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Boy Meets Girl
Looking for love in the Muslim world
Page 4 of 4
One woman who asked to be called "Sarah" met her husband through an online matrimonial advertisement -- a recent rage in the Muslim community. Both described themselves as liberal in the ad, though their Pakistani parents aren't, she says. By the time he contacted her parents, Sarah and her future husband had e-mailed for months, spoken a few times on the phone and secretly met once in Virginia. Both had dated other people in college and both drank socially, facts they mutually agreed to keep from their parents.
"I always wanted to marry a Muslim man," Sarah says. "I want to raise my children in a marriage that my parents approve of. I want to be an accepted part of my family. But I want a man who can function in American culture, who can be comfortable with my non-Muslim friends. If you grow up here, it becomes a part of you. You can't help that. I was lucky to find my husband. Not many men from my culture are like that."
Ironically, Sarah says she's become deeply religious since her marriage.
"Before, it was a set of rules that sometimes got in the way," she says. "Now it is a relationship with God that demands certain things of me."
Berhane's experience with marriage was very different. A native of Eretria, she moved here when she was just four. She was a devout Christian who drove her sisters to church every Sunday while her parents stayed home. She took a long, slow path toward Islam after a friend converted. For Berhane, the distance between the sexes in courtship wasn't alien at all because she'd always been deeply religious. Though she saw her husband just three times before she married him, she says she fell in love over the phone and that they weren't intimate until they were married. She glows when she talks about her five-month marriage, what for her was a smooth transition from single life to living with her husband.
But Vera Hough, a native of Indonesia, admits that there were no fireworks the first time she met her husband. They were, however, compatible, she says, and their relationship quickly grew over the phone. Seven years after marrying her husband, after knowing him for less than three months, Vera, 32, and her husband Jibril, 39, insist they are happy, too.
"Marriage is about commitment," Jibril says. "Love is about emotions. They rise, they go up, they come down. If you have the commitment, that will take you through. If you don't have the love from the storybooks, eventually I think you will get what you need."
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