I spent time laughing and dancing with my friends. I took up yoga, running and creative writing. I began to fill my time in other, more enjoyable ways. I began to blame myself there had to be something wrong with me.Įventually, I told my mother I’d had enough. So many women I knew, friends I had grown up with, had met someone in an arranged way, and things had worked out perfectly they seemed so happy in their married lives. After countless rejections, my flaws picked apart and magnified, my confidence began to crumble. Various prospective mothers-in-law found something in my appearance or my personality lacking and things fizzled out as flatly as they’d begun. The process wasn’t as simple or efficient as I’d assumed it would be often when I was introduced to someone, we had no chemistry and nothing to talk about. But by this time I was nearly 30 and proposals weren’t exactly fast-flowing. I thought being married would put an end to my sadness. I threw myself into arranged marriage introductions because I was tired of being alone. I called my mother and told her I was ready to be introduced to someone suitable. After several years of naively waiting for a stroke of exceptionally good romantic luck to come my way, it dawned on me that it probably never would. It was when she told me how they’d met that I realised, bittersweetly, that the odds of something like that ever happening to me, given all the criteria I needed to fulfil, were so slim they were nonexistent. One of my friends started dating a man she’d met in a supermarket she had dropped something, he picked it up and they ended up swapping numbers (they are now happily married with two children). Every day, my eyes glittered with hope, wondering if the man I was destined to marry was sitting right opposite me on the tube or if he’d walk past me in the street. I wanted to meet someone completely by chance. I had filled my head with romantic stories of chance and fate and soulmates, and I wanted all of that. The problem was, my own way didn’t include a plan of action. I was trying to buy myself some time, to find someone my own way. Every now and again my mother would call with details of some suitable boy, but I changed the subject or made excuses, saying I was too busy. I’d say I was busyĪfter graduation, instead of meeting potential marriage suitors I moved to Paris for my masters degree and then to London after that for work. My mother would call with details of suitable boys. Above all, I craved romance and didn’t think that would be possible with my parents and possible future in-laws overseeing my every step. I wasn’t ready I planned to travel, to write, to study for another degree. We were on holiday in Florence, eating lunch in the sunshine, and when they said all this I felt the sun withdraw behind the clouds. They said it was time I started considering my options, and that I should be introduced to some of those families and their sons. The summer before my final year of university, my parents spoke to me about arranged marriage proposals that had come for me. In my head, I merged these two opposing desires: the man I’d one day fall in love with would also magically meet all my family’s requirements. More than that, I didn’t want to have to lie. I wanted my own happy ending, even though the ones I saw on screen or read in books rarely featured girls like me.Īt university I saw girls of my background in clandestine relationships with boyfriends they weren’t supposed to be with, but it seemed like an awful lot of stress to hide it from their parents, and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to keep that up. But when my time came, I desperately hoped to marry for love first and not merely obligation. I had grown up hearing that marriage was an important part of Islam, and that love came after marriage. More than anything, I wanted to know what love felt like. I mourned Joey’s unrequited love in Dawson’s Creek with great heartache on her behalf, though I knew the object of her affection was unworthy. I read Jane Austen obsessively, always a little disappointed that Marianne didn’t get to be with Willoughby. Boyfriends were firmly not allowed, but I spent a lot of time pining, perhaps more for something than someone. Still, though I knew it was expected of me, I began to long for more than a match made by my parents.
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