Hyderabad, February 2026. A 24-year-old techie, Harini, told her ex she didn't want to get back together. He met her outside her PG, pulled a knife, and stabbed her 14 times on a street with CCTV. The footage went viral before the police did. Friends said he'd been texting her for months: 'If I can't have you, no one will.' The line is old. The body count is new.
Delhi, March 2026. A 22-year-old DU student, Meera, blocked her ex, Aarav, after he showed up at her metro station twice. He waited outside her coaching center in Laxmi Nagar, dragged her into a lane, and attacked her with a paper cutter. She had 19 wounds. A shopkeeper's CCTV caught it. The clip circulated on Telegram before an FIR was filed. Friends showed police his notes: 'You chose books over me. Now choose pain.' The line was scribbled in his college diary. The trial is new.
Jealousy over her boyfriend reconnecting with his ex-girlfriend fueled a brutal murder in Bengaluru. Pune, April 2026. Ankita, 25, ended a 3-year relationship with her colleague Rohan and moved out. He drove to her society in Wakad, called her to the parking lot 'to return a charger,' and hit her with a hammer he'd bought that morning. She died in the ambulance. The building guard gave police the entry log. His search history had 'how long jail for murder India.' Neighbors said he'd been outside her gate at night for a week. The chargesheet called it premeditated.
Meghalaya, March 2026. Raja Raghuvanshi married his wife Sonam in Indore. For their honeymoon they flew to Shillong. Three days later, locals found his body in a gorge. Police say Sonam plotted it with her lover. A wedding album became a case file. The state called it a 'honeymoon murder.' Twitter called it Gone Girl in Garo Hills.
Bengaluru, April 2026. Prema, 27, invited Kiran, 27, over for a 'Western-style proposal.' She blindfolded him, tied his hands, poured petrol and kerosene, and lit him. Both worked at the same mobile store. He'd been 'ignoring her,' she told police. He died on her floor. It wasn't a moment of madness. It was planned. Receipts for the fuel were in her purse.
Five cities. Five months. Five victims. One pattern: rejection turned to retribution. Retribution turned to fire, steel, or a shove off a cliff.
These are not 'crimes of passion' in the Othello sense, where a handkerchief and a whisper drive a man to smother his wife in a jealous fit. The prefrontal cortex is online for these. There are texts, purchases, alibis. This is violence with a calendar invite. This is murder, premeditated.
Patriarchy turns love into ownership and algorithms reward rage. Cultural conditioning still teaches many people — especially men, but increasingly women too — to see partners as possessions rather than autonomous individuals. Social media's outrage economy constantly feeds anger, comparison, entitlement, and emotional dysregulation, making escalation more likely during romantic conflict.
And it's happening more. The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) logged 4,48,211 crimes against women in 2023, up from 4,45,256 in 2022. An estimated 35,000 women were murdered by their husbands or in-laws between 2017 and 2021. While another state-wise data from 2020–2024 shows that in 5 major states in India, 785 husbands were killed by wives: UP (274), Bihar (185), Rajasthan (138), Maharashtra (100), and MP (79).
What is going on here?
Dowry deaths, honour killings, stalking that ends in acid or a knife – these didn't start in 2020. But something about the last five years has sharpened the edge. Ask any cop in a metro: the calls are younger, the triggers are pettier, the outcomes are deadlier.
The answer to what is going on isn't one thing. But patterns are beginning to emerge. First, separation has become the deadliest moment among couples. Most victims killed by partners had tried to leave. Many are killed in the first month of leaving, most within a year. This observation that 'separation is the deadliest moment for victims of intimate partner violence' is a well-established finding in criminology and victimology, famously documented by researchers such as Dr. Jacquelyn Campbell and R. Emerson & Russell Dobash. Their data indicates that women are at the highest risk of intimate partner homicide when they leave, are in the process of leaving, or have recently separated from an abusive partner, particularly within the first month to one year. The idea that 'no one saw it coming' is usually wrong.
Though most couple killings involve men killing women, cases of women killing men in India are on the rise. The UN Women defines both as Intimate Partner Violence (IPV).
In India, we haven't yet started the process of gathering data or research specifically to understand the rise in IPV. But that the Pandemic has given rise to such cases is evident in the news headlines we see almost every day. Dhara Ghuntla, psychologist and psychotherapist, affiliated with Seven Hills Hospital, Navi Mumbai, says there is a worrying drop in emotional resilience, of late. 'People struggle to process rejection and feel deeply threatened or humiliated. For them, rejection becomes about their worth, ego and insecurities.' Ghuntla also feels that the Pandemic isolation may have played a large part in the rise of such cases.
