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Modern Love: Should Divorce Be Shameful?

2023-02-20T13:01:22.630Z


In my South Asian community, where ending a marriage is relatively uncommon, the answer seemed to be yes.


That night, my husband, my in-laws, and my parents had gathered in my parents' living room in Dallas for some kind of intervention, hoping they could talk me out of ending my marriage.

"I don't understand.

She has taken you to five countries,” my mother-in-law said.

"Is not sufficient?".

“He takes care of you,” my mother added.

"He gives you everything."

I lowered my head, looking at the floral swirls of the Persian rug under my feet.

My father-in-law suggested that I was unhappy because my husband was not a doctor, like me, while my own father wondered if he had met someone else.

Although my husband and I had been separated for months, my decision to end our marriage was outrageous for our families.

He had anticipated their counter reactions;

divorce remains rare among South Asians, even in the diaspora

.

Being initiated by a woman is even more taboo.

And ending a marriage for the reasons I claimed—lack of emotional intimacy—must have seemed foolish to my Pakistani parents and in-laws, immigrants and survivors.

They came from families who crossed the India-Pakistan border under cover of night, leaving behind homes and wealth, to settle in a new country.

Couldn't she learn to live with a rather lackluster marriage?

For them, marriage served a utilitarian function

as a unit of stability that built a larger society based on the commonalities of cultural group, religious sect, and family background.

Love was just a lucky by-product.

My husband and I belonged to the same demographic, but love did not blossom in the three years we were married.

He tried to plan exotic vacations;

At my urging, we tried professional therapy.

We moved closer to family.

Little changed.

I desperately needed a deeper connection that I had tried to forge within our marriage, but it wasn't there.

It was a need that became centered in my consciousness as I began my residency in psychiatry and discovered deeper things about myself that I could no longer live with without fulfilling it.

Over the years, my parents had noticed my unrest within the marriage, but they encouraged me to be tolerant and appreciative.

My husband took me on trips, he made a decent living and there was nothing heinous like physical abuse, so he should be able to love it.

My inability to do so only spoke to my own failure, not to any inherent incompatibility between us.

In our collectivist culture,

the source of my dissatisfaction seemed senseless

, and my desire for a divorce, self-indulgent.

What mattered most was that I was reneging on a commitment, threatening my position and theirs in our desi community, and throwing my life away, all on the premise that my husband and I didn't “connect”.

“You are going to return all the jewelry they gave you,” my mother told me as my in-laws left.

No one had convinced me to change my mind, and everyone was unhappy about it.

“You are making the biggest mistake of your life,” my father told me.

The last time I saw him, my husband stared at me and said,

"You don't know how to be a wife."

A year after my divorce, and despite the shame of the marital ineptitude that had been foisted on me, I decided to date again.

However, in my desi circles, people didn't see me as marriageable the second time around.

When I asked a friend if she knew someone who might be right for me, she said, "Even my friends who haven't been married before can't find someone."

My mother, perhaps wanting to avoid disappointment, tried to manage my expectations.

"She's worried that she won't like you when she finds out you're divorced

," she'd tell me about a potential partner.

Her advice was for men to know this scarlet letter in advance, but to talk about it as little as possible, a closed chapter that did not need to be reopened.

At my first dinner out after the divorce, the man asked me for more details about my marriage after the aperitif.

“Is that all?” he said, with a puzzlement bordering on disappointment at the lack of drama.

Next, he told me that he too was divorced and that he had caught his wife cheating on him at their five-star hotel in Mexico during their honeymoon.

We didn't see each other again.

Then there was the old acquaintance I had reconnected with, who said, “I don't care,” granting me an approval I hadn't sought.

"As long as you don't write a memoir or something about it."

Then there was the man I hadn't talked to before meeting so I didn't know I was divorced.

She was enjoying a steak and fries when I told her about it, and she put down her fork, a frie dangling from the cutlery, and said, "It would have been nice if you had told me sooner."

Shortly after she asked for the bill and I never saw him again.

I tried to resist my culture's insistence that I be ashamed of my divorce, but it wore me out.

In my eyes, I had made a necessary and authentic decision.

That decision deeply hurt my ex-husband, his family, and mine, but the lack of love in my marriage also hurt me.

Yet again and again I was reminded that perhaps it was impractical to think that I could grow something new where something had died before.

Until I met Mahmoud

.

The first time we talked about my marriage, we didn't say much.

In response to what little I shared, he said simply, kindly, "It must have been difficult."

We had met on

Minder (the Muslim Tinder, now called Salams)

, but I remembered his name from when he consulted me about a patient six months earlier, whereas he remembered me from two years earlier, when we shared an elevator ride at the hospital. on our first day of residency.

That day, he had seen my name on my ID card and asked one of his roommates if he knew me;

she knew me, and let her know that I was married.

Seeing my profile on a dating app years later caught him by surprise, but it didn't stop him from swiping right to indicate interest in me.

The next few times Mahmoud and I met, I never tried to erase three years of my life to make him feel comfortable, because the fact that he had been married never bothered him.

Talking to him was easy.

However, the idea of ​​marrying him was not.

Our connection—the lack of which had seemed to others a frivolous reason to end a marriage—was there.

It was vital.

But I had been seen as someone who didn't know how to keep a marriage alive.

“If you do it again, don't screw it up again,” my mother told me when I told her about him.

The shame of being divorced

—of having once declared my marriage a failure—had taken root in me in a way I hadn't fully recognized.

So when Mahmoud proposed to me, I turned him down

.

I had thought that divorce would free me from a failing marriage, and it did, but it also metastasized into an internalized stigma that prevented me from allowing a new relationship to flourish.

When describing their decision to get married, people often say, "When you know, you know," or "Go with your gut."

I was not one of those people;

I didn't know, and my instincts bothered me anyway.

If I didn't remarry, I wouldn't have to divorce again;

but if she didn't, she would lose the person she had come to love.

Despite my refusal, Mahmoud took a chance and stayed.

And I took a risk and ended up saying yes.

This summer, three years after we were married, the two of us and our daughter visited the campus of my old medical school.

At one point,

we passed my old apartment, where I had lived during my first marriage

.

Mahmoud stopped the car and asked me if he wanted to take a look.

When I hesitated, he assured me that he would have no problem waiting as long as he needed.

I got out and looked at the balcony on the fifth floor of my old apartment, remembering that it wasn't deep enough to sit comfortably on it.

When I chose my own apartment after the divorce, I made sure it had a nice balcony.

After I moved in, I put in a rocking chair and a small table and sat there almost every afternoon, enjoying the peace that I had worked so hard to achieve.

When I got back to the car after a few minutes, Mahmoud said to me, “Don't you want to stay longer?”

"No," I told him.

"I've been here long enough."

c.2023 The New York Times Company


Source: clarin

All news articles on 2023-02-20

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