Understanding the Marriage Imperative

Diane Singerman

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Video Transcription:

In the Middle East, there are two main issues. Number one: marriage defines adulthood. People become an adult when they marry. When they marry, they leave their parental home and/or they set themselves up as a couple in the extended family, but as a sort of independent – not independent completely – but a more autonomous unit. And, basically, adulthood is marriage. And so people who are unmarried, whether they’re 30 or 40 or 50, are not really considered adults. They are not fully integrated into society. And at the same time, with delayed marriage in the Middle East, sexuality is largely linked to marriage. So, premarital dating is considered – by a lot of religious authorities, by young people themselves, by their parents – immoral, and controversial. And, although we have indications that there’s more dating and there’s more sexual relationships taking place, it’s still very risky, it is still very hidden, and young people themselves suffer from what Roxanne Varzi calls living in “multiple realities.” When they’re with their parents, when they’re with religious authorities, they try to live their lives in a moral way. But at the same time, demographically, they’re marrying later and later.

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The family is extremely important. The family’s extremely powerful. And what’s happened is that young people need the resources of their family to succeed in school Families pay a lot for education: private lessons. Families house their young people, they clothe their young people, they feed their young people, and they invest in marriages of their young people, so in a way, parental dependence has only increased.

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The largest burden is on young men and their families. Basically, young men pay about a third of the marriage costs, their family pays about a third of the marriage costs, and the bride’s family pays a little bit less than a third of the marriage costs. It depends – rural and urban. The bride herself pays very little of the marriage cost. That also reflects the fact that there are few women in the labor force.

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There is a lot of very religious young people, who themselves don’t really know what to do, and want to lead a good life and a righteous life. So some religious authorities would say you should marry early. But because of education, because of expectations that people have for their careers, and also because of the financial problem, they can’t marry early. So that’s not really a solution. So there’s a lot of rhetoric about what we should do, and about this problem. All of what I’m saying is common knowledge, and if you ask any family about their children, about their relatives and marriage, they will talk about this. It is not a secret. The government knows about this, but the question is – to give this issue and the financial costs of marriage the kind of serious consideration that it deserves. So, a lot of poverty programs, a lot of literacy programs, a lot of initiatives about trying to get women to work, a lot of initiatives about job creation, are all about the school-to-work transition, as it’s called. And what I would suggest is that we need to rethink it; we need to think of the school-to-work-to-marriage transition. Marriage is largely universal. It’s a largely universal expectation. Now, ideals always fall short of reality.