To most Saudi women, getting married is a priority in life; so, if God forbid, it doesn’t happen, there may well be sadness and despair. Although a woman herself may imagine all kinds of reasons for her “failure,” it is society which puts a great deal of pressure on women to get married and stay married.
From girlhood, females are taught that their worth is in their physical appearance. For example, girls with fair skin are preferred to those with darker skin; tall girls are better than short ones and a girl with long silky hair has an advantage over the one who lacks it.
So, in other words, if you are a girl who possesses none of the above, you may be doomed to a life of delayed sexual activity because you will most likely not marry before the tall, fair girls; and you will probably have a stormy marriage since you will have to marry what the tall, fair girls have rejected (the leftovers!). And because you will often compare yourself to other girls who married before you, you will have a very small sense of your own self-worth and low self-esteem.
What makes all this so much worse is the girl’s own family, friends and the rest of the community she is living in, which pushes her to focus principally on her physical attributes without much regard to her character. This is so because culturally the most important thing for a Saudi girl is to get married; and men usually choose wives based on how they look. Therefore, no matter what educational qualification she has or what knowledge she possesses, she is nothing if she is single. It is almost as if men provide value and self-worth to women by simply changing the woman’s state from “single” to “married.”
It is frustrating to see an educated young girl genuinely believing in these traditional thoughts. She may be in her early 20s but already she thinks of herself as a “spinster” whose life has gone down the drain because her hand has not yet been asked for!
It genuinely angers me to read about women who are educated and possibly even employed and yet who live in emotional agony because they have not been granted the social privilege of marriage. If women in this day and age think that way, then what is the difference between our generation and our mothers’ or grandmothers’? Why can’t Saudi women be valued from within instead of accepting what someone else thinks of them? Why does our culture look at marriage as something which everybody must do? Aren’t there people who are just not cut out for marriage?
What is surely just as bad as all these things is that many get married without having the slightest idea of what they are getting themselves into. Marriage is not only for sex; it is also about companionship based on mutual responsibilities and rights and it needs two mature adults to make it succeed!
If we women continue marrying for the wrong reasons, then there is no surprise that many marriages either fail or drag on in misery because any man would have been fine so long as the goal was only to be married. When partners are chosen by families, instead of the actual person who is getting married, feelings of love and devotion are overlooked from the beginning. Both the husband and wife could be initially replaced by anyone else and the union would probably have lasted because it was not built on any personal specifications. The physical and material reasons for the marriage might have easily been found in many others.
Saudi men and women do not have the opportunity to get to know, or even see each other, before marriage; they are not allowed to examine each other’s characters which would help them to develop healthy feelings of love and so keep the promises made at the time of marriage. So is it puzzling that some married men and women are not happy? It is not easy to merge two lives into one and expect everyone to have a successful and joyful experience, let alone have a new life to begin with misconceptions and sexist stereotypes.
It is true that this is not unique to Saudi society, but what makes our social life so “special” is our overemphasis on getting married and staying married, regardless of any circumstances. I did some research on Saudi “spinsters” as well as on divorced women and it seems that social problems before marriage (e.g. feelings of being forced into spinsterhood) transform into new issues during marriage which may cause the marriage to fail. This makes me wonder if the woman’s personal psychology and low self-esteem are not responsible for many Saudi marital problems.
I think it is essential for every man and woman to embrace his or her own individuality and self-worth, regardless of what others think and want since it is obvious that when we lose ourselves in a group, problems arise and no one is there to help.
(Dr. Maha Al-Hujailan is a medical researcher at King Khaled University Hospital in Riyadh. She can be reached at [email protected].)