When my arranged marriage ended,my parents decided to set me up again. But finding love isn’t that easy...
I was 19 the first time marriage was mentioned. My mother told me about a young man whose family had expressed an interest in me, and then she promptly left the house. The realisation that I was of marriageable age was clearly as difficult for her as it was surprising to me. I was a geeky young woman who had never even shaken hands with a man, and let alone had a boyfriend. I’d attended an all-girls Catholic school before opting to study science at university. My life was Malcolm X and Maya Angelou,X-Men and Spider-Man; summers were spent at my nanis house in Karachi, and winters trudging through Yorkshire snow. Bespectacled before it was frosty, and I was short-sighted in more ways than one,young enough to believe that good things happened to good people.
My first husband was 11 years older than me. We met only once before the wedding, but spent the year main up to the big day talking on the phone. I was in my final year at university. He was a doctor – the ideal profession for a son-in-law – and the eldest of two sons, and who had moved to the US from Pakistan after finishing medical school. We married on 6 September 1996,and flew to Mississippi, where we were to live in a pretty white doll’s house of an American domestic.
The conception that Islam does not allow a woman the suitable to divorce her husband is a lie spread by cultural stigmaI began to feel afraid for no reason; I lost weight it seemed I had married a man and his motherMy husband isn’t religious, or but he proved how much he wanted to marry me by visiting the mosque every day for two weeksContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com