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abstract
This Article uses Swahili audio recordings of marital instruction and interviews with Zanzibari Muslim women to investigate their conception of ‘love’ within Islamic marriages. When seen through a language socialisation framework, their talk illustrates how Swahili women socialise one another into not only particular ways of using language within marriage but also a particular discourse about the ideal means to mitigate their precarious status within the institution of marriage. A focus on grammatical subjecthood in the verb -penda, ‘love’, reveals that women idealise speaking and behaving in ways that will engender husbandly love, thereby protecting themselves from the financial risks of divorce. Discourse about their own loving feelings occurs only in constructed dialogue, suggesting their greater concern with saying “I love you” than with experiencing marital love. These findings contradict Swahili stereotypes about women as more emotional than men, and suggest that they are strategically agentive.