It's a pile-up: a neurobiological hangover from COVID, a dating culture that runs on entitlement, an algorithm that pays you in dopamine for being angry, a mental health system with 0.75 psychiatrists for every 1,00,000 Indians, and a society that still whispers, 'log kya kahenge,' while screaming, 'main tumhara hoon' at the same time. As Gillian Flynn wrote in her bestseller, Gone Girl, 'Love makes you want to be a better man. But maybe love, real love, also gives you permission to just be the man you are.' Post-pandemic India is finding out what kind of man—and woman—that is.
Separation is the deadliest moment in a relationship. Research cites victims are at highest risk when they try to leave abusive partners, especially within the first month to one year after separation.
The map of control
Globally, when COVID-19 locked the world down in 2020, the alarming rise in Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) came into view. UN Women called it the 'Shadow Pandemic': a sharp rise in IPV. Homes became more dangerous for many women. Support systems got harder to reach. But this wasn't just a reaction to lockdown stress. The roots run deeper. They involve old evolutionary instincts, how our brains react to rejection, and cultural stories that make control look like love while treating women's independence as a problem. To understand it, we need to pull from psychology, criminology, sociology, and literature together.
Popular culture as well as classics, be it films, TV or books, often frame love as all-consuming – worth killing for. That feeling feeds 'rejection-aggression.'
Criminology: Murder isn't sudden. It follows a timeline.
One big myth is that intimate partner homicides are 'crimes of passion' that happen in a blind rage. Jane Monckton-Smith's research says 'no'. Monckton-Smith, Professor of Public Protection at the University of Gloucestershire, is internationally renowned for her research into homicide, coercive control and stalking. In her book, In Control: Dangerous Relationships and How They End in Murder, she wrote that most people follow a clear eight-stage path to killing their partners. She even went on to say that killers aren't losing control. They are tightening it. Here's the eight stages that lead to murder.
How rejection turns into aggression
Psychologists say the link between feeling rejected and lashing out is complicated, but real. Downey and Feldman's Rejection Sensitivity (RS) Model shows that people who constantly expect to be dumped often overreact to small slights.
What is the Rejection Sensitivity model? The Rejection Sensitivity Model was created by Irish-American social psychologist, Geraldine Downey, and psychology researcher, Scott I. Feldman, in 1996. RS implies a person tends to expect rejection, quickly sees it even when it's not clear, and reacts strongly to it. The model says that if someone faced rejection a lot when they were young, they develop a 'defensive' mindset. They start misreading normal or unclear behavior as a threat. That leads to big emotional reactions and problems in relationships.
Evolutionary pattern of RS Psychologists Roy Baumeister and Jean Twenge found that being left out or rejected doesn't just make people sad. It often makes them angry, impulsive, and antisocial. Humans evolved to need groups to survive. Being kicked out of a group used to mean danger or death. So our brains now treat social rejection like physical pain. The same brain areas light up when they face rejection. That's why people can react with aggression — it's a defensive response to something that feels like real harm. In plain words: Rejection isn't just emotional; it hurts the brain like a physical injury.
Emotional regression after the Pandemic
COVID created extreme stress, especially for young people. Many missed key social experiences where we learn to handle rejection, conflict, and uncertainty. Experts now call it 'emotional regression.' Neurologist Dr. Praveen Gupta, Chairman, MAIINS, Marengo Asia Hospitals, Gurugram, says, 'The brain's amygdala (responsible for detecting threats, and which still is in development stage among teens) has become too sensitive due to extreme stress; and that, in turn, has affected the pre-frontal cortex (responsible for impulse control).' That helps explain why teens and young adults are quicker to read situations as threats and react without brakes. Isolation and fear also dulled our coping skills. For some, aggression has become the default way to handle stress. And that habit hasn't gone away. At least, not without seeking active help.
These days, rejection doesn't just sting. It can feel overwhelming or dangerous, triggering a strong fight response. Dr. Shivi Kataria, consultant psychiatrist at CK Birla Hospital, Jaipur, is seeing lower frustration tolerance and more entitlement among youngsters these days. 'They get upset easily. The entitlement may stem partly from overuse of social media, which pushes people towards constant comparison. They seem more fragile, so even small setbacks feel bigger than they should,' she says.
