Women: what goes on here

Sometimes we're asked to do something unquestionably, something that'll change our lives forever. While this concept might be alien to a liberal few, many of us, more often than not, in this part of the world live with this reality day and night, every single day of our lives, mostly cursing the people who caused us to do what we did.
What most people fail to understand is that more than a few things in life are pre-determined. We're told by those who came before us to accept their decisions as part and package of destiny. Seeing is believing for this generation, and we don't really bow down our heads and look at everything as part of life', we question the authorities of our elders and some of us, who're known as the rebels' have the audacity to defy them.
This isn't about a single person, this reflects the girls who live in contemporary Pakistani society, who go to good schools, come from upper middle class homes, are taught to be adapting daughters at home whereas their schools, the books they read and the media tells them, "it's a free country", "we live in an equal opportunity world", "girls today are doing everything boys do, and more". Every single day, a girl who goes to such schools, reads all the proper books has ultra-modern friends, when goes home, to her conservative family, sinks into a pool of despondency, which shatters every hope of a better future, and a self-reliant life ahead.
Then, there's the tiny proportion in our society, that's different from the conventional households. These are frequently rich, educated, and inspired-from-the-west people. Mothers go out wearing tight fitting jeans, showing of rotund hips and turtle-neck shirts with a bust-line that screams bite me!' and to hell with the driver/ chowkidaar (bodyguard) and the abaya (long dark garment worn my Muslim women) clad aunties who stare. Their daughters are seen wearing sleeveless shirts that also fashionably show off a tiny part of their abdomen suggesting the rest of their torso is gym-toned and perfect. The Levi's they wear are adorned with round-the-hip silver chains. Feet clad in five inch stilettos that make the distant observer feel sorry for the misery their feet are in, but hey! Don't you know? They're IN dude!
The third group is that of the pretenders! They're good at pretending and they'll fake almost everything. Their English accent is made-up merely for the sake of impressing oblivious male counterparts, who the pretenders think, will get attracted, but it usually works the other way round. Their jeans won't be Levi's and their track pants wouldn't be original Nike, but they'd want you to think otherwise. They spend hard earned pennies on stilettos when they have a list of more important to-do's waiting back home at the start of each month. One never knows that they're wearing Sunday bazaar underwear inside the carefully polished exterior.
Then, there's the majority, the conservatives. These are educated / un-educated, rich, poor and middle class. They simply have old-fashioned, more inclined toward religion values. However, not all these people are genuine in their pursuit to find the truth. Often, they'll twist both religion and the norms of our society to suit their own interests. The women in these houses are poor nobodies, more like doormats who'll get to wear trinkets, yet are occasionally scraped with the outdoor boot, with no say in even their own lives, or where to buy the next house, or even pointless political discussions. The men however, are often bigamists with various outdoor romantic interests and overeager male hormones. Their children are brought up in the same manner usually.
It doesn't matter which group of society these women come from, the gist of their lives are the same, "thou shall bow down to thy men." This is especially true when it has to do with marriage, which is basically at the root of a lot of problems that people have in this society.
Love, still is a taboo in our society, as arranged marriages prevail and are obviously in the best interests of the two people who're bound together like animals to spend the rest of their lives together, whether they like it or not. As objections to such marriages increase by our generation our elders have come up with a fascinating idea which serves as a go-between to our conflicting views on love and marriage, they hitch you up with the person of their choice and then prescribe a testing' period commonly known as the engagement. You're told to exchange phone numbers, email ID's, meet once a month or so, in order to get-to-know each other'. In other words, you're told to fall in love with a particular person. Like love was an assignment!
I've always failed to understand how people do it. When you don't know somebody, why would you want to spend countless hours of your time trying to interact with them? It's pointless even worse than the conventional form of arranged marriage because God-forbid if you end up disliking the person at the end of the engagement (read: probationary) period, you actually know and understand the kind of trouble you're getting into before the death sentence actually begins, the waiting period in such cases is more like waiting for the hangman to pull the chain that'll kill you. I've witnessed it a couple of times (third hand, thank goodness for that!) and it leaves me with a feeling of contempt for the institution of marriage in our part of the world.
So, what happens when somebody falls in love? Why is it that love marriages' usually get bitter with time in our part of the world? Well, for starters, I'll be terribly lady-like and blame men for it. When a girl falls in love, she finds out that her boyfriend is terribly understanding, compassionate and aware of her emotional troubles (read: whims) unlike other men, he'll spend countless hours hearing the girl hollering about this and that, and then listening to her whine if her nail that took weeks to grow and now accidentally broke right before the night of an important party or if her younger sister used up her favorite lip gloss that aunty X had brought specially for her from the States, or whatever, will hate it when he becomes the husband. While the guy thinks of this change in attitude as natural, or is even oblivious to it, the girl who is by now used to being pampered like a rotten rich kid, will start hating him for it, and hereby commences a period of fights, which includes calling each other names and sometimes the guy hitting his bickering wife for chewing his brains out. This is followed by divorce and bedeviling elders on either side chanting "I told you so-s!" which I think is actually worse than disowning your kid for getting a divorce. The other common reason for divorce in love marriages are pathetic in-laws, who try to chip away at the relationship only because it happened without their having to intervene. Whatever the reasons might be, the fact remains, falling in love, is NOT the thing to do. In capital letters!
The second option are the infamous arranged marriages, where the aunt of a cousin who has a friend whose son just returned from the US with an MBA and has a flawless character and the latest BMW, will come to convince the girls' grandmother who will talk to a dozen people about the rishtaa (marriage proposal) before actually referring the matter to the parents of the lady concerned. Now, it really won't matter what the guy is actually like, both physical and personality flaws don't matter because he comes from this really rich family where the bahu (daughter-in-law) will be treated like a maharani! Give us a break! To most people it doesn't even matter if the guy has a drinking problem, a dozen ex-s' in his closet and has a receding hairline (when that's the last thing you want) a cauldron-like belly boasting of what's called his khushhali (happiness)!
Hereby, the poor girl is convinced' about how good the guy is and she becomes a Missus Somebody how's she supposed to associate to the guy who is to her what oil is to water? Her problem! The rishtaa aunty will seize the first opportunity to call upon every single person she knows and brag endlessly about the wonderful match she just made.
Now, this totally doesn't mean I'm against the institution of marriage on the whole or of arranged marriages even, but, shouldn't people give us a bit more space, and an occasional say when it comes to these really important decisions of our lives? I am of the opinion that no relationship can be forced upon a person, if you do that, you're likely to end up with a pressure-cooker situation with the lid threatening to blow off at any moment. Each individual is different, and like the cliché goes, no two minds think alike, then why is the fairer sex subjected to the gentle' persuasions of their kind' elders?
It is saddening to see the double standards of our society. I am of the opinion that if a marriage has to be forced upon somebody, then this should be so for both men and women. If a guy can choose the girl he wants to marry and get away with the deed without oppression, then why is the girl traumatized endlessly unless she says her I do-s' with the guy her parents have chosen for her? Girls today need to get a grip on themselves, they need to take a stand and say no, when and where they want to say it. Broken marriages are not the answer, and we can put an end to problems between married people if we bother bonding like with like, i.e., people who generally think the same and live on the same ideas without their private worlds having to go topsy-turvy.