Huda Al-Marashi's Blog
September 11, 2018
The Myth of a Shared Life
I had the moment my future husband would see me in my wedding dress all planned out. Although it wasn’t necessarily a Middle Eastern tradition, he’d be waiting for me at the end of an aisle. I’d walk in with my father, and upon seeing me in all my bridal glory, he had had one of the following options: a) cry with manly restraint b) open his mouth wide with surprise before breaking into a smile of wild, uncontained joy c) step back and clutch his heart so stricken by my beauty d) some combination of the above.
When I got engaged at eighteen to the son of our closest family friends, I was disappointed to discover that my fiancé, Hadi, also had an image of the moment he’d first see me in my wedding dress and it involved no such dramatic displays of devotion. He merely wanted to be the first one to see me in my wedding dress in a private moment that only the two of us shared.
I’d never seen a bride and groom meet before their wedding in any movies or television shows. I supposed Hadi could have the kind of the reaction I desired when it was just the two of us, but then our guests wouldn’t witness his outpouring of emotion. How else would anybody know that we were not getting married because of our families’ friendship but because Hadi loved me more than any man, in the history of time, had ever loved another woman?
The fact that Hadi even had an opinion about the matter both surprised and bothered me. When it came to weddings, men were supposed to be conveniently indifferent, content just to get the girl. And while I faulted Hadi for not fulfilling this gender stereotype, I accused him of another―the desire to see me first was chauvinistic and controlling. It was as if I was some sort of present for his eyes only or worse an object whose unveiling he wanted to control.
We argued about the logistics of this moment until our wedding approached. When we decided to take pictures together before our ceremony, I realized my argument had become a moot point. On our wedding day, my mother helped me get ready in the staging room across from our hotel ballroom, and I quipped that she should close her eyes and try not to see me.
Later when Hadi finally joined me in the room, he smiled wide and took my hand. He said something about how happy he was that we were getting married, but my mind was elsewhere―on finally seeing the ballroom, my friends, my family. For me this wasn’t a moment to savor. I was playing along, already humoring the man I would be marrying in minutes.
At the time, the disconnect between us struck me as sad and dysfunctional. I had no idea that married life would march on as a parade of moments just like this one, where Hadi and I would share the same physical space but not the same emotional space, and that this was not sad in any way just inevitable and completely natural.
Hadi and I always had been and always would be filling in the scenes of narratives set in motion long before we became a couple. For all the romantic images that had filled my head, I had grown up on marriage stories where the moral always rested in resignation. From the outset of our relationship, I was looking for signs of the things that I thought to be true, that marriage was about sacrifice, about men dictating and women bending.
It took me years to understand that my mind had penned Hadi’s role in the above anecdote. I’d assigned him patriarchal motivations because I didn’t know him well enough to know what he was really thinking. It would take me several more years to discern the kinds of stories Hadi’s mind told about an indifferent bride who was more concerned with her wedding, her family, and her friends than the man she was marrying.
This mental gap used to strike me as inherently unfair; we are not privy to the thoughts and memories of those with whom we are most intimate. We can only guess how our lovers are recording and remembering the time they spend with us. But over time I’ve come to see the beauty in this space, as well. It reminds us of the mystery behind our partners’ familiar faces, voices, and touches. It reminds us that just because we share our days, our tables, and our beds with our spouses, it does not mean that we share the same life.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/loveinsh...
When I got engaged at eighteen to the son of our closest family friends, I was disappointed to discover that my fiancé, Hadi, also had an image of the moment he’d first see me in my wedding dress and it involved no such dramatic displays of devotion. He merely wanted to be the first one to see me in my wedding dress in a private moment that only the two of us shared.
I’d never seen a bride and groom meet before their wedding in any movies or television shows. I supposed Hadi could have the kind of the reaction I desired when it was just the two of us, but then our guests wouldn’t witness his outpouring of emotion. How else would anybody know that we were not getting married because of our families’ friendship but because Hadi loved me more than any man, in the history of time, had ever loved another woman?
The fact that Hadi even had an opinion about the matter both surprised and bothered me. When it came to weddings, men were supposed to be conveniently indifferent, content just to get the girl. And while I faulted Hadi for not fulfilling this gender stereotype, I accused him of another―the desire to see me first was chauvinistic and controlling. It was as if I was some sort of present for his eyes only or worse an object whose unveiling he wanted to control.
