Every year during this time, across the country, millions of women fast from sunrise to moonrise.

They dress beautifully. Gather with other women. Perform rituals passed down through generations. Wait for the moon. And when it appears, they look at the face of the person they love through a sieve, and break their fast.

Karwa Chauth is, at its heart, a celebration of love.

And as I sit with the spirit of this tradition, I find myself thinking about something that doesn’t get discussed nearly enough when we talk about love.

What happens to you inside it?

We are taught so much about how to love.

Be devoted. Be patient. Be selfless. Put the other person first. Show up, consistently, through every season. Hold the family together. Keep the peace. Be the one who adjusts.

And love does ask for all of those things. Genuinely.

But there is a version of love that asks for something it was never entitled to.

It asks you to disappear.

To shrink your opinions, your needs, your ambitions, your voice — so quietly and gradually that one day you look up and realize you can no longer clearly tell where the relationship ends and where you begin.

That is not devotion.

That is erasure. And it does not serve love. It hollows it out.

I have met many women over the years — through my work, through Insppy, through conversations that started in one place and went somewhere much deeper — who loved with everything they had.

And somewhere along the way, in the act of loving, lost themselves.

Not because their partners were unkind. Not because anything dramatic happened.

But because the culture around them, the expectations placed on them, the stories they had absorbed since childhood — all of it quietly told them that a good woman puts herself last.

So they did.

They stopped speaking up about what they needed.

They set aside the career because the family needed stability.

They swallowed their frustration because the timing was never right to express it.

They postponed their own dreams — once, twice, indefinitely — because someone else’s dreams always felt more urgent.

And one day, they came to me not knowing who they were outside of their roles.

Not as a wife. Not as a mother. Not as a daughter-in-law.

Just as themselves.

That is a particular kind of loss that doesn’t get talked about enough.

I want to say something clearly, and I want to say it with love.

You cannot truly love someone from a place of self-abandonment.

The love you give when you are running on empty, when you have silenced your own needs for too long, when you have buried your identity under layers of duty and expectation — that love is fragile. It carries resentment in it, even when you don’t mean it to. It builds walls even as it tries to build bridges.

Real love — the kind that lasts, the kind that deepens over decades, the kind worth celebrating — is only possible between two people who remain whole.

Who have maintained their own sense of self even as they’ve chosen to build a life together.

Who respect each other’s individuality not despite the love, but as part of it.

Loving without losing yourself doesn’t mean loving less.

I want to be clear about this.

It doesn’t mean being less devoted. Less present. Less committed.

It means being honest about who you are. What you need. What matters to you. What you will not compromise — not out of stubbornness, but out of self-respect.

It means staying curious about your own life even as you invest deeply in someone else’s.

It means keeping the friendships that nourish you. The work that gives you purpose. The parts of yourself that existed before the relationship and deserve to continue existing within it.

It means being able to say — I love you, and I also love myself. And both of those things are true at the same time.

That is not a contradiction.

That is the foundation of a healthy love.

There is something I find profoundly beautiful about Karwa Chauth when I look at it through this lens.

Yes, it is a fast.

But it is also a day when women dress for themselves. When they gather with each other. When they laugh and sing and share stories and wait together. When they are, for a few hours, simply women — not just wives or mothers or daughters-in-law, but women with their own rituals, their own community, their own tradition.

There is something in that which has always felt like self-expression to me, not just sacrifice.

And perhaps that is the invitation this tradition holds for all of us — to love fully, to celebrate love genuinely, and to also remember that the person doing the loving matters too.

To every woman reading this —

Fast if it is meaningful to you. Celebrate the love in your life. Honor the rituals that connect you to something larger than yourself.

And also —

Don’t fast from your own voice.

Don’t fast from your own needs.

Don’t fast from the parts of yourself that make you who you are.

Because the love you are celebrating?

It deserves the full, complete, undiminished version of you.

Not a smaller version. Not a quieter version.

You.

The most beautiful partnerships I have seen are not the ones where one person sacrificed everything for the other.

They are the ones where two people chose each other — again and again — while still choosing themselves.

Where love made them more, not less.

Where being together added to who they were, rather than subtracting from it.

That is the love worth celebrating.

That is the love worth fasting for.

— Kiran Tandon
Founder, Talent Potential Consulting, Insppy | Author | TEDx Speaker