The four horses of the Rejection Apocalypse
To understand why love, rejection, and violence are intersecting so often, we have to look at four forces: how the pandemic reshaped our brains, how hyper-individualism erodes tolerance, how social media trains us for outrage, and how patriarchal ideas still shape expectations.
The first horse - No cooling-off time or spaces: No one has come out and acknowledged that we all have 'mass PTSD' after the Pandemic. Because we never got real closure from the trauma. One moment, we were at home, our lives gone haywire after years of a certain routine. The next moment, we were back in offices, or working in hybrid mode. And all the while, we lost our loved ones, friends, or saw them becoming frail weak beyond their years. Irritability, burnout, and exhaustion remain common because we never really got a 'cooling off' time in between.
Then comes the disappearance of 'third spaces' — libraries, community centers, offices, parks, cafes, friends places — where people used to interact beyond their phones. This was the close circle and safe places to vent and joke and make sense or make light of a lot of emotionally difficult phases in our lives. These spaces helped absorb almost all our personal crises. Without them, romantic relationships have taken on all the weight. Before 2020, we had buffers. The tapri uncle who told you 'arey chhod na, ladkiyan bahut hain.' The office friend who dragged you to drink after your girlfriend left. The cousin who said 'your ex is crazy, but don't do anything stupid.'
COVID killed all of those spaces. WFH made work transactional. Cafes became laptop zones. Housing societies got more isolated. We re-entered the world, but we didn't rebuild the village. Belgian psychotherapist Esther Perel's line hits hard now: 'We want one person to give us what once an entire village provided.' When that person leaves, the village burns because there is no village. Sapien Labs calls this the collapse of 'social self.'
It becomes evident when we see the numbers. Sample this. Indian 18–34-year-olds scored 33 on the Mental Health Quotient. Their grandparents had scored 96. That gap is a chasm. And it's full of people who don't know how to be alone without being lonely, or how to be lonely without being lethal. They have become the only source of identity and worth. And when they fail, it is annihilation. This brings us to the second horse of the rejection apocalypse.
The second horse - we can't handle 'no' anymore: This feeling extends beyond our love life but that's a story for another day. Back to love and rejection… The Pandemic stress rewired our behaviour completely. Isolation made people more hostile. Chronic stress kept the brain in constant fight-or-flight mode. You're always one notification away from war. We all get to decide what or who to worship. Post-Pandemic, a lot of people started worshipping their own fury. It has become dangerously routine. Neurologically, all of these leads to the amygdala overreacting to threats like rejection. The prefrontal cortex struggles to slow things down. By this time, compassion fatigue has also set in. After constant exposure to crises, people are numb to others' pain.
This is being termed as 'rejection tolerance.' Hearing 'no' now feels like a personal attack or a broken contract. People high in rejection sensitivity (the young generation or adults who have extreme insecurity) read the worst into small cues. That fuels jealousy, poor relationship satisfaction, and a higher risk of violence. If love is seen as an investment of time or money, rejection feels like theft. And violence becomes payback.
Popular culture as well as classics, be it films, TV or books, often frame love as all-consuming – worth killing for. That feeling feeds 'rejection-aggression.' Take Shakespeare, Emily Brontë or Leo Tolstoy… classic literature, too, has been warning us for centuries. Shakespeare's Friar Laurence says in Romeo and Juliet, 'These violent delights have violent ends.' In Othello, jealousy is a 'green-eyed monster' born from insecurity. Othello kills Desdemona to protect his 'honour.' The violence starts in the mind, not the moment. In Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff's love for Catherine is a monomania. When she marries someone else, he says, 'The moment her regard ceased, I would have torn his heart out, and drank his blood.' He sees her as part of himself. So her choice feels like an amputation. His revenge lasts decades. Love and hate fuse into destruction.
Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata is colder. Pozdnyshev kills his wife over imagined infidelity with a violinist. He admits he 'killed her long before' by treating her as a body, not a person. He says romantic love is a lie that hides animal desire. That is the crux of it. A rejected partner lashes out to feel powerful again, cycling between anger and fake charm to win the person back. If that fails, the response can be planned. In our time, and post-Pandemic, our primal urges have surfaced on top of our emotional ladder, and our social graces – human decency or just common sense – have all taken a backseat.
Dutch psychiatrist and author Bessel van der Kolk says that past trauma rewires the brain. The amygdala, our alarm bell, gets too sensitive. The prefrontal cortex, which helps us think clearly, gets weaker. So a hint of disrespect or abandonment can flood the body with stress hormones. The person explodes. Many can't even name what they feel. They look furious but say they're fine. Terrified but insist they're not. That disconnect is called 'alexithymia' or 'emotional blindness' or 'no words for emotions'. It is not a mental disorder, but rather a deficit in emotional awareness.