We argued about the logistics of this moment until our wedding approached. When we decided to take pictures together before our ceremony, I realized my argument had become a moot point. On our wedding day, my mother helped me get ready in the staging room across from our hotel ballroom, and I quipped that she should close her eyes and try not to see me.
Later when Hadi finally joined me in the room, he smiled wide and took my hand. He said something about how happy he was that we were getting married, but my mind was elsewhere―on finally seeing the ballroom, my friends, my family. For me this wasn’t a moment to savor. I was playing along, already humoring the man I would be marrying in minutes.
At the time, the disconnect between us struck me as sad and dysfunctional. I had no idea that married life would march on as a parade of moments just like this one, where Hadi and I would share the same physical space but not the same emotional space, and that this was not sad in any way just inevitable and completely natural.
Hadi and I always had been and always would be filling in the scenes of narratives set in motion long before we became a couple. For all the romantic images that had filled my head, I had grown up on marriage stories where the moral always rested in resignation. From the outset of our relationship, I was looking for signs of the things that I thought to be true, that marriage was about sacrifice, about men dictating and women bending.
It took me years to understand that my mind had penned Hadi’s role in the above anecdote. I’d assigned him patriarchal motivations because I didn’t know him well enough to know what he was really thinking. It would take me several more years to discern the kinds of stories Hadi’s mind told about an indifferent bride who was more concerned with her wedding, her family, and her friends than the man she was marrying.
This mental gap used to strike me as inherently unfair; we are not privy to the thoughts and memories of those with whom we are most intimate. We can only guess how our lovers are recording and remembering the time they spend with us. But over time I’ve come to see the beauty in this space, as well. It reminds us of the mystery behind our partners’ familiar faces, voices, and touches. It reminds us that just because we share our days, our tables, and our beds with our spouses, it does not mean that we share the same life.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/loveinsh...
Equal in the Eyes of Marriage
I was a novelty to Ashley. I’d never travelled or lived alone. I’d never been to bar or a club. I’d never had a boyfriend before my husband nor kissed another man. Ashley and I might not have become such close friends had we not been living in Guadalajara, Mexico while our husbands attended the local medical school, but in the company of so much strangeness, we were more similar than different. We were both in our early twenties, and we both spoke English as our first language. We’d lived in California and were familiar with the same towns, the same malls, the same restaurants. We’d both been wrested from our familiar routines only to find ourselves with too much time on our hands and too little direction.
Our friendship quickly evolved into a symbiotic relationship. Ashley had a car, and I was learning Spanish. She drove us places, and I translated. We looked for apartments and paid our bills together. We got our teeth cleaned, our eyebrows waxed, and our hair cut together. We went furniture shopping in the manufacturing towns outside the city, and we scoured all the local flea markets. None of these tasks were small feats in a different country prior to navigation systems and cell phones. We made each other brave.
On the road and over lunches and dinners, Ashley and I talked about our lives before Mexico. Ashley told me about her previous boyfriends, how she met her husband, their relationship while dating and how it had changed since they’d gotten married. And even though I had little to offer in this regard, we connected. I hadn’t much choice in who I picked to marry, but I struggled with the picking at all. There were Muslim girls like myself in Mexico, alone, studying, and wearing the hijab no less. My mother had always told me I had to get married before I could study at any distance from my home. Why was I a wife when I, too, could’ve been a student?
To release the tension, we made fun of our husbands; we criticized their study habits―one studied too much, the other too little. We compared ourselves to other female medical students who’d be doctors at the end of this when all we’d be was wives. Then we’d pick on their hair and clothes until we felt better about ourselves. Our gripe sessions were catty, but they were also my survival. They were small reprieves from the discontent that dogged me; the moments when I was certain I was the only woman of my generation supporting a man in his career, washing his clothes and his dishes, and preparing his meals. Just when I wanted to blame my lot in life on being an Arab, Muslim woman, Ashley reminded me that for all its promised freedoms, her Western culture and religion had led her to the same destination. Ashley may have served in the military and married a fellow officer. She may have gone on romantic dates and had a surprise marriage proposal, but it hadn’t spared her from moving to Mexico or any domestic drudgery.
