness as an 'emotional practice', I uncover how the emotions elicited and generated through these narrations guide women and anchor the self, offering an interpretation of what has happened, a way of making meaning of circumstances and, most importantly, a recognition of the labour and endurance through which they have built their lives. Many of the narrative and rhetorical motifs that women draw on in these contexts are those of a self that is subsumed in service to patriarchal family structures. Yet the cumulative self‐recognition that emerges through these narratives is of a self that exceeds these normative categories, even as it is dependent on them.
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