Can we talk about this for a minute? Can we talk about why I spent Thursday night sobbing to my mom about all the love I was waiting for, but am so worried I won’t find?
I spend a lot of time trying to be chill, trying to be fiercely independent and thankful for freedom and my single status; pretending that the spectre of an arranged marriage is abhorred and never eagerly-awaited. The truth is, for the first twenty-three years of my life this was perfectly true. I was comfortable in my size eighteen jeans, in my sequined hijab at the mosque and a sequined top at the club and a sequined kurta at desi events. I never worried about my future and was grateful I didn’t need to be thinking about my wedding during graduation, or when I got my first job.
I’m painfully shy around men but it never bothered me, because I wasn’t expected to date. Good Indian girls don’t date. Good Muslim girls don’t date. Fat Women Who Hate Themselves don’t date either.
What was the point when I was going to find someone through the time-honored tradition of an arranged marriage, my mother proudly picking out a man who would fulfill all my tepid Mills & Boons dreams? It was expected. It was safe. It was all I knew.
But twenty-four has been a very weird year.
Suddenly all my friends are coupled up, my younger cousins are making their way to marital bliss, my colleagues’ sexcapades are up for discussion after every weekend and my cushion has slowly dissipated. All the other sisters — the sexually clueless, the casually repressed, the cheerfully chaste — they’ve been married off one by one. All my other friends have fully functional romantic lives with the support and encouragement of the societies they come from. All the other Muslim single women I meet have waved off their repressive shackles, explored their sexuality and have embraced their independence.
Somewhere within this spectrum I lie waiting.
The truth is the waiting is isolating AF. I don’t know what I want I just know all the things I don’t want.
- I don’t want to wait anymore.
- I don’t want to wait to lose weight to meet the one.
- I don’t want to wait for the stars to align and for the perfect rishta to come my way.
- I don’t want to wait for a man who doesn’t know me or anything about me to come, assess me and decide my future.
The truth is also that I just don’t know where to start. My friends tell me I should be open to dating, I should join Tinder, I should befriend more men. A direct harsh quote from someone I love: “None of your friends is ever going to set you up with anyone unless you change it up, you’re too awkward around guys.”
Which sounds logical, but I don’t know how to wave off twenty-four years of believing life should be one way and then switch sides and be another way. To be part of the dating scene as an adult. To grapple with abstinence, to risk rejection, to risk being fodder for gossip. To kiss.
A part of me feels like I missed the boat and it’s getting too late and with every day, and every week, and every month, and every pound I haven’t lost, it grows, strangling the part of me that drove around listening to love songs believing my time would come. I’m in a no man’s land where I don’t fit into the Halal crew, but am too weird for the “Chill” crowd.
Even now, a small part of me believes. Believes in waiting for “the one,” in the traditions and the culture and the safety. I drank the rooh-hafza and now I just want to hold on a little bit longer, pray a little bit harder.
The isolation of these feelings is getting too heavy. This falls under the section of things that are too embarrassing to discuss with people I know. With them, I try to be the cool independent chick who’s focusing on her career and is single out of choice.
Here, with the anonymity of the interwebz, I just want to be honest.
I just want a little guidance; or if not that, then a little company.
The author lives in Dubai, and hopes to one day collaborate with Mindy Kaling.
