Finding Love: Dating and Arranged Marriages

When I read the novel "Love in a Headscarf" by Shelina Zahra Janmohamed, I started thinking more about arranged marriages and why most people are firmly against the concept of a marriage being arranged between a couple.

Growing up, when I heard the word arranged, I thought it meant forced. 

Arranged marriages were quite common in the past and are still common today in certain cultures. In Western culture, you had to marry someone in the same social class as yourself. It was unlikely that a poor man could marry a woman from a wealthy family. Status was to be maintained. 

As time went on, people married more often for love rather than status or economics. I think people started associating the word "forced" with "arranged" because some people could not marry the one they loved if status and money were issues. 

Arranged marriages still exist in the U.S., but not necessarily in American culture. In college, I met a girl who told me her family wanted to start the process for an arranged marriage. She communicated her reservations to me but said she was not against it. It was just that she was not ready to get married. She did not know what she wanted. It shocked me that a woman was not against an arranged marriage.

Rather than judge her, I stepped back and thought about it. I think this is something that a lot of people may neglect to do. It is easier to rush to judgment before doing some homework. I know...no one likes homework. But it is important. To understand why the person is making that choice, you also need to understand the person as an individual and the person as a member of a culture.

In Muslim culture, arranged marriages are how marriages happen, for the most part (I think). Dating is forbidden. Even though dating is forbidden, Shelina's journey shows you that there is there some degree of dating going on. It may not be called dating in their culture but it does resemble some aspects of dating found in Western society. 

At first, young men are brought to the house with their families. In some Western families, a man has to come to the house to meet the parents before he takes the daughter out on a date. This is quite old fashioned but still goes on today when women are teenagers and come from a strict household. In fact, if parents are concerned about their child’s safety, they insist on meeting the man their daughter is going on a date with.

For some people, meeting the family may not be considered dating for some people. Meeting the family comes after dating if the couple is older. For instance, if they are in college, it is common for the couple to date before meeting the family. When they are ready to meet the family, this means the relationship is getting more serious. The culture of dating has changed as people put off marriage and are working on their careers. They may start dating through online sites which in a way resemble the work of matchmakers in other cultures.

Muslim women and Western women are similar in many ways when it comes to finding the one. As Shelina shows us, even Muslim women have their checklist for what makes up the perfect man. 

All women have an idea of their perfect man. We are not that different. 

We even go through a phase where we think "should I settle for less than perfect?" Even though her father tells her she needs to compromise and settle for maybe only 4 out of the 6 things, she is persistent. We can be too.

This reminds me of when I was arranging my own marriage. Yes, I said arranging. What else are women doing when we date in American culture? If we want to get married, we are thinking about whether or not the man is someone we could marry. That is the purpose of dating for us. We don't want to marry someone we don't know.

As I dated, I realized what things I could or couldn't put up with. I could deal with someone watching Fox News all day. I could deal with someone who can't cook. I can't deal with someone demanding his mother cook him lunch even when she is sick. I can't deal with someone being late all the time. I can't deal with someone who doesn't work as hard as me.

Just like Shelina, I had my list but I only realized these things as I grew up on the path to marriage. This is one reason why I believe young girls should not get married. 

A 13-year-old girl is not old enough to know what she wants in a husband. She needs time to grow up and to realize who she is so she can realize who she wants her husband to be. If a girl doesn’t know who she is, how can she know who her husband should be?

As a young adult, I continued to add to my checklist and even tried online dating myself. I was tired of wasting my time meeting guys who didn’t share the same interests as me. So like Shelina, I tried online dating where I could limit my search to men with a certain background, a certain level of education, characteristics, etc.

In the novel, Shelina used online dating in the same way to find her perfect Muslim match. We both took finding our husband or partner into our own hands by arranging it. We didn't just wait for him to find us. 

Photo by Pablo Heimplatz on Unsplash