This realization felt weighty, as if it were a revelation, and this in itself troubled me. To have made this assumption, on some level I must have believed that Ashley’s non-Muslim, North American background entitled her to a better love story and life thereafter and that being an Arab, Muslim women had entitled me to less. In spite of the years I’d spent arguing against generalizations about Middle Eastern women in my college classroom and challenging those ideas in term papers, those very notions had seeped into me. As soon as things got complicated in my marriage, I didn’t think, “Such is the nature of human existence; all people make sacrifices in their relationships.” Instead I’d marched into the script of the Arab, Muslim wife that has to give up her studies to follow her husband, the young woman who’d been married off to a spouse her family picked for her. I looked at the Muslim women studying in Mexico as the anomalies, the ones that had escaped the story that claimed me and my mother before me. It was the kind mental sloppiness I would have found inexcusable from someone outside of my community, but I’d allowed banal prejudice to color how I viewed my marriage, my spouse, and my family.
Ashley and I separated when our husband’s chose off-campus clinical rotations in their fourth year. A year later, we met up at their graduation and marveled at the toll the uncertainty over this entire educational adventure had taken on us, how sweet the relief that now lived in its place. We agreed that as much as this journey had strained our marriages, it had ultimately made our relationships with our spouses stronger.
Ashley and I stayed in touch for several years before we lost each other to moves and changed email addresses. But the gift of that friendship, what has stayed with me to this very day, was that it made me witness that the journey of womanhood and the journey of married life are great equalizers. No matter how different the roads we take to marriage, all women have to reconcile the role of wife with the centuries of convention that surrounded the term.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/loveinsh...
Our friendship quickly evolved into a symbiotic relationship. Ashley had a car, and I was learning Spanish. She drove us places, and I translated. We looked for apartments and paid our bills together. We got our teeth cleaned, our eyebrows waxed, and our hair cut together. We went furniture shopping in the manufacturing towns outside the city, and we scoured all the local flea markets. None of these tasks were small feats in a different country prior to navigation systems and cell phones. We made each other brave.
On the road and over lunches and dinners, Ashley and I talked about our lives before Mexico. Ashley told me about her previous boyfriends, how she met her husband, their relationship while dating and how it had changed since they’d gotten married. And even though I had little to offer in this regard, we connected. I hadn’t much choice in who I picked to marry, but I struggled with the picking at all. There were Muslim girls like myself in Mexico, alone, studying, and wearing the hijab no less. My mother had always told me I had to get married before I could study at any distance from my home. Why was I a wife when I, too, could’ve been a student?
To release the tension, we made fun of our husbands; we criticized their study habits―one studied too much, the other too little. We compared ourselves to other female medical students who’d be doctors at the end of this when all we’d be was wives. Then we’d pick on their hair and clothes until we felt better about ourselves. Our gripe sessions were catty, but they were also my survival. They were small reprieves from the discontent that dogged me; the moments when I was certain I was the only woman of my generation supporting a man in his career, washing his clothes and his dishes, and preparing his meals. Just when I wanted to blame my lot in life on being an Arab, Muslim woman, Ashley reminded me that for all its promised freedoms, her Western culture and religion had led her to the same destination. Ashley may have served in the military and married a fellow officer. She may have gone on romantic dates and had a surprise marriage proposal, but it hadn’t spared her from moving to Mexico or any domestic drudgery.
This realization felt weighty, as if it were a revelation, and this in itself troubled me. To have made this assumption, on some level I must have believed that Ashley’s non-Muslim, North American background entitled her to a better love story and life thereafter and that being an Arab, Muslim women had entitled me to less. In spite of the years I’d spent arguing against generalizations about Middle Eastern women in my college classroom and challenging those ideas in term papers, those very notions had seeped into me. As soon as things got complicated in my marriage, I didn’t think, “Such is the nature of human existence; all people make sacrifices in their relationships.” Instead I’d marched into the script of the Arab, Muslim wife that has to give up her studies to follow her husband, the young woman who’d been married off to a spouse her family picked for her. I looked at the Muslim women studying in Mexico as the anomalies, the ones that had escaped the story that claimed me and my mother before me. It was the kind mental sloppiness I would have found inexcusable from someone outside of my community, but I’d allowed banal prejudice to color how I viewed my marriage, my spouse, and my family.
