The Marriage Trap

I'm going to hell. That's a fact. The sins I've committed in this lifetime are enough to send me straight there, no matter how many "Get out of Hell" cards I
possess in my hidden hand.

No, wait a second. I'm already in hell. Am I already dead? That's a tangential thought. Whether or not I'm already pushing up the daisies, though, I can
tell you that I'm already being burned to a crisp by the flames of Satan's cooker.

How do I know I'm in hell? Because wherever I go, whoever I meet, whatever conversations I have, they all revolve around the same topic: Marriage, and
Why We're Not Married.

Whenever I'm sitting around with a group of women between the ages of nineteen to thirty, the M-word comes up. Sometimes it hits me full in the face,
like American Scud missiles raining phallically down on the dusty deserts of Iraq. Sometimes it sneaks up on me, a trusted friend who then bends down
and bites me, really hard, on the ass. At times I feel like I'm absorbing in the water, like fluoride, only not as beneficial to my teeth and gums. Whatever
the means, whatever the ways, it's there, insidious, mocking me, pushed into my ears by every soprano voice in town.

"Why aren't we getting M-A-R-R-I-E-D?"

This is often accompanied by its sister complaint, "Why aren't there any good M-E-N?"

For a long time, I was able to take it. I even agreed sympathetically with my buddies. Yes, it's really hard to get married. Yes, men are all b--stards. Yes,
it's really tough if you're educated, because men don't like educated women. Yes, our parents are giving us a hard time, especially our mothers. Yes, it's
really humiliating to see little girls of nineteen and twenty getting engaged and married. Yes, every time the phone rings I dread hearing that it's another
one of my contemporaries announcing her entrance into the land of Holy Matrimony. Yes, I'm dreading holding their babies.

Now, I'm at the point where I want to have an allergic reaction every time I hear these phrases. Maybe a nice little episode of anaphylactic shock will
distract them from the topic of marriage? No, they'll probably just watch me swell up and die a horrid, bloated death, and as my heart stops, they'll
breathe a sigh of relief: "One less woman to worry about."

The attitude in Karachi, growing day by day, an evil little blue flame of fear in the hearts of every single woman, is that she is never going to get married.
That all the good men have moved away to America or Canada. That there's something horribly wrong with her - an invisible, disfiguring birthmark or
something - that brands her as Unmarriageable, sets her apart from her other, more eligible sisters.

Maybe it's a previous relationship that got her to this stage - she's wiser, more wary of getting involved again. Or her education that's made her too
picky. Or her parents' high standards and social status that has scared every male away. She's got a bad reputation. Her reputation is too good. She's
not pretty enough. She's too pretty. She works. She doesn't work.

Whatever it is, it's always her fault. And this blaming makes her feel even more desperate as she becomes even more obsessed with the fact of her single
status.

Our parents are becoming equally neurotic, issuing statements that make me wonder what they've been smoking recently. Take a conversation I had with
some friends the other night. My friend's mother - a lovely, sweet, educated woman - came into the room and sat to chat with us for a few moments. Her
comments? "Well, you see, I noticed that everyone who's having babies now - they're all girls. Thirteen girls to two boys. So the next generation - your
kids - will have even worse of a problem getting married than you guys are having. You just don't have enough choice. At least in our generation,
proposals started coming when we were about twelve. Nobody could imagine being unmarried at 27. But you girls, at least you don't look like grown-up
women as yet, you still look like you're only 22 or so."

Boy, was my head spinning. I was still trying to assess the scientific validity of the 13-to-1 birth ratio, but my friends were all nodding their heads as if
she possessed the oratory powers of Martin Luther King Jr. At the end of this speech, one of my friends implored, "Pray for us, Aunty!"

My mother is no less guilty of such bizarre statements, though she expresses them less articulately. They tend to come out in moments of extreme
frustration. As in, "I don't know what I did wrong that you're not married. Perhaps someone is doing black magic on us. We must have made a mistake
sending you to school in America."

I think it's all the extra prayers I've been reading that have given me the patience to remain calm when my mother says things like this. My girlfriends are
all religious too - someone told me of a wazifa, a formulaic prayer that when read a certain number of times brings you a love that ends in lasting
marriage. I mentioned it to one person and now I've got at least seventeen friends who have made it a part of their daily prayer rituals.

And where are the men in this whole equation? I have this theory that when unmarried women go to a party, they exude a special scent, like a
pheromone, but with opposite effects. When men get a whiff of this scent, which is six parts desperation, three parts sexual frustration, and about ten
parts fear, they run the other way. The other weapon women wield unknowingly is The Look. We've all seen it - wide, glassy eyes, big, welcoming smile,
face and upper body thrust forward, accompanied by high-pitched laugh. Men see this spectacle and visibly crumble. The Look and The Scent combine
to give this message to men: that the woman they see before them is an intelligent, accomplished, fun, adorable person, whose primary aim in life is to
get married. If that isn't enough to scare a man, I don't know what is.

Anyway, to amuse myself, I've devised a method of my own, for future conversations. Whenever anyone says the word marriage, I'm going to interject
with the first thought that comes into my head, like the old word association games. I'll have to forgo the traditional female conventions of conversation,
like listening carefully to others, not interrupting, and being emotional and empathic. People will wonder if I've got Tourette's Syndrome, but hey, it'll be
worth it.

The conversation could go something like this: "Why aren't we getting married --" "-- Hey, so what did you think of the Chinese Ice Castle Show?" or
"Another one of my friends is engaged--" "-- I saw a great program on kangaroo mating on National Geographic the other day!" "My mother is so upset
that I'm not married--" "--Did you know that the human head weighs eight pounds?!"

Hopefully I can do it skillfully enough to manipulate the conversation to other topics of interest, such as sky-diving, pornography, and post-modern
feminist theory. With enough positive reinforcement, I can train them to give up talking about marriage altogether. If nothing else, it will keep my mind alert
and my senses intact. After all, when I finally meet my future husband, I don't want him to run away from me, screaming and gibbering in fright...