My family has celebrated two engagements in the past month, and so when I went home last weekend, preparations for the engagement parties, suggestions for the wedding dates, and speculations of what everyone would wear where the foremost topics of conversation.
The marriage frenzy was so intense that even I got a dose of it in the form of advice about the importance of compromise in marriage, a concept with which I fundamentally agree. However, there was an important amendment to the advice I was offered: it was important for women to compromise more in a marriage and be willing to mold themselves to their husbands.
I was astounded. What was it about being a woman that allowed Pakistani culture to recommend that I subsume my needs to those of my husband? Despite my education and the fact that one day I would be self-sufficient and (hopefully) a member of a respected profession with authority and knowledge about the human body and health, I was still being told that in a marriage, none of that mattered. My gender still dictated how a man would interact with me.
There is no doubt that compromise in any relationship is important. Unfortunately, people in my generation are so accustomed to having their every whim satisfied that they do not understand how to compromise, regardless of their gender. The divorce rates for Muslims in the US reflect this development: 31% of marriages end in divorce. Compared to the 50% divorce rate among all Americans, 31% for Muslims may not seem terrible, but in both Iran and Turkey, arguably among the most progressive Muslim countries in terms of education and economic opportunities for women, the divorce rates are below 10%. One could counter that perhaps the permissibility of divorce in the US accounts for the nearly tripled divorce rates among American Muslims, but many Muslim communities have as conservative ideas about divorce in America as they do in either Iran or Turkey, so clearly there are other factors at play in this situation.
The culture of instant self-gratification is partly to blame for the demise of American Muslim marriages; we have lost the patience to work through problems and cannot sacrifice for others. Yet does this problem of not compromising naturally lead to the solution that women must be prepared to become like putty in a man’s hands? If we forego our own identities and our own personalities when we get married, there would probably be fewer problems in a marriage, but there would also be significantly less happiness. Self-immolation is not my version of a compromise. This solution is not feasible not only for me, but for any other Pakistani American. If only women are doing the compromising, a relationship can never truly be a partnership and mutual respect will be nonexistent. People may claim that these ideas of partnership and of men and women being equal are recent inventions heavily influenced by Western society. They are not.
In the Quran, women and men are given different responsibilities in regards to a family—men are explicitly labeled as the protectors and financial providers for their families—but that in no way means that women are second-class citizens. In fact, the opposite is true: the Quran adjoins men to respect women. The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) helped his wives with the housework, and considering that men don’t help their wives with the housework in this day and age, his actions said a lot in the 500s CE.
With these examples, I struggle to understand how the onus of maintaining a marriage has fallen upon Pakistani women. I cannot even ascribe it to the differences in thought among different generations, because growing up, I saw my father helping my mom with the housework, and both my parents worked together and compromised for the sake of their marriage. Obviously then, a partnership is not a novel concept among Pakistanis. It is not something that we women who have been raised in the West have suddenly begun to demand; it is something that has roots in our tradition but has largely been ignored.
Perhaps instead of telling women to mold themselves to their husbands’ needs, we should be teaching both men and women the importance of compromise and sacrifice. Instead of placing the burden of sustaining a marriage on the shoulders of Pakistani women—which obviously has not worked, considering the high divorce rates—we should be asking people to think about marriage as they would think about any other relationship where understanding and equality are central aspects of the bond between two people.
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