Do any of us know what it is that we are looking for in a prospective spouse when we find ourselves ‘on the market’? A lot of us think we know what it is that we want, only for all our relatives to inform us that actually, they know what it is that we want even better than we do. The only problem is that their respective opinions of what it is that we are looking for, while being absolutely accurate individually (for how can some aunty who has met you at Eid lunches and weddings, with a sum total of 37 minutes of interaction in your whole life, not know you better than you know yourself?), are often wildly divergent when set off against each other. What, then, is a young man whose biological clock is ticking to do? Does mother, in this case, really know best?
After all, especially in a typical ‘drawing room’ arrangement, one is not able to ask the really big questions: Do you squeeze the toothpaste tube from the bottom or from the middle (or, heaven forbid, from the top) ? Do you eat ketchup with pizza (a deal breaker in most civilised societies)? How many hours of Indian soaps do you watch on average in a day? What is your favourite football team? Wasim Akram or Waqar Younis? Coffee or tea? Paper (money) or plastic?
Another problem is that, in our society, many people are not comfortable communicating openly with their parents about what they really want (assuming, that is, that they know themselves). Of course, for some this is not as big a problem as with others; I know of at least one prospective groom who, when his mother asked him what kind of girl he was looking for in a spouse, replied that it was imperative that the incumbent be “hot”. Shallow, but honest.
I guess physical appearance is fairly high on most peoples’ shopping lists when they go looking, though. Although I am told that facility with housework, adeptness with a sharp knife and other accoutrements of a domestic goddess are also fairly high up on the agenda with most people. Interestingly, although these things are also desirable for the parents of the male child, of equal importance for them are the family and other accessories, things that are not on the radar of most young men when they go a-looking. Darwin’s hypothesis about the perceived child-bearing ability of potential mates being directly proportional to desirability is, on the face of it, left undiscussed, although it probably figures very high on the unwritten list of the said aunties.
So what it is that a typical Pakistani male looks for in a spouse? Are the old stereotypes of a typical housewife, who has the homemaking capabilities of Delia Smith, Martha Stewart and Zubaida “Totka” Tariq all rolled into one still applicable today? The answer, it seems, is not a simple yes or no. A straw poll of office colleagues indicates that while most are more than happy to help with the housework, especially when not living as part of an extended family, there is still a latent expectation that is the wife who will wake up at 4am to make parathas for sehri, regardless of the fact that both may have full-time jobs.
And certainly, career women have to bear a greater share of the housework than their spouses, even if the latter are part of a growing breed who do lift a finger around the house. And although I do know of couples where most of the cooking is done by the takeaway down the road, such are few and far between. And the jury is definitely out on how outspoken a person Pakistani men are comfortable with; the answer, it seems, lying with the level of confidence of the man in question and, to a greater extent, the people within earshot when the wife tells her man the exact prices of flour and lentils.
To complicate matters further, it often seems like what we say we are looking for is quite different from what we end up seeking out. One of my friends, for example, stated for the record that the person he was looking for should be young, not very well educated and completely malleable, only to get married to someone the same age as himself, highly educated and highly opinionated. Presumably he over-estimated the size of his male ego, or decided to take the selfish route (as in theory his desired mate would have been able to “adjust” better in his family – “adjust; what a word! And one that is used to hide a multitude of sins, much like shalwaars with extra wide ‘ghairs’ are used to hide a multitude of sehri paratha-inflicted spare tyres).
And what of me? Well, I would like to think that my list was a simple one. A good level of education, a sense of humour, being more actively religious than I am, and an interest in reading for pleasure all featured highly. But then, again, it is likely there was much that was left unsaid. I was lucky enough to find someone myself, and thus avoided the whole ‘arranged marriage’ lottery, but it just goes to show that making a list and checking it twice is no guarantee that one will get what they are looking for, as there is no guarantee that any such list will actually hold even half the items that one is truly looking for.
Originally published in Dawn, some time in 2010
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