Stop Teaching Girls To Obsess Over Marriage

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When you ask a young girl about her aspirations for the future, she’ll give you different answers. At six, she might tell you she loves playing with colors and wants to become an artist. At ten, she might want something to do with the stars in the sky and dare to become an astronaut. At thirteen, she might decide she wants to save lives and become a doctor. Or a designer, or a teacher, or a programmer, or an accountant, or anything. Almost never, will the answer be ‘somebody’s wife’. Unlike adults, children don’t have a filter, they’re wired to dream big. Oftentimes, they have fleeting passions which offer them the exclusivity to explore and constantly redefine themselves. However, as young girls transcend into womanhood, their ambitions are lulled into feeble expressions. The phrase ‘follow your dreams’ takes on a convoluted meaning when society asserts getting married is far more important. Girls are fed the promise of a prince through fairy tales, taught to smile and keep face – trained to be marriageable.

For many girls across the globe, culture denies them the luxury of pursuing a career. They’re raised to be good wives to some man in the future; stripped of their individuality and shunned for wanting more. The norm maintains that financial independence is a man’s domain; women must stay home, tend to the house and look after the kids. Nothing more. Since the status quo makes so many demands, it designs different ideals for the girl to keep busy. She learns to dream about wedding dresses instead of the sky she once fascinated about. Her visions for the future become diluted, incumbent upon her future husband’s mercy. The girl who once wanted to save lives and travel the world decides those were mere pipe dreams, convincing her of the unrivaled promise of marriage. She gives in to a life’s worth of coercion and decides that ambition is too daunting a challenge, unworthy of the inconvenience.

Or maybe, she genuinely falls prey to the belief that a woman’s job in life is only to be someone’s, and not someone.

This sets a cascading effect promising another generation of repressed girls through a woman disillusioned by her subjugations. Another generation of girls educated to obsess over marriage.

For some nations in the subcontinent and beyond, a measurable fraction of female young adults will tell you their plan after college/high-school is to get married. Arranged marriage is largely prevalent in these Eastern cultures which is to say when parents’ find an eligible suitor for their daughter, they feel relieved of a responsibility (burden). The classism rooted from post colonialism reinforces that privilege wins against poverty. In that, women of poverty don’t stand a chance of entertaining career goals due to nonexistent support mechanisms. Women of poverty are often forced into labor to survive; and these jobs earn for them meager salaries and indignifying looks by onlookers. However, the debate over affluence and what it entails for a gender is a broader one.

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This is about girls who are equipped with their family’s financial resources, but crippled by the discriminatory conventions of society, often their own parents. In simple words, they are not ‘allowed’ to work, let alone strive to be breadwinners. Maybe that is why a boy’s birth is cheered on but a girl’s is mourned? These girls are raised to fixate on romantic unions; their horizons are restricted lest they commit the sin of breaking free. The institution of marriage naturally evokes feelings of wonder and longing but for everything to hinge on these emotions alone is dangerous. Dangerous for a girl’s mental health, her sense of belonging and her perceptions of the world around her. When we, as a society, enable girls to obsess over marriage and nothing more, we rob them of the tools to their power. We push them into an abyss of toxic inter-dependency and absolute submission only to erase their potential.

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