one from the heart
A woman’s decision to leave a marriage - regardless of how long she has been married - is generally judged harshly by Pakistani families. Your social circle brings up the woman who moved out of her home and everyone spends the rest of the dinner party analysing the couple’s public interactions for signs of a troubled marriage. Often, the woman at the centre of that discourse is completely unaware of the judgments being passed or of the resolutions being tabled about which one of the couple should be invited to the next gathering now that they are no longer a unit.
The blame for the dissolution of the marriage is assigned almost entirely to the woman: she must have been selfish, a bad wife, a bad mother, a bad woman. A good woman always sacrifices and adjusts. He was kind, attentive and gentle, so she simply failed to see, recognise and appreciate all that he was doing for her. He was, after all, employed and therefore providing.
The woman loses all her social capital upon leaving the marriage. So why would any woman choose to leave?
The decision to leave a marriage comes at a cost that a woman is either not fully aware of or is willing to pay after giving everything she has - and more - to her partner and her children, if there are any. The choice is never an easy one. And the decision is usually made after she has tried everything she can to keep her marriage and her home intact for as long as humanly possible, until she realises that her survival is only possible outside the relationship.
A bad marriage is designed to keep a woman trapped in a cycle of self-doubt and self-hatred, deliberately confused and emotionally destabilised, leaving her in survival mode for extended periods.
Here, I’m mainly discussing marriages in which a woman feels suffocated and undermined without ever being able to put a name to what she is experiencing. This type of abuse has been called emotional abuse, but its specifics are as individual as the perpetrators themselves, making the definition nebulous. Emotional abuse is often accompanied by financial abuse and the threat of physical violence. In the bedroom, the abuse can take the form of withdrawal of affection and intimacy, control over the woman’s body, control over when intimacy will occur and a refusal to let her express herself in ways that would bring her safety and pleasure.
The final erasure is the lack of social support available to her. The woman suffers alone, unable to tell anyone, partly because she has been convinced that the abuse is her own fault and partly because the perpetrator appears to be the model husband and father to everyone in the couple’s social circle, including their own families.
There comes a time when she realises that she is unfulfilled in every way - emotionally, physically and financially. Her decision comes after months, perhaps years, of soul-searching, after having done everything she has been told is necessary to be a good partner. Even after doing everything a good wife is supposed to do, she is disrespected, ridiculed and dismissed.
She tries to bring up her troubles softly and gently, first with her own family and then with her friends. The usual response is to ask her to adjust. In most cases, the social conditioning is so strong that even the woman internalises the narrative of sacrifice. After every instance of disrespect at home, she is first told - and eventually learns to tell herself - that it is her fault, that she deserves the disrespect and that she is the one who makes him behave badly.
And this expectation of extreme sacrifice is not restricted by class, creed or ethnicity, which means that more women are trapped in unfulfilling marriages, incapable, perhaps even unwilling, to leave because they have convinced themselves - or been convinced - that once they sacrifice enough, they will be able to rule their households the way their mothers evidently do.
Difficult marriages aren’t difficult consistently, nor are women of our generation somehow more demanding than our mothers. In most marriages, especially those characterised by coercive control, there are brief periods of reprieve and many moments of pure joy. Most women will stay in difficult marriages because of those moments.
Men express affection and perform romantic gestures, carefully watching their wives’ reactions. Over time, these gestures are performed after every disagreement and accompanied by empty promises of change and self-reflection, which women believe. Women remind themselves of those gestures and promises when their lives feel particularly overwhelming. They make lengthy excuses for their partners’ bad behaviour and work ceaselessly on improving themselves, hoping that they’ll be loved once they become better.
A woman can and does, sacrifice everything to achieve a semblance of stability and peace in her home. If she works outside the home, she is made to feel that her career is a source of contention in her marriage. Yet, she knows that she needs to continue working because her job pays for her children’s needs and fills the gaps left by her partner’s income. She listens to - and then internalises - the voices telling her that her children are not thriving because she works outside the home. Even if she does not work outside the home, her contributions to maintaining a stable, mess-free household are minimised, even ridiculed, despite the fact that it is her labour alone that keeps the family unit functioning smoothly.
What role does a man play in a marriage? We are told that a man’s role is to provide, but the word seemingly applies only to finances. A man who earns a living - and sometimes even one who doesn’t - automatically earns the right to be the head of the household. Women with careers are told that their earnings do not bring barakah (blessings) to the home because women were never intended to earn an independent living.
And yet, the catch is that a woman’s earnings are now an integral part of a family’s finances. She is expected to contribute at the same level as her partner but is not given the social capital that is inherently granted to a man based on gender alone.
The decision to leave a marriage, however, remains difficult - almost impossible. She spends years pouring all her energy into keeping the home and family together, years searching for an explanation for why she is treated with disrespect when she is doing everything she is supposed to do to maintain the relationship and preserve the family unit. Once she does decide to leave, she is usually unable to pinpoint the one incident that made her leave. The decision is usually based on an accumulation of a thousand small instances of disrespect, control and manipulation. She leaves a space she loves because she recognises that if she stays any longer, either she, her children or both will not survive the toxic environment of their home.
Once she does leave, she faces new challenges - socially, culturally and financially - challenges she recognises but is willing to face. Because, like the phoenix, she must burn before she can rise from the ashes.
Amber is an editor and a freelance writer based in Canada. She can be reached at [email protected]
