- There was a lot of hinting growing up that,
oh, maybe one day, these two will get together.
(upbeat music)
Hi, my name is Huda Al-Marashi,
I'm the author of "First Comes Marriage:
"My Not-So-Typical American Love Story".
I'm also the daughter of Iraqi American immigrants.
And part of what inspired me to write this book
was I was so interested in debunking the stereotypes
around arranged marriage in the West.
In the early 1980s, my family moved to California.
The only family that spoke the same language,
ate the same foods, shared the same religion
was a family that had a boy that was a similar age to me.
I was six years old at the time,
and the boy who was to become
my future husband was only nine.
We grew up going to each other's houses for family events,
for graduations.
There was a lot of hinting growing up that,
oh, maybe one day, these two will get together.
And we come from a matchmaking culture.
So there was always this conversation
about other young people in our community,
and might so-and-so married so-and-so,
and if my name ever came up in conversation
my husband's mother was very quick to say,
"No, no, not her, she's ours."
And I got it in my head very early on
that this was not a way to be successful
by Western standards.
Now the Western story of love is something so romantic,
and it celebrates autonomy and choice,
and never do you see a Western love story
that celebrates anybody's parents being involved.
But there was also things about it that felt terrifying.
The idea that you could date someone for years
and not know if their intentions were for marriage.
Or that you could be in a relationship for so long
and that they could just fall in love with somebody else.
And then that was a perfectly acceptable reason
for a relationship to end.
And something about the Eastern love story felt so secure.
So knowing that my future love story
would have parents involved kind of worried me.
And so I had the idea that there
had to be a way to get both.
What really stirred the pot for my particular relationship
was a very Western tradition, and that was the prom.
And it was my senior year in high school,
and my mother approached me and said,
"Would you like him to take you to the prom?"
This is another thing that a lot of people don't understand
about matchmaking cultures is that we assume
that they're forced relationships,
that the couple involved doesn't have any choice.
But the way it more likely happens
is that there's multiple meetings, multiple introductions,
ample time to get to know one another.
And that if either party is not interested
in pursuing the relationship,
they have full liberty to leave.
The idea appealed to me because I thought
well this is the way I can jumpstart our story.
Now I cooked up a world of expectations
about this one evening.
This seemed like the perfect bringing together
of this two sides of myself that I had straddled so long,
the Western and the Eastern,
and I was doing this sanction thing.
But now was the chance where this Western love story
I pictured was gonna swoop in.
And even though my husband had also grown up in the West,
and had also grown up watching the same TV and movies,
he had no idea that this event in my mind
was the one where he was supposed to transform,
and start acting like something
that was beyond what was normative.
He was just trying to be respectful.
He was trying to do what we'd always done,
which was follow the rules of what was expected of us.
And before marriage, you comported yourself
very proper and appropriate, and didn't flirt,
and you didn't tease, and you didn't hint at liking someone.
So the evening wore on, and I didn't get invited to dance.
And that frustration made me poke at him a little bit more
and said, "You know, you had a chance and you lost it."
Three days later, he worked up the courage to call me
on the phone and to tell me how he really felt about me.
And I cannot underscore what a big step that was for us.
He never called my house.
We were the type of families where boys never rang.
He told me how he felt about me.
And this was something that really appealed to me
because I was like okay, I can work with this.
If he told me he liked me, then that meant
we're not brought together by our families.
We have our own story, but what did that mean?
What it meant was we had the opening to a story.
And now in order for us actually to become a couple
is when all the families would end up needing to rush in.
That led to him telling his father how he felt about me,
and his parents coming to my family's home
to officially ask for my hand in marriage.
So at this time I am only 18 years old.
I have not even finished my first semester in college.
And I'm not worried.
I think that I am doing the smartest thing
to be successful by both cultures standards.
Even though I wasn't getting the kind of meet cute
of the romantic comedy, where you meet somebody
and there's a chemistry, and there's spark,
and then you get to know each other, and then you date.
And it wasn't following this order.
I felt some kind of security
and confidence in this relationship.
So I found myself engaged at the age of 18, and he was 21.
I was hoping for more moments, for more stories,
for more things to flesh out this romantic love story
that was supposed to carry us through
for the rest of our life.
And our relationship was looking more, and more,
and more like this very traditional, very arranged marriage.
And as somebody who was born and raised in the U.S.
it wasn't doubt that settled in, but questions,
like what had I just agreed to do?
A year and a half later of a very supervised courtship
we got married when I was 20 and he was 23.
What my newlywed years showed me
was that this East West story
that I was trying to fulfill
was in itself a false dichotomy.
The Western love story that I was trying to impose
upon my marriage was causing a lot of trouble.
And what I really needed, and what I really hoped for others
was to normalize the story that I did have.
I had chosen a good man to marry.
We were happy together.
Our families were happy with us together.
What was causing my dissatisfaction was the expectation
that it somehow should've been otherwise.
As I started to get more comfortable
with my relationship, I started to notice all around me
the ways that even Western culture
was mimicking a matchmaking culture in many ways.
There were television shows
like "The Bachelor" and "Love Is Blind".
And then we had this whole shift towards online dating,
and online dating was nothing more than a community's auntie
calling together information and bringing people together.
And so the real question to me then became
is why aren't there other stories of what love looks like?
There's a universality there
that we're all participating in.
It's hard to meet a partner.
It's hard to meet someone.
And all that is happening in so-called arranged marriages,
is that families and communities
are working together to bring people together.
The label of arranged marriage is so laden
with so many ideas, and notions, and expectations.
And the truth of the matter is
it's a lot more nuanced than that.
And while yes, there are couples
who it has not worked out for,
I happen to be one of the stories
where my family's input was actually valuable,
and we're very happy together, we have three children.
And that's why this work is so important to me
and writing stories that show different arts
about love and relationships,
because this current story is so narrow,
and I think more people need a way to see themselves,
and see their relationship.
(upbeat music)