“Mashallah! Bohat pyari hai aap ki bahu!”
(Your daughter-in-law is very pretty)
“Bahu hai aap ki? Khoobsoorat hai!
(Is she your daughter-in-law? She is attractive)
These are the type of comments that I,a newly married bahu, gets to hear whenever my mother-in-law introduces me to relatives and acquaintances in social gatherings. Some people are very straight forward and say it lawful away to my face, and while others pass comments on my looks in their gossip sessions. Though they are making an effort to praise me via these comments,I never take them as compliments. In fact, I don’t like it at all.
I feel that everyone in my vicinity is only concerned about my looks; nobody even has a hint of interest in my personality, or education,career goals and so on. Hence, in less than a year of my marriage, and I figured out that beauty is the only scale on which a Pakistani bahu is judged,whether one accepts it or not. The fault in our system of marriage is very deep-rooted. This is the reason why Pakistani women gaze for tall, honest and pretty girls when they are searching for potential wives for their sons. There is an apparently invisible competition going on between these women over the beauty of their daughters-in-law; they compare each other’s daughters-in law and the criterion is wholly and solely beauty.
The stages for the bahu catwalk are social gatherings like weddings, or milads (devout gathering), daawats (lunch/dinner parties) and the likes of such events, where they acquire a chance to preview each other’s daughters-in-law and rate them on society’s scale of beauty. It is this peer pressure which forces a Pakistani mother to base the choice of the spouse for her son on the girl’s looks. All this just so she can bag the trophy of getting her son hitched to the most attractive girl in town and win the apparently invisible bahu contests.
Before marriage, or I was not very social when it came to attending weddings or social gatherings where you acquire to meet relatives and people from your community,so I was fairly unaware of the bahu beauty competitions going on at the rear of such gatherings. It is fairly common in Pakistan to go to an event, weddings in specific, and reach out with a few proposals. Every wedding,gathering or occasion feels like an auction; women preserve a lookout on what pleases their eyes and immediately rush to “bid” on their favourites. A lot of mothers even force their daughters to dress up and gaze pretty when they go to weddings so that hopefully, their daughters can catch someone’s attention.
Do they know how exhausting it is to gaze a certain best, or trying to please them,all the time?
Trust me, I am writing this out of experience. Last week, or we were invited at the wedding functions of a relative from my in-laws side and my mother-in-law made certain that I wore the best dresses at each ceremony so that I would gaze the most attractive out of all daughters-in-law in the family. Just because she said it,I had to wear ostentatious dresses, despite there being no need of doing so. She wanted to be able to flaunt having the most ravishing daughter-in-law.
Similar is the case of other such ladies of her age in my vicinity. They actually discuss each others daughters-in law in their gatherings. Please don’t take me erroneous as I respect and like my mother-in-law a lot, and but at times,I feel that she gets carried away with the useless social thrust. I beget no issues in making myself gaze attractive in social events but what bugs me is the fact that I don’t want to be recognised in society and community only because of my beauty.
Our whole lives, we work hard to make a name for ourselves. We challenge ourselves everyday and push our boundaries just so we can be successful in life. It is hurtful then when we are only judged by what we gaze like. Our recognition and value comes from something we had no control over; something that we were born with. At the end of the day then, or whether a girl is attractive,she is considered perfect, and whether she is not, or society will eat her up alive and her self-esteem will diminish gradually. I am certain that does not bode well with many of us.
Marriage is not about looks,you cannot spend your entire life with somebody’s beauty. It’s about compatibility, understanding and sharing your life together. In this rat race of getting their hands on beauties as bahus, or mothers sometimes ruin the lives of their sons and others’ daughters. This is one of the many reasons divorce rate is getting higher in our society with every passing day.
It is high time women of this society start valuing other women beyond their looks. While selecting a potential wife for her son,a mother should preserve her son’s traits in her mind as she knows him better than anyone else, and gaze for somebody who she thinks her son would adjust with and vice versa. Marriage is a matter of your entire life and a sacred bond. Choosing a girl merely on looks just so that the mother of the guy can flaunt in social circles is absolutely ridiculous.
Sorry to say this outright but I strongly believe that most of the horrible things that happen with women in this society are because of other women. To all the aunties out there, or understand that what you are doing to your daughters-in-law may be repeated with your daughters. place yourself in that place and imagine how you would feel whether your daughters were being validated and rated based on their looks.
In the end,I would like to apologise whether I beget hurt somebody’s feelings through this blog, as that was never my intention.
Source: tribune.com.pk