Ashley and I separated when our husband’s chose off-campus clinical rotations in their fourth year. A year later, we met up at their graduation and marveled at the toll the uncertainty over this entire educational adventure had taken on us, how sweet the relief that now lived in its place. We agreed that as much as this journey had strained our marriages, it had ultimately made our relationships with our spouses stronger.
Ashley and I stayed in touch for several years before we lost each other to moves and changed email addresses. But the gift of that friendship, what has stayed with me to this very day, was that it made me witness that the journey of womanhood and the journey of married life are great equalizers. No matter how different the roads we take to marriage, all women have to reconcile the role of wife with the centuries of convention that surrounded the term.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/loveinsh...
A Married Woman
When I was growing up, my Iraqi-born mother responded to my requests to travel alone, consider schools out-of-state, or stay out late with friends with the same answer, “When you get married.” Once I got married, I’d be somebody else’s problem. Then, it wouldn’t be her place to tell me no. Then, it would be my husband’s job to worry about me.
Marriage, in my adolescent mind, was the only way to an independent adulthood. Western culture may have referred to marriage as settling down, but I associated it with freedom. Marriage would sanction my first relationship with a man. It would transition me from my parents’ authority to my husband’s, and I was convinced my future husband would do whatever I wanted. He was not an individual with his own goals and desires; he was the supporting actor in my life’s script.
The bridal magazines I pored over as a teenager only confirmed this notion. In every wedding dress advertisement, the groom’s sole purpose was to gaze longingly at his beautiful bride. Clearly the bride was the star of the wedding, the most important character, and this alone made marriage superior to dating. Girls with boyfriends didn’t get pearly sets of bone china, gleaming flatware, or crystal goblets; they didn’t don flowing white gowns with tiaras, slice into towering cakes, or go to exotic destinations for their honeymoon. But if I was a married woman, I could wake up next to my husband, watch him shave every day before leaving to work in a pressed suit and tie, and then according to Sheena Easton’s Morning Train, he’d come home and take me a movie, to a restaurant, slow-dancing, anything I want.
The two cultures I straddled, American and Iraqi, disagreed on so much, but they both agreed that marriage was a shiny new beginning. It was a life of matching underwear, fancy pajamas, sophisticated clothes, and smooth, hairless legs. It was beautifully set tables with fresh flowers and groceries bought at boutique markets. I didn’t see these ideas as the realization of my every when-I-grow-up image. I didn’t recognize that I was falling for advertising’s promise that consumer fulfillment led to personal transformation.
When I was twenty years old, I married the son of our closest family friends in a wedding that brought my every bridal magazine fantasy to life. But after six hours of smiling for photographs, hugging family and friends, and twirling under a grand chandelier in layers of tulle, I was no longer a bride. I was a wife in a lifelong relationship with another person, a daughter in another family. While those new ties brought with them wonderful, tender moments, I hadn’t allowed any room for the mundane in my vision of the future, and anything short of sheer fabulousness, shook me. Friday night movies at home meant my husband and I were already a boring married couple. Lazy Sunday mornings meant we never did anything fun. Quiet weekday dinners meant we’d run out of things to say to each other. Squabbles over whose parents we’d stay with and for how long meant we were too different to ever be happy together.
On visits home, I complained to my mother. “Why did you tell me I could do everything after I got married? Marriage just makes things harder.”
To this, she offered different explanations. “That’s what I was told;” “I just wanted something to tell you to keep you home and safe;” “It is one thing to let a boy go out in the world alone, but with a girl, you worry about her reputation;” “Maybe it wasn’t right, but how was I supposed to know you were listening so carefully?”
Gradually I came to see the particular, the maternal, and even the fear behind the rules that had defined my life, the rules I’d always assumed were based on my religion or at the very least, my culture. And even more gradually still, I came to understand that while I’d inherited a myriad of gender, familial, and media expectations, these ideas had only been partially to blame for my discontent. The truth was that simple refrain of “When you get married,” had cleaved my mind. It had convinced me of a great big divide, the before and after marriage.
