So you are a guy and you are now ready to get married and start a family, and from ALL the girlfriends you had; none was good enough to be your wife; what would you do? What is the next step in your life?
You go to mommy dearest and ask her to find you a bride; she asks you to describe your wife to be, and you start taking her through your preference list or wish list of physical and spiritual characteristics of Mrs. You.
It is your mom's job now to work hard to find you the perfect match and when she does, she shows you the photos of the lucky wifey nominees with you being the only and ultimate judge to pick the finalists.
But let me not be very harsh on you here; you need to really see those nominees and sit with them for an hour or two before you make your mind and give the final verdict. So your mom sets out to work again to get appointments with the families for you to go and pay them a visit which in most cases is a chaperoned short visit.
You start your exhausting mission going from one house to another, trying to figure out which one of them fulfills that maximum number of preferences from the list, and you disqualify some of them and some are kept pending till further notice.
Once you have short listed them to a few or a couple, you may take another visit to make sure that you are on the right track. You keep this on until you finally decide on who the lucky lady is; and you go back to her house; armed with your charm and good reputation, and you make your position stronger by taking family members with you, and you pop the question to the lady and ask her dad for her hand in marriage.
Of course they will be ready for such a request but the cliché has to be performed once and again, and then ladies and gentlemen; I present to you Mr. and Mrs. You!
Can anyone tell me what is wrong with the described scenario? I really don’t believe how men put themselves and others through this, and how they take a life altering decision based on imaginary preferences. How do they know what they want? How can they tell that they ended up with the right match? How do they predict that this will be a successful marriage? Or is it all a game of luck?
We watch the stupid show Joe Millionaire, with a big scam of a handsome guy who does exactly what men are doing; he courts, flirts and dances with the ladies and at the end of each week, he short lists them even more. The game goes on and on till he is down to 2 girls, at which time he needs to give the final verdict as to who the lucky girl is. The difference is that this Joe guy tells the disqualified girls why they were dismissed from the competition, but in the real world, the girls are kept wondering what went wrong and thinking that it is their fault that "3arees el ghafleh" never came back or called.
I know that some of you guys out there would want to attack me for my cynicism about this issue, but it really gets to me how some guys put themselves and others in such a position without any considerations to the harmful consequences that might occur.
You might say that some of these arranged marriages do work in the end, but how confident are we that the relationship is successful or just hanging in there because of the culture, kids or whatever reason there might be? How confident are we that these same men are regretting the way they chose their lifelong partner and wish that time would go back to change things? How confident are we that these couples have common language between them? How confident are we that they are loyal towards each other?
In my opinion; this is a huge risk that both are taking, and please don’t tell me that they will be engaged and can test their feelings and compatibility, because we all know that it never worked and that the engagement period is the time when each of them is at their very best, showing only the good part of things and compiling all the bad things till after marriage. No wonder many couples go through post honeymoon shock or post-wedding depression as it is medically defined.
Newsflash; this is not a game; this is a lifetime commitment that one cannot break without consequences, and it cannot be erased from your life. Maybe it is about time we gave mommy dearest some time off, and married someone that we can talk to and relate to on the long run. The dating game is going so far with the way we lead our lives to the extent that both genders are taking relationships among them way too lightly and entering these relationships for the wrong reasons.
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amusing!
Does everyone has to get married?! What's wrong of being single and free from all constraints!