Wherever you look, all around you, you find one thing that everyone seems to have interest in and talk about; Weddings. The Pakistani society in particular gets a tad too excited when it comes to bride, groom, designer lehengas and expensive gold jewelry.
The moment a girl turns twenty and a boy twenty-five, parents and the society begin to conspire against their freedom and divert all their attention towards one goal in life; getting the bachelors and bachelorette hitched. A regular Pakistani dinner table conversation may start with politics, drama, religion, food, Mickey mouse, maid problems, sports, Obama, but it always ends on the topic of WEDDING.
But have you ever stepped back to ponder over why our society in particular is so obsessed with weddings? Well, this is a topic that brings together people with different cultures, values, thoughts, ideas, mindset and perspectives. It sparks the interest of different people in an instant because this is the most common phenomenon there is. Weddings take place everywhere. It’s as universal as the sun or the moon; everyone has it.
With this evident obsession, one must think that marriage as an institution must be the most successful. However, despite this obsession with weddings, the statistics prove otherwise. The figures reveal that it’s much easier to obsess over weddings than it is to live a successful marriage.
Yet, even with the failure of marriages all around us and the fear of commitment and compromising within us we continue to believe in the institution of marriage and the concept of weddings.
We thought and wondered and came up with a few reasons to justify this ongoing obsession with weddings and getting married.
Marriage reflects our desire of companionship:
It is human nature to feel the need of a companion, a partner. The belief that human beings were originally created with 4 hands, 4 feet and 2 faces and were later separated to find their other half, may seem like a romanticized twisting of the theory of evolution but we still find people who believe it to be true, maybe because they desperately want it to be true.
Marriage gives us hope for a better future:
Most of us like to believe that our lives are incomplete and imperfect. We all dream of a better future for ourselves. Marriage is supposed to bring about a drastic change in one’s life. That change is most often anticipated to be a positive one. Be it social, moral, financial, physical or spiritual, marriage brings about a number of variations in one’s lifestyle and to experience those variations, people start to believe wedding and marriage as the ideal phenomenon.
Marriage gives us a secure position within the society:
No matter how educated, aware and broad minded we may become, at the end of the day a widow or divorcee is not awarded the same social status as a woman with a husband and family. This obvious discrimination has made it more necessary for everyone to obsess over a wedding, even if it leads to a miserable life but at least it guarantees them a respectable social standing.
In a nut shell, the idea of weddings has been an obsessive matter for most Pakistanis since a very long time. It’s going to take a lot more than a few broken marriages, disrupted families, and horrible personal experiences to curb this obsession.
Written by:
Rida Rahim
Sohaib Mehroze Iqbal
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