What I wish I’d known as a twenty year old bride is that for all the externals that change with marriage, the nature of life is consistent. There is no fix to the angst of living, no person that will deliver you from the work of existence. You will feel lonely; sometimes when your spouse is sitting right next you or sleeping in the same bed. You will navigate your mind’s mental wilderness alone, and you will communicate what you found there to a partner who may or may not understand. Your underwear will get holes in them. You will wear your ratty, old pajamas, and your spouse will, too. One day you’ll understand that this is not the disappointment of married life, but it’s reward―to carry on with the business of day to day living with someone at your side.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/loveinsh...
Marriage, in my adolescent mind, was the only way to an independent adulthood. Western culture may have referred to marriage as settling down, but I associated it with freedom. Marriage would sanction my first relationship with a man. It would transition me from my parents’ authority to my husband’s, and I was convinced my future husband would do whatever I wanted. He was not an individual with his own goals and desires; he was the supporting actor in my life’s script.
The bridal magazines I pored over as a teenager only confirmed this notion. In every wedding dress advertisement, the groom’s sole purpose was to gaze longingly at his beautiful bride. Clearly the bride was the star of the wedding, the most important character, and this alone made marriage superior to dating. Girls with boyfriends didn’t get pearly sets of bone china, gleaming flatware, or crystal goblets; they didn’t don flowing white gowns with tiaras, slice into towering cakes, or go to exotic destinations for their honeymoon. But if I was a married woman, I could wake up next to my husband, watch him shave every day before leaving to work in a pressed suit and tie, and then according to Sheena Easton’s Morning Train, he’d come home and take me a movie, to a restaurant, slow-dancing, anything I want.
The two cultures I straddled, American and Iraqi, disagreed on so much, but they both agreed that marriage was a shiny new beginning. It was a life of matching underwear, fancy pajamas, sophisticated clothes, and smooth, hairless legs. It was beautifully set tables with fresh flowers and groceries bought at boutique markets. I didn’t see these ideas as the realization of my every when-I-grow-up image. I didn’t recognize that I was falling for advertising’s promise that consumer fulfillment led to personal transformation.
When I was twenty years old, I married the son of our closest family friends in a wedding that brought my every bridal magazine fantasy to life. But after six hours of smiling for photographs, hugging family and friends, and twirling under a grand chandelier in layers of tulle, I was no longer a bride. I was a wife in a lifelong relationship with another person, a daughter in another family. While those new ties brought with them wonderful, tender moments, I hadn’t allowed any room for the mundane in my vision of the future, and anything short of sheer fabulousness, shook me. Friday night movies at home meant my husband and I were already a boring married couple. Lazy Sunday mornings meant we never did anything fun. Quiet weekday dinners meant we’d run out of things to say to each other. Squabbles over whose parents we’d stay with and for how long meant we were too different to ever be happy together.
On visits home, I complained to my mother. “Why did you tell me I could do everything after I got married? Marriage just makes things harder.”
To this, she offered different explanations. “That’s what I was told;” “I just wanted something to tell you to keep you home and safe;” “It is one thing to let a boy go out in the world alone, but with a girl, you worry about her reputation;” “Maybe it wasn’t right, but how was I supposed to know you were listening so carefully?”
Gradually I came to see the particular, the maternal, and even the fear behind the rules that had defined my life, the rules I’d always assumed were based on my religion or at the very least, my culture. And even more gradually still, I came to understand that while I’d inherited a myriad of gender, familial, and media expectations, these ideas had only been partially to blame for my discontent. The truth was that simple refrain of “When you get married,” had cleaved my mind. It had convinced me of a great big divide, the before and after marriage.
What I wish I’d known as a twenty year old bride is that for all the externals that change with marriage, the nature of life is consistent. There is no fix to the angst of living, no person that will deliver you from the work of existence. You will feel lonely; sometimes when your spouse is sitting right next you or sleeping in the same bed. You will navigate your mind’s mental wilderness alone, and you will communicate what you found there to a partner who may or may not understand. Your underwear will get holes in them. You will wear your ratty, old pajamas, and your spouse will, too. One day you’ll understand that this is not the disappointment of married life, but it’s reward―to carry on with the business of day to day living with someone at your side.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/loveinsh...
