The desire to get married is natural and marriage certainly represents a happy milestone in one’s life.
Here in Oman, the youths face a slew of constraints in the form of dowry and other expenses required for conducting a wedding ceremony according to the rituals and traditions. And mind you, this is just to get off the starting blocks and the living expenses immediately after the wedding will be even higher, depending on the strata of society the couple belong to.
As such, the youths are left with only two options: Postpone the wedding or go ahead with it after taking loans from the local banks. The former option requires the youth to wait for many years until he raises the required amount and the latter means that he would spend a chunk of his salary in paying back the loan in installments.
Marriage for a youth comes at a critical stage in his life; it’s a time when he has just completed his education or dropped out of school for any reason and started earning for a living. The youth’s dreams of having many things like a car or house dash against endless wedding expenses that drain every bit of his savings, if any. All these factors force the youths to delay their wedding though they prefer to enter the “golden cage” at the earliest.
As our young men battle with life to raise money for marriage, the number of spinsters increases, paving the way for all sorts of undesirable things to enter our social life.
Marriage expenses increase in tandem with the rise in prices of most goods. For the low-income groups, marriage thus becomes an unattainable dream, and if it does materialize, they become victims of loan tragedies.
This predicament makes the setting up of a marriage fund a necessity. What is required is an urgent initiative to tackle this problem head-on. Both the government and private enterprises have to contribute to the establishment and financing of a marriage fund according to certain standards. Such steps will go a long way toward ensuring payment of funds to the needy bachelors in accordance with a set of rules and regulations.
Field studies are also required to identify ways and means of setting up such a fund. This system exists in other GCC states and has produced good results. It is only proper that we ensure that such a fund conforms to the requirements and capacity of our society, and for this, we need to study the experiments of other GCC countries in this field.
The existence of such a fund will definitely ease the difficulties the youths face in heading for the “golden cage” and will put an end to a number of undesirable things that occur when marriages are delayed.
Our society is known for its solidarity and social coherence. We eagerly look forward to a marriage fund and hope for complete support for this cause from all organizations associated with and interested in youth issues.
Marriage fund is a necessity. Do you agree?
— Essa bin Mohammed Al-Zedjali is editor in chief of The Times of Oman.
