Love in a Headscarf (16 page)

FIVE
None of the Above

Six Stages of Self-Pity

A
s time passed, the quality of the men being presented by the Aunties began to decline even faster. My parents exchanged worried glances as the introductions were made and yet another suitor was rejected. They were concerned that I would never find anyone to be my exact match and that I should think carefully if any of the men that we had met so far could be a strong contender. “Three out of six,” said my dad, referring to the diminishing number of my requirements that I should look to find in a man. I asked them, if we could go back in time and have our pick of the boys we had met, which of them would they like me to reconsider? With great sadness, they agreed that none of them had been a suitable match. We were sitting in front of a blank drawing board.

Life was on hold until I got married, and it was the same for my friends. Girls were offered two life settings: before marriage and after marriage. So until I found a husband, everything else had to wait. Soon I would realize that this was a false dichotomy, and that actually I could quite happily get on with my life and search for a partner at the same time.

I would get together regularly with my friends Sara and Noreen to compare notes on our search. We looked forward to sharing these intimate thoughts and the emotional stresses we were facing in order to gain inspiration from each other, as well as consolation.

Each time we met, our conversations followed a similar format: the Six Stages of Self-Pity.

1. (MUSLIM) WOMEN ARE AMAZING

“I don’t understand,” I would begin, initiating the well-worn format of our conversations. “You’re both so beautiful, so smart, so funny. I just don’t understand why men aren’t falling over themselves to marry you.”

Noreen started giggling. “We could ask you the same thing.… You could have married Syed and his cricket addiction. Or you could have grown three inches and said yes to Khalil, the dentist who wanted an exact-height wife.”

“Don’t laugh!” I chided. “The state of men like that isn’t funny.”

“It’s not, it really isn’t,” she confirmed, sobering up her expression.

“I don’t get it either,” said Sara, ignoring Noreen’s premature dive into hysteria. Commentary about all the awful men we had met did not usually take place until Stage Three of the conversation. Sara carefully returned us to this first stage of our discussion: to eulogize about how talented Muslim women were and how they were excelling in their education, careers, communities, and spirituality. “We’ve worked so hard to become the women we are today, it hasn’t been easy at all.”

Noreen and I both nodded in agreement. Our parents had arrived as part of the immigrant waves of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. During this period, Britain had been changing socially and culturally, while at the same time the world was becoming more connected and we all started living in a “global village.” We were all the first generation of our families and communities to be born and brought up in Britain. That meant we had to navigate our way through the challenges that faced all Asians and all Muslims. Many of those challenges were the same that any second-generation child of immigrants might experience in creating a solid sense of identity that combined both their parents’ culture and the culture that they found themselves growing up in.

Muslim women had risen to the challenge and were using all the opportunities presented to them. They were outstripping Muslim men at school, university, and in some cases their careers too. They also seemed to be more confident in their identity and in finding a way to integrate their faith and their Asian and British cultures; and they were more open about these different elements that made up their lives. In our circle of friends, all the Muslim women we knew were university-educated and professionals of their trade.

There was one area that was particularly clear though—the Muslim women we knew were still very much connected to their community, their mosques, and their faith. In all these areas they were much more visible than men, and worked hard to keep them together. In our experience, Muslim men only seemed to return to these spaces after they were married. Muslim women were pushing forward the debate about our community’s understanding of Islam. We were questioning “how things were” in the way that our faith was practiced. Our spirituality and faith were important to us, and we wanted to have our voices heard and our questions explored. We were confident that we would be the ones who could create real and positive change in the Muslim community and in extricating the faith of Islam from the cultures that had taken root in its practice.

In that far, far away alternative universe, where hard work, effort, and creating positive change was directly rewarded, and where it was known that we deserved wonderful men in our lives, we would not need to hold regular heartbreak sessions with our girlfriends about not being able to find a husband. Real life should have been like that, but it wasn’t.

“If it makes you feel better, it’s not just Muslim women like us who are amazing and having difficulty in finding amazing men,” I consoled the girls.

“You’re right, I have so many incredible friends who are female and they are all finding it hard to find the right man,” agreed Noreen.

“Nope,” said Sara shaking her head emphatically, “that does not make me feel one bit better at all.”

2. WHERE ARE ALL THE DECENT MEN?

“They must be out there,” said Noreen, “somewhere.”

“But where?’ chimed in Sara. “I’ve looked everywhere. Are they invisible?”

We had been searching for so many years and yet we hadn’t found any decent specimens. Where were they hiding?

“The good ones are all married,” sighed Noreen.

“But maybe they only got ‘good’ once they’d been whipped into shape by their wives?” I was thinking out loud to the girls. “Maybe living with a woman is what turned them into ‘decent men’?”

“So maybe what we need to do is spot the potential in a man, marry him, and then magically, just by living with us, he’ll turn into the perfect Prince Charming!” Noreen threw her hands into the air in excitement.

“Or maybe,” said Sara breathlessly, “they are all hiding from us, frightened that we’ll pounce on them. They might be hidden in some kind of underground bunker or on a desert island, and if we can just find them then we’ll have our choice of men galore!”

I placed my hand on Sara’s forehead. I wondered if the intensity and stress of the search had made her delirious.

It wasn’t just us as single women that despaired about the absence of eligible men. Mosques and community leaders did not know where to find them either.