The abuser's mind: A sociological perspective
It's about entitlement, not anger. Author Lundy Bancroft spent years working with abusive men. His conclusion: abuse isn't about losing control. It's about a value system. Abusers feel entitled. They think they have special rights. In his book, Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men, he writes, these men believe women should serve men. His needs come first.
Talha Bin Latif, and Ayesha Yaqoob's 2026 study of TikToker Sana Yousaf's murder shows how society frames killers as 'tragic lovers.' The story becomes 'he loved too much,' which excuses the violence. Latif is lecturer at department of social sciences, Iqra University, Islamabad, and Yaqoob is senior lecturer MPhil (counseling and psycho therapy) at Fatima Jinnah Women University, Rawalpindi, Pakistan.
Take Shakespeare, Emily Brontë or Leo Tolstoy… literature, too, has been warning us for centuries. Shakespeare's Friar Laurence says in Romeo and Juliet, 'These violent delights have violent ends.' In Othello, jealousy is a 'green-eyed monster' born from insecurity. Othello kills Desdemona to protect his 'honour.' The violence starts in the mind, not the moment.
Wen-Qi Chen, an independent researcher who authored a 2021 study titled 'Analysis of the psychological factors of love murder cases', lists three triggers for 'love murders': break-ups, rival disputes, and suspected cheating. But she says the common thread is the Death Drive: I'd rather see you dead than free. This has old roots. Indian author, publisher and activist Urvashi Butalia documented, during India's 1947 Partition, 75,000 women were abducted and raped. Families killed their own daughters to 'save honour.'
In Kerala, 29 out of 30 'unrequited love' murders in six years were pre-planned. These aren't sudden bursts. They're calculated. Losing a partner creates real cravings and agitation, similar to quitting alcohol. Without healthy coping, that distress explodes. Often there's 'dramatic devaluation.' Once the partner stops meeting their needs, the perpetrator stops seeing them as human. The partner becomes an object that betrayed them. That mental shift makes murder possible.
The third horse - hyper-individualism and 'me first' has made us more fragile than ever: It sounds like an oxymoron. Individualism is supposed to make us stronger, emotionally. But hyperindividualism, the third horse of the rejection apocalypse, can have the opposite effect. Personal freedom now outranks relationships. 'Boundaries culture' was meant to protect people, but it slid into selfishness. Phrases like 'honour my energy' are used to justify ghosting or dismissing others' feelings. Interdependence starts to look like weakness. Compromise gets labeled as 'self-abandonment.'
Dating apps reinforce this. Partners feel like products. If someone doesn't fit our lives perfectly, they're 'toxic.' So, when a person used to radical independence enters an intense relationship, they often can't cope when it ends. There's no community to catch them. The break-up feels like total collapse. The line between self and partner blurs. If the partner leaves, they feel they'll be destroyed. So they destroy the partner instead to avoid abandonment. This 'myopic individualism' rewards status over care. It breeds apathy. And apathy corrodes democracy in relationships. The perpetrator feels detached from the victim's reality. On to the fourth and last horse now… social media.
The fourth horse - rage economy: Social media trains us to be angry all the time. Platforms profit from outrage. Algorithms boost content that sparks anger because anger drives clicks, comments and 'shares'. Constant rage bait hijacks the already-fragile brain. Over time, the nervous system learns to react fast and harshly to any slight. Add to it the fact that increased screentime, during the Pandemic, had already reduced our empathy. It's easier to be cruel when you don't see a face. That habit is now bleeding into real life. Hence, we see cases of rejection in love turning fatal. For many young people, the dopamine hit from outrage is addictive, like drugs. So when a romantic conflict hits, they escalate instead of de-escalate. As legendary American author the late Joan Didion wrote, 'We tell ourselves stories in order to live.' Some people, post-rejection, tell themselves a story where the ending is fire.
Dr Anil Venkatachalam, consultant neurologist, Zen Multispecialty Hospital, Mumbai, says, 'Romantic rejection and substance withdrawal tend to engage overlapping brain circuits, mainly the dopamine reward system (like the ventral striatum). This further raises the chances of craving-like thoughts and even distress. Also, increased amygdala activity and reduced prefrontal control induce emotional pain and irritability in both states.' In such a state, people mistake intensity for authenticity. Outrage spikes dopamine and cortisol in our brains. The amygdala overrides rational thought.
