Love in a Headscarf (30 page)

The search returned a few hundred results. I should have felt elated at the pool of potential husbands who were just waiting for a cyberbride. Instead I wilted beneath the weight of the profiles that I would have to trawl through one by one to see if they were a good match. I steeled myself for a long, arduous marathon facing the computer screen.

Reading through the profiles was surprisingly addictive. I read one, and then another, one more, just one more, and then just one more. I experienced a “lightbulb moment”: here was a captive pool of single Muslim men! But what kind of men were they? Was there something wrong with them if they were searching online? If I was about to put my own details onto the matrimonial site there were only two possibilities: I was normal, therefore they were normal too; or they were very strange and something was wrong with them, and with me. I gave myself the benefit of the doubt and assumed we were all normal. It was also the most logical analysis in response to my doubt.

Some of the men had left the space for their descriptions completely blank. It seemed that they were not bothered enough to spend the time describing themselves or what they were looking for. I dismissed them immediately, as they weren’t taking this process seriously. Others had written long essays. I studied these carefully. Some were prescriptive, some arrogant, some downright ludicrous. They reminded me of the wildly unrealistic and unbalanced matrimonial advertisements we used to listen to on Sunrise Radio when I was a child. Sometimes the advertisements were posted by the parents of the boy.

Every so often there would be a profile that looked appealing, both sensitive and sensible, and that reached out from the screen and touched me with its intelligence, humor, and spirituality. I would clip the advertisement and add it to my list, but I was still hesitant to take things further and fully commit to cybersearching.

Even at this point I felt that the Internet search was a shameful secret. If I proceeded, I would need to expose myself and share some details. I would be anonymous but I would still be committed. I would need to share information about myself, and I fully expected people to deduce who I was and then propagate the knowledge that I was searching through the InterShame to find a man. Perhaps I felt that my urgent desire to be married had reduced my dignity and I wanted to hold on to as much of it as I could.

For a few weeks I watched proceedings from the sidelines. One day, one of the profiles caught my eye and I decided to take the plunge. He was about my age, lived in London, and wrote an engaging description of himself that showed he was committed to finding someone but was not self-centered or arrogant. In order to send him a message I had to post my own profile, which I finally decided to do.

It was biodata hell all over again. This time I had the opportunity to capture my aspirations and myself in as many paragraphs as I wanted, and send it directly to the people out there who might be interested. I was also able to describe in more detail the kind of person I was looking for. It would help him to decide if he resonated with my ideas. I spent a few anguished hours carefully crafting my words, and then hit the “submit” button. There I was, officially looking for marriage in public on the Internet.

The search became more and more addictive. Apart from the obvious fact that there were so many potential suitors online, I saw profiles of men across the country and even the world, and I started to learn about what else was happening in places I’d never previously had insight or access to. It was a new universe, populated entirely with people in the same situation as me. Reading profiles, sending the odd e-mail, scrutinizing each word for meaning and nuance to see if the owner of the profile could hold the key to something special—the process became all absorbing. There were no introductions at all through the “old” channels, and yet here I was swamped for choice, ranging from ghastly to full of potential.

I spent many hours each week reviewing several different marriage sites, reading through new profiles, rereading old ones, and then submitting my requests or responding to requests from other people. Every so often there would be a two-way match and then an initial e-mail, and if that went well, a period of frenetic e-mail exchange. The usual shyness of meeting in person, of not knowing if the person is looking to marry, and whether they could be interested in you, were all gone.

Occasionally I exchanged an introduction with a prospect who had either been rejected or not suggested in the traditional channels by a third party who was busy interfering. We cyberlaughed, sharing an understanding of the flawed matchmaking process. It was remarkably heartening to be able finally to share the trials and emotions of the search so openly. The detachment and anonymity created by the Internet were remarkably cathartic. I felt I was not alone.

There were profiles from the Middle East, Canada, America, Australia, in fact any country you could imagine. I exchanged e-mails across time zones and found out that Muslim men in small-town America felt isolated and abandoned in their faith. In their parents’ struggles for a better life, they had been separated from their communities. In the Middle East, young men told me that there were no jobs for them, and no prospects. In South Asia, some men wanted to maintain traditional marital relations (with men dominating and women submissive), whereas others aspired to “Western” ideas of equality in a relationship with women responsible for earning money too. Despite our different political, social, and economic challenges I came to one simple, obvious conclusion: that we were all looking for the same thing. We all had a strong desire for a partner and the desire finally to find someone to love, and we pursued this with enormous gusto. The global connections opened up a whole new world for me and for the Muslims that I was in touch with. I learned about new places and new experiences, and found far-flung cyber–pen pals. The globalization and easy access to people all around the world changed all the parameters. I had met men from abroad before who had traveled to the UK to meet prospective wives, but this was the first time that I could proactively choose to introduce myself to a man from almost anywhere on earth. It marked a general change in the world, and in the Muslim community, that we were so easily and quickly connected to anyone, anywhere.

As my confidence and sense of self kept growing stronger, I found this global connectivity very liberating and exciting. I could go anywhere and talk to anyone in any location. It melded with my sensibilities as a global citizen. And it enhanced my sense of faith because the language and values that I used as my currency were cross-border and cross-cultural. The worldwide connectivity reflected a change in the wider Muslim community, too. Cheaper phone calls, widespread Internet, and the sharing of news tightened connections between the already existing multitudes of Muslim diasporas. It also reflected the general trend of globalization and creation of cross-territory communities. No longer were national borders a defining factor; instead it was about interests, faith, extracurricular activities. News, events, trends, humor were all shared across the global village. One of those villages was SingleMuslimsville, which I was inhabiting, temporarily I hoped.

