“I think we should get married,” Chris mused as we sat under the jacaranda tree at the Sydney University quadrangle. We had been friends since a UN mock trial held over the second-year summer, and had recently started dating. He was a gentle, nerdy Catholic boy. He had seen my year of struggle with the hijab, asked me how I practised and how he could accommodate that, and even tried to say hello to the family members that he met at my dorm-room birthday party.
I paused, silent. I had started to feel the cloying suffocated feeling I got when anyone got too close; a numbness came over me, followed by dread.
He had hinted at meeting my parents, marriage and children, but we hadn’t been dating that long. I had visited his warm family in the Blue Mountains, and a jealousy had turned like a screw in my heart at the ease with which he led his life, open and free to introduce whoever he wanted to his relatives.
Still, I didn’t want to marry him. I couldn’t get married until I met a Muslim man, anyway. I still envisaged an approximation of the life I’d been brought up to expect – one that wasn’t exactly the same, but that vaguely resembled it, at least.
I had no-one to talk to about relationships, and no real communication or relationship skills. Chris remained a secret. I would flee whenever things got hard, because freezing and panicking were what I was used to. The fear I lived with in those early months of moving out still lingered a year on, even though I was no longer petrified someone in the South Asian community would recognise me. It was an unease and stress that lived under my skin, and it made me reflexively secretive. I would lie unnecessarily and was guarded against rejection, against disapproval. It created a kind of lonely shell, a fear of bombs going off even when there was no risk. When other people spoke of their relationships, I remained quiet. My life felt a million miles from theirs.
In the end, I wrote a long, apologetic break-up letter to Chris. This prompted a long, pleading letter in return, followed by a dramatic tear-filled meeting, and then silence.
I didn’t know what to feel. The people who wanted me I was repelled by. Those that didn’t – men who were gay or confused, taken, much older, or in any other way out of reach – ignited a pattern of interest and insecurity I was attracted to like a dysfunctional magnet. I wondered why I was so stupid, so vulnerable to predatory encounters. Even out of home, I felt like I was at the bottom of the social desirability ladder, clawing for the currency those on the upper echelons could offer. Unlike the archetypal hot blonde girl, revered in books and in movies, I saw no reflections of my reality in mainstream media. It was like driving on a road I had no map for.
Sarah Malik. Source: Supplied
I thought of all the romantic comedies I was obsessed with and how easy they made everything look, how much I had internalised my own invisibility in work and love by comparing myself with what I saw as the real way to be. I had decided to become the friendly asexual side-kick, the foil to the lead I could never become.
“If you are the majority group, you could meet someone at the bus stop or a bar, or anywhere. You see your life played out a million times in TV, film and books. You literally get a playbook,” my friend lamented at coffee one day.
I knew what she meant. “There’s apparently six hundred thousand Muslims in Australia. When you filter out kids, women, the elderly and the unavailable, that leaves maybe ten people?” I put my head between my hands on the table.
We were left with an intractable dilemma.
I fell into dating accidentally, with no other options available. Dates were awkward encounters without the lubricating grease of alcohol, and I’m embarrassed when I remember the time I mistook a butter slab for cheese and swallowed it whole. That doesn’t mean there weren’t fun times, like the joy and whirl I felt one night dancing to salsa music. I met some Muslim guys, who invariably realised they wanted the ‘not too’ girl instead of me, choosing more traditional women.
Out here in the wild, rather than the Aunty-mandated living-room world, these rejections felt more personal and hurtful. On more than one occasion I ended up dating a friend I had known for years, falling for them after they had made me tea or helped me vacuum. These domestic tasks were romantic catnip to me, relieving my deep subconscious fear of becoming enslaved by marriage and domestic servitude.
Occasionally, an Aunty offer would slip the gate, and I would be forwarded texts and WhatsApp messages as poetic as a tightly woven haiku. Divorced. Thirty-seven. Lawyer. Seeking tall woman five foot five from an educated family.
‘Desi Girl: On feminism, race, faith and belonging’ by Sarah Malik, published by UQP. Source: Supplied
Sometimes I wondered whether an arranged marriage would be so bad compared to the exhaustion of this ambivalent, commitment-phobic, swipe-right system. I assume that’s what Mr Thirty-Seven (or his family) thought. Many whose ‘love’ marriages had imploded tried the old way the second time around with success.
This kind of semi-arranged marriage between men and women of equal status, age, power and maturity looked more like a choice than an ultimatum, a real alternative in a world where finding a match as a looked-down-upon minority was not easy. I could understand the desire to find a person with whom you felt understood and not ridiculous for eating with your hands, buying discount mango pickle or wearing too much make-up on Eid.
“Are you going to get an arranged marriage?” people would snicker at work, not understanding this complexity.
In groups of women sharing gossip and war stories I would stiffen, embarrassed at my inexperience. It didn’t feel like the Australian relationships around me were that free either, though. The women still changed their names, still did most of the work at home, still auditioned for approval, still experienced abuse and intimidation, were ghosted, and still measured themselves against unfair beauty standards. And they didn’t have the extended family support to juggle it all.
I had rejected so much for a better way of being that even the mainstream now felt pretty retrograde. I felt I still risked exposing myself to the same discrimination outside the community I had been raised in, by those who had never met a Muslim and made assumptions about me. Most of the time it was easier to stay in the margins, still and alone.
A friend would often chastise me for my Muslim requirement, saying it limited me. “How Muslim are you, anyway?” she looked at me accusingly, taking in my un-modest clothes. I was Muslim enough to feel the sting of latent throwaway Islamophobia like a slap. It was enough to be exposed to it in the mainstream, but to risk it in my home and my personal life was exhausting. I was Muslim enough to know that saying you’re Muslim doesn’t invite many calls back. I felt too Muslim for westerners, and too western for Muslims.
I sat in the loneliness of my bedroom wondering if this is what all that freedom I had yearned for had amounted to. I had worked so hard for this; why wasn’t it easy to just find the right person? Why did it feel so scary to be myself, to be vulnerable, to tell people the truth about my life, my politics, my culture, my religion? Why did it have to be so complicated?
There was so much that still needed to healed, to be learnt. I felt like a novice: inept, isolated, and unable to do things that came easily to others. I was trapped within myself and my fears and insecurities. Having never seen healthy love modelled, I couldn’t see myself as worthy and deserving of it, as being enough.
All these years later, self-help books and therapy have taught me that the journey to love is within me. Freedom is here, and love and acceptance is here too. Acceptance isn’t something that can be sought on the outside; it exists right in this mirror. It’s easy to say but hard to embody.
Choosing love, good love, is not a random act of magic or a period-drama fantasy, but a positive act, a daily conscious task I had to learn, and still have to practise.
This is an edited extract from Sarah Malik’s (UQP) on sale now.