In a hyper-individual world, interdependence starts to look like weakness. Compromise gets labelled as 'self-abandonment.' Dating apps reinforce this. Partners feel like products. If someone doesn't fit our lives perfectly, they're 'toxic.'
'You're Mine': The male violence we don't want to call routine
Let's start with the most common story, because it's the one we're numb to. Harini's murder in Bengaluru wasn't anomalous. It was algorithmic. Ex-boyfriend. Refused reconciliation. Public place. Multiple stab wounds. A WhatsApp status from him the night before: 'Tu nahi toh koi nahi.' Bollywood wrote the BGM. Tere Naam's Radhe grabs a woman's hair and the audience whistles. Kabir Singh slaps Preeti and she marries him. Darr made Shah Rukh a star by carving 'K-K-K-Kiran' into his chest. We were told this was love. So when a boy in Indore grows up and his girlfriend leaves, the script is already in his head. He's not the villain in his story. He's the hero who 'fought for her.' As Tyler Durden says in Fight Club, 'It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything.' Some men hear that and reach for a knife.
In India, lethal obsession is tied to patriarchy and generational trauma. Even as gender roles shift, the idea that a woman is a man's property persists. Feminist theory argues that patriarchy gives men a sense of entitlement. A woman's 'no' feels like it violates the natural order. Families often reinforce this. A household's 'honour' gets linked to controlling its women. NCRB data from 2022 and 2023 shows the scale.
Patriarchy isn't abstract. It's a guy in Surat telling police, 'She was mine. How could she say no?' It's the family in Haryana that kills their daughter because she chose her partner. It's the 'izzat' that's always female and always fragile.
When Women Kill: Prema's fire and the myth of one-way violence
Prema's case in April 2026 broke the usual mold. Female perpetrator. Male victim. Same motive: perceived rejection + entitlement + planning. She bought petrol. She bought kerosene. She texted him. She blindfolded him. She lit him. Police called it 'revenge for ignoring her.' Colleagues said she'd been obsessive, checking his phone, fighting over marriage.
It's tempting to treat this as a 'reverse' case, an outlier. It's not. NCRB data doesn't track 'husbands killed by wives' as a separate national category, but state police data and news archives show it's real and rising in pockets—Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Haryana. Methods differ: poisoning, contract killing, like the Meghalaya honeymoon case. Prema's case matters because it breaks the lazy binary. This isn't just 'men vs women' anymore. It's 'dysregulation vs regulation.' It's what happens when 'main tumhare bina nahi reh sakta/sakti' stops being a lyric and becomes a plan.
Dowry deaths, honour killings, stalking that ends in acid or a knife – these didn't start in 2020. But something about the last five years has sharpened the edge. Ask any cop in any city in the world: the calls are younger, the triggers are pettier, the outcomes are deadlier.
The treatment gap
India's mental health system is stretched. There are 0.75 psychiatrists per 100,000 people. The World Health Organization recommends 1.7. The treatment gap for serious mental illness is 70% to 92%. Most people get no care and mental health literacy is low — nearly 80% of Indians have never heard of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. Many attribute mental illness to spirits. Without language for their feelings or access to help, people let anger build until it explodes. This 'infrastructure of despair' means when a relationship ends, there's often no outlet except destructive urges.
The lethal last text
Prema's last text to Kiran was 'surprise.' Harini's ex's last text was 'you'll regret this.' Raja Raghuvanshi's last text was probably 'reached Shillong.' In Normal People, Sally Rooney writes, 'Most people go through their whole lives without ever meeting their soul mate. But I did, and I'm not with her.' The tragedy there is quiet. Losing in love is life, not death. India's problem right now is that too many people meet rejection and decide someone has to die. This tragedy is loud. It's petrol, it's knives, it's gorges.
We need emotional buffers again
We can't ban heartbreak. We can't police love. But we can teach a 20-year-old that 'no' is a sentence, not a death sentence. That 'tu nahi toh koi nahi' is not romantic. It's a threat.
Rage without restraint comes from neglecting emotional and social health after the Pandemic, say experts. Love has turned into a game of possession because the structures that moderated desire have eroded. Fixing it takes more than new laws. We have to rebuild human infrastructure.
The data is here. The bodies are here. The next story is being written in a DMs right now. The only question, going forward, is who will decide the ending?
If you or someone you know is experiencing relationship violence or suicidal thoughts, contact a healthcare professional immediately. Telemanas - comprehensive mental health care service: 14416; National Domestic Violence Hotline: 14490
