Weddings in my family have always inspired a certain element of fear in me, as I knew one day it'd be a possibility for me. It's also the arranged element, I've never come to terms with the fact the bride and groom are strangers.
Marrying age in our community depends
on the family and can vary. I was able to avoid marriage for
a long time because I was studying, which has since become a common excuse.
But I know of two weddings very recently, both of them my second cousins where one was
sixteen and the other seventeen. The sixteen year old was taken out of school and
missed her GCSE's to go to Pakistan for her wedding, whilst the seventeen
year old’s college studies were stopped abruptly for the same reason.
The reasons for the age of marriage depend on many things.
Some parents, like mine, allow the girls to educate, thinking it’s good for her to have a career. Inevitably those are the girls who are the most
difficult to find potential suitors for as the boys are always less
educated and the girls, with the ability to think for themselves, often don’t want
to marry a taxi driver, the most common profession of the men in my community.
Those parents who marry their daughters when they're teenagers usually do so for two reasons. The first is out of fear. This is usually driven by
other girls presenting problems for their parents, in the form of a boyfriend or an older girl refusing marriage like
I did. So they get her married before she’s old enough to say no,
or before she starts getting involved with boys. At a young age parents have
more influence and can persuade her with promises of how great
the wedding will be, how beautiful she’ll look and how when she has her
own husband, she can do what she wants.
Because she’s at an age where a normal
teenager would have their first boyfriend, the husband effectively becomes
that. This is what happened to both my second cousins. Being so young
and living within our close knit Pakistani - Kashmiri community they probably couldn’t
even imagine what it would be like not to be part of it, to say no and strike out on their own.
Marriage is also an effective band aid for
almost every problem a son or daughter presents to their family. Son going out all
night, not listening to his parents? Get him married, with the responsibility of
a wife at home he’ll stop doing those normal teenage things. Daughter got
a secret boyfriend? Get her married to anyone, as quickly as possible. Once she has a husband she’ll be fine.
These reasons are at odds with what marriage should
mean and signify. It should be a union of two people, who want to be together. But in our community, it’s used to stop young people doing things which are
perceived as ‘bad’. Translate ‘bad’ – anything indicative of Western
culture.
I'm not saying these marriages don't work. My parents, my sister, my brother and some of my nieces and nephews have all had such marriages. They do work, but for all the wrong reasons. They work because of the sense of obligation drummed into us from a young age, that we must abide by what our parents say and respect their honour and never do anything which could blacken the family name. This is why Parveen's marriage is viewed as a success by my parents.
What isn't seen is the struggle between the couple. If one half of the couple is from Pakistan, which they often are, the first difficulty is language. The British half probably doesn't speak our language (a dialect of Urdu/Punjabi) because of the precedence of English. And the Pakistani half will not speak English. So already there are problems with communication, at least until they both get up to speed with the language they are weak in.
What do they have in common? Despite restrictions in freedom, the British half will enjoy some Western pursuits, such as movies, songs, pop groups etc. The Pakistani half won't have these interests. Although our community has never given freedom to girls, some things over the years have been allowed. Going shopping in a group, pursuing some kind of further education. The Pakistani half, if male, usually doesn't approve of this, having been bought up in a male dominated environment. He has seen women cook, clean and generally slave for men all his life. To see a woman with even the most basic of freedom or doing something slightly Western is at odds with his belief system.
But a sense of duty and obligation pushes through and these marriages do work. Children are encouraged as quickly as possible (another band aid) and the couples stay together. I have a twenty-three year old nephew who was married at nineteen and has a son who's almost one. Everytime I see his son, I remember being ten years old when his father was born. Here I am at thirty-three, a great aunt. I'm actually a great aunt five times over.
