ALKHOBAR: Imagine you are a newlywed. After the thrill of the wedding party and honeymoon, you start living with your partner. Gradually, you discover that your husband shows abnormal behavior, indicating psychological problems. Or you find out that your husband does not earn the salary his family claimed he did before you got married.

Marrying a man with a psychological problem or personality complex is a trap many women fall into. Before their marriage, the family of the bride does not discover these problems in the husband-to-be for many reasons.

The candidate may be from a well-known family and the bride’s family pushes to conclude the marriage; the engagement period is short and not enough for the family to discover the groom’s personality; or the bride’s family does not check the groom’s background. These marriages usually end in failure, and in such cases, it is the wife who pays the price.

Some families try to hide the bad history of the bride or the groom. Sadly, many families rush the wedding without performing a proper background check, thinking that it will be a happy marriage. Once the bride finds herself in the trap of being married to a sick husband, she is faced with either living in torture or choosing divorce and as a result facing condemnation from society.

One of these victims is Um Remas, who talked about the pain and suffering her husband caused her. According to her, her husband and her family deceived her. She said that when he came to ask for her hand, her family told her that he was working in a high position job with a salary of over SR9,000, and that he was the favorite in the family. She said that her family was not able to check the accuracy of the information and relied on what his family had said about him.

“I was shocked to discover shortly after we got married that he worked in a low paying job and earned only SR2,000 a month. His mother, who had been bragging about his good nature, was actually a victim of his bad treatment. He would not hesitate to beat her up when he had the chance,” said Um Remas.

She went on to say that she hated her life with her husband, because she was under mental and physical torture. However, for her it was too late to ask for divorce, because she had a baby girl with him. “My story became an example to others who did not want their daughter to fall in the same trap. My friend asked her husband to submit a certificate from his workplace to prove his position and salary before they got married. As for his personality, she was extra careful and asked more than 10 people about him,” said Um Remas.

Ghayda Abdul Rahman is a Saudi woman who faced the same problem. Her husband’s family was pushing for their marriage, and tried not to give her time to think. “They kept telling me that the groom was the perfect man for any girl, until I was convinced,” said Ghayda. She said that she always suspected that the family was hiding something.

“After marriage I discovered that my husband was taking a lot of medicines. I discovered he was suffering from epilepsy. I was shocked and I felt cheated by him and his family. Despite this, I moved on with him, mainly because I had a boy and a girl with him. Years later, my husband died as a result of his disease, leaving behind two children.” She said that marriage is about honesty and sharing and that she could not get over the fact that she was cheated. She is extra careful about her daughter’s future, and will allow her daughter to marry someone only after a careful background check.

Nasreen Jasem is another case of a woman deceived by her husband. She said that she didn’t observe anything strange in her husband-to-be when they were engaged. Everything looked fine until after she got married. She said, “I discovered that sometimes he woke up in the middle of the night and started crying. Another night I found him in a dark room crying and I discovered that he wet the bed while being asleep.”

She decided to confront his family. At first they denied anything, saying that he was perfectly normal. When she pressured them to tell the truth, they told her that he was suffering from severe psychological problems, and that he was taking medicines for it.

Unlike the others, she left him and asked for a divorce, even approaching the courts because she felt cheated.

According to Omar Al-Khodi, law professor at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah, there is no law to protect the wife from the husband if she discovers that there is something wrong with him after they get married. He says that according to Islamic law, she has the right to file for a divorce in court.

Al-Khodi thinks that there are some unacceptable characteristics in husbands that wives might discover after marriage. In these cases it is better for the wife to demand divorce, because continuing such a marriage is a disaster. He adds, “Sadly there are many families that hide information about the condition of their sons. Such problems could be solved if special laws against them were approved.”

He calls for a special test that determines the husband’s ability to get married, as well as educational seminars about marriage. He says that the same way there are premarital tests for a potential spouse’s physical health, there should be other tests that examine the mental health of the groom.