The Internet also opened up opportunities for Muslims like me who had grown up in Britain or other Western countries to explore the new multifaceted identities that we had been developing in private without knowing who to share them with. Newsgroups, bulletin boards, and blogs exploded onto the cyberscene with an exponential growth of activity, writing, and opinion. If I had once felt lonely with my British Asian Muslim woman multiversal identity, I knew now that there were other people out there who felt the same.

It was extremely exciting to find messages from different places in the world, respectful and direct approaches from men who were searching and who found your profile interesting. They were usually polite and conscious of the context of the marriage search. No longer was there the need to go through a third party; instead you could get to know someone directly. Messages would tell you unexpected things, from people who were interested in getting to know you. The sweetness and charm of receiving a message sometime in the middle of the working day are exquisite, and at some point, after the volume of e-mails exceeded a certain threshold, there came the moment of seeing a picture of that person or picking up the phone to hear their voice.

I tried not to decide too rapidly upon seeing a picture—photos were deceptive. Speaking on the phone was more revelatory. I never gave my number to anyone but asked them for theirs and then had a brief conversation. I learned that e-mails were misleading. It was too easy to read into them what you wanted to read. Even on the phone you lacked their physical presence and non-verbal cues to really know if the person had genuine potential.

Talking to someone unknown on the phone or meeting an unknown in person were skills I had already honed through the introduction process. But I felt a greater need to be cautious. These were people who had not been vetted and who I had no background information about. On the rare occasion that I finally arranged a meeting in person, I was careful to ensure that my safety was paramount. I would always have someone with me or be in a public space, and, of course, have the fail-safe of all blind dates, a get-out excuse.

GUILT

After several months, I came across Tayyab’s profile. He was American, about my age, working in the technology industry. He showed healthy humor about the online marriage process and his description made me laugh out loud. He didn’t take himself too seriously but sounded sensitive and interesting. I submitted a request to be put in contact with him and he accepted, so we began exchanging e-mails. He lived in Houston, by all accounts a cosmopolitan city with a large Muslim population. At first we just shared facts and opinions, and then slowly we talked about our hopes and dreams about getting married.

Tayyab was of Indian origin, born and brought up in the USA, and very much an active member of one of the more progressive mosques in Houston. He played sports, loved writing, and wanted to make the world a better place. And he wanted someone to share it with. He had reached his late twenties and he wanted a companion, a wife. He had discovered that he was lonely. He had some interesting political and social opinions. He loved watching the news and was clued up about what was happening around the world. We exchanged ideas about the U.S. presidency, modern science, Islamic jurisprudence, emotional intelligence. I was stimulated and challenged. And I was totally hooked. I really believed that he might be the one.

We spoke on the phone, and he was everything I imagined him to be during our e-mail exchange. He was funny, sensitive, emotional, warm, and intelligent. He sent me a photo where he was a small speck in a dark night sky. He looked like a normal twentysomething. The only thing that worried him was that he was only five foot five tall. He was small, only a couple of inches taller than me apparently, but I reassured him that was fine. I had already faced height discrimination and was not about to do the same.

“I’m going to come and visit you in London,” he told me in an e-mail one day. This was big, this was huge, this was momentous. Tayyab had never been outside America. Despite the fact that I had received several suitors who had visited London from abroad on their bride-finding tours, no one from the Internet had yet done so.

It took Tayyab some time to organize his travel arrangements. He had to get himself a passport and arrange with work to take some time off. He grew more and more excited, and I grew more and more nervous. Deep inside me was a mounting trepidation. Even though my parents had conducted some preliminary research about Tayyab and his family, we didn’t know a great deal about his background. My parents were therefore just as concerned as I was but encouraged me to give it a try. This was uncharted territory for them as well.

When he arrived he was introduced to my parents, and each day he would meet them, just as he met me, so that we could all get to know him together. His persona was sharper and more angular than when we had spoken on the phone. The mystery of absence had vanished, and instead I saw his own expressions face-to-face. The biggest challenge was to get to know him almost as a totally new person, because he was different from the character I had created for him when we spoke on the phone. I had experienced this with other people I had met, but with the epic travel across the Atlantic, and his certainty that our meeting in person was just a formality before getting engaged, the contrast between Internet-Tayyab and In-Person-Tayyab was heightened. He was also much more short-tempered than on the phone; the distance and our intermittent interactions had hidden this from me, but in person it was constantly evident, and this is what eventually signaled the end of any potential.

He started to annoy me: he seemed more excited about being in the UK as a tourist than meeting me. He jumped up and down about how our license plates were different, how we drove on a different side of the road, how everyone spoke with cute accents, how our houses were smaller, our cars were tinier, our streets were narrower. Most of all, though, he started by trying to make a show of being well paid. I was more than happy to contribute or even cover our shared expenses, especially in light of the fact he had paid to travel across the world to London. He insisted on paying but then very quickly began complaining about how expensive our coffee was, how expensive our food was, how expensive everything was! And soon his offers to pay, or even share, were deliberately and pointedly withdrawn, despite his initial showmanship about his financial liquidity and his own chivalrous qualities. It was the dentist all over again. This did not bode well for married life.

It was Tayyab’s unpredictable temper that finally sealed the decision for me. I felt enormously guilty that he had traveled so far to see me, but I told myself that I had no reason to feel guilty. I had not forced him to come. Every individual did what they had to do to find a partner. And Tayyab had taken a calculated decision to make this journey, knowing that things might not work out.