“I met a couple of nice boys at a wedding last month,” Noreen told us. Weddings were always a good place to meet previously unknowns. They were rarely present for more mundane social activities but were required by family intervention to attend such significant events. “Both of them seemed like good possibilities. One was setting up his own business, the other was an architect. Both of them very nice, intelligent, and charming.”

“Very smart,” said Sara, intrigued. “So, what happened?”

“We exchanged details but I never heard anything back from them.”

“Did you contact them?” I asked, and then added cheesily, “There’s no point being backward in coming forward.”

“Yes, I did,” declared Noreen, “but I’ve heard nothing. I don’t mind making contact, but I’m not going to be desperate.”

“I think these men are not looking for women through the traditional routes of family and friends, maybe they think it’s just too ‘old-fashioned,’” commented Sara. “And because they meet us in these environments, they think we’re too ‘traditional’ and can’t see us for everything we are, even though we need someone like them who is out in the world.”

“Where are all these men hiding?” I asked again.

Sara responded: “More importantly, who are they marrying?”

3. MAYBE THERE ARE NO DECENT MEN LEFT

“If nobody can find them, maybe they don’t exist,” wailed Noreen. “Everyone knows everyone else or knows someone who does, so by now between us we ought to have met any half-decent single, breathing man.”

“You’re right,” agreed Sara, “there aren’t any. We’re going to have to live out our lives as lonely spinster Aunties in our nylon
shalwar kameez
, fixing up matrimonial matches between the new batch of girls and boys.”

“I’ll tell them to take the first one they get,” said Noreen seriously. “I wish I had done that, at least I wouldn’t be in this hapless, manless situation.”

“Maybe these men have let their mothers search for their wives, and because we don’t fall into the mold of ‘good traditional wife,’ we’ve been excluded!” Sara was cross: she was starting to think mean thoughts about these men and their spines. I could tell it was going to get very ugly very quickly.

“We’ve had to work so hard to find a partner, and these men just waltz in and take who they want and expect us to fall in line. That’s not being a decent man! Even though I love cooking and looking after the house and I want to have lots of children, that doesn’t mean I want someone who just expects me to stay at home all day in traditional servitude!” Sara’s cheeks were burning neon red.

Noreen put her arm around Sara’s shoulders to comfort her and calm her down, but Sara had another furious complaint. “Why are all these men going ‘back home’ to marry? We want to marry men who have had a similar upbringing to us and share the new identity and perspectives that we’ve had to create to find our place. I can’t marry someone from ‘back home’ because I can’t talk to them and they just don’t understand the new environment that we’re in. The men don’t seem to care, they just want to find a traditional wife and have an easy life. No wonder there are no decent men—they are all marrying ‘back home’ and we are all left with nothing.”

“I know, I know,” soothed Noreen, but there were tears in her eyes too. “The boys are encouraged by community and family to marry ‘back home’ without worrying what is going to happen to the single women who are here.” She cleared her throat and tried to lighten the mood. “I have a cracking story to add to our list of terrible introductions.”

Sara and I inhaled in mock horror: “Another one! Who would believe it?!”

Noreen continued, “I met a potential match for a coffee last week. Thirty-five years old, VP of a multinational corporation. He brought his mother along as a chaperone.”

“No!” gasped Sara and I in unison.

“And she told me that next time we met I should bring my passport so she could check I was really a British subject …”

“No!” we repeated in a higher pitch.

“… and that I wasn’t out to marry her son for his citizenship or his money.”

With the inclusion of the latest story to add to our anthology of awful experiences, Stage Three was complete. Now it was time in the conversation to turn up the expression of our pain to “full.”

4. MAYBE WE ARE THE WRONG KIND OF WOMEN

“I was cornered by some Aunties at the wedding,” Noreen divulged. She rolled her eyes in horror. “They were in fine form, raising their eyebrows and waggling their fingers energetically at me.”

“Oh, yes, and what was their wonderful advice to you on this occasion?” asked Sara with irritation, still emotional from her outburst.

Noreen tried to imitate the rhythm and accent of the Aunties’ voices. “‘We know that things are
changing.
We
know
, my dear, we’re not
so old-fashioned
like you think. We
know
that it is good for you young girls to work, but we
told
you, we
told
you so many times, to find yourself a man and get married first, then you can do
whatever
you want. Just start by looking
after
him and
then
worry about this independent modern nonsense later. Men like to have independent women as
friends
, but when it comes to
marrying
and having a wife, they all want the same thing—a
nice
traditional woman who will look after them. Men are
men
, you can’t change that.’”

We all growled, but were we upset because they were wrong or because they were right?

We were following the “traditional” process because we felt it fitted well with our faith as Muslims. But we had rejected the definition of a “traditional” wife when “traditional” was restricted to mean “wife-is-second-to-husband.” We wanted to pursue our understanding of a more
Islamic
marriage relationship, where the minimum obligations were defined, and where love and companionship were the fundamental pillars. Maybe that’s why the process wasn’t working for us, because even though we were playing by the rules, we were not abiding by them in spirit?

The crux of the matter was this: whatever we thought of being a traditional wife, or of falling into the traditional process and being the kind of wives we thought boys and their mothers wanted us to be, we seemed to be the only ones that were suffering. The boys were still getting married. We girls were left single and unloved, wailing to our friends and families.