My husband, in-laws and parents had all gathered in my parents’ formal living room in Dallas that evening for a kind of intervention, hoping they could talk me out of ending my marriage.
“I just don’t understand it. He took you to five countries,” my mother-in-law said. “Is that not enough?”
“He takes care of you,” my mother added. “He gives you everything.”
I hung my head, staring at the floral swirls of the Persian rug beneath my feet.
My father-in-law suggested I was unhappy because my husband was not a doctor, as I am, while my own father wondered if I had met someone else.
Although my husband and I had been separated for months, my decision to go through with ending our marriage came across as outlandish to our families. I had anticipated pushback; divorce remains uncommon among South Asians, even in the diaspora. A woman initiating it is even more taboo. And ending a marriage on the grounds I was claiming — a lack of emotional intimacy — surely struck my survivalist Pakistani immigrant parents and in-laws as nonsensical.
They came from families that crossed the India-Pakistan border under the cover of night, leaving behind homes and wealth, to establish themselves in a new country. Couldn’t I learn to live with a somewhat lackluster marriage?
Marriage, for them, served a utilitarian purpose as the unit of stability that built a greater society based on commonalities of cultural group, religious sect and family backgrounds. Love was merely a fortunate byproduct.
My husband and I belonged to the same demographics, but love didn’t flourish in the three years we were married. He tried planning exotic vacations; at my behest, we tried counseling. We moved closer to family. Little changed.
I desperately needed a deeper connection that I had sought to forge within our marriage, but it wasn’t there. It was a need that centered itself in my conscious awareness as I started my residency in psychiatry and discovered myself to a greater depth, and one that I could no longer continue living with unmet.
Over the years, my parents had noticed my disquietude within the marriage, but they encouraged me toward tolerance and gratitude. My husband took me traveling, earned a decent living and there was nothing egregious like physical abuse going on, so I ought to be able to love him. My inability to do so spoke only of my own failure, not of an inherent incompatibility between us.
In our collectivist culture, the source of my dissatisfaction appeared foolish, and my pursuit of divorce self-indulgent. What mattered most was that I was reneging on a commitment, threatening my own and their standing in our Desi community, and throwing my life away — all over the premise that my husband and I didn’t “connect.”
“You’ll be returning all the jewelry they gave you,” my mother said to me as my in-laws walked out. No one had convinced me to change my mind, and everyone was unhappy about it.
“You’re making the biggest mistake of your life,” my father said.
The last time I saw him, my husband looked right into me and said, “You don’t know how to be a wife.”
A year after my divorce, and despite the shame of marital ineptitude foisted upon me, I decided to put myself out there again. Yet among my Desi circles, people didn’t see me as quite so marriageable the second time around.
When I asked a friend if she knew anyone who might be right for me, she said, “Even my friends who haven’t been married before can’t find someone.”
My mother, likely wanting to spare me from disappointment, tried to manage my expectations. “I worry he won’t like you once he learns you’re divorced,” she would say about a prospective match. Her advice was to let men know this scarlet letter up front yet also talk about it as little as possible, a closed chapter that need not be reopened.
On my first post-divorce dinner date, the man asked me for more details of my marriage’s demise after our appetizer. “That’s it?” he said, his puzzlement at the absence of drama bordering on disappointment. He then proceeded to share that he, too, was divorced, and regaled me with details about how he found his wife cheating on him at their five-star resort in Mexico on their honeymoon. We did not meet again.
Then there was the old acquaintance with whom I had reconnected, who said, “I don’t mind,” granting me approval I hadn’t sought. “As long as you don’t write a memoir or something about it.”
There was the man I hadn’t spoken to before meeting, so he didn’t know I was divorced. He was enjoying steak frites when I told him, and he set down his fork, French fry hanging off one of the tines, and said, “It would have been good if you had told me that sooner.” He asked for the check shortly after, and I didn’t see him again.
I tried to withstand my culture’s insistence that I feel ashamed of my divorce, but it wore on me. In my eyes, I had made a necessary, authentic choice. That choice deeply hurt my ex-husband, his family and my family, but the absence of love in my marriage hurt me. Yet time after time, I was reminded that perhaps it was impractical for me to think I could nurture anything new where something had once died.
Until I met Mahmoud. The first time he and I talked about my marriage, we didn’t say much at all. In response to the little I did share, he said simply, kindly, “That must have been hard.”
We had met on Minder (Muslim Tinder — now called Salams), but I remembered his name from when he consulted me about a patient six months earlier, while he remembered me from two years before that when we shared an elevator ride in the hospital on our first day of residency. That day, he had caught my name from my ID badge and asked one of his co-residents if she knew me; she did, and she let him know I was married.
Seeing my profile on a dating app years later caught him by surprise, but it didn’t keep him from swiping right. The next few times Mahmoud and I met, I never tried to erase three years of my life’s narrative to suit his comfort because the fact that I had been married never bothered him. Conversation with him was easy.
Yet the idea of marrying him wasn’t. Our connection — the lack of which had seemed to others a frivolous reason to end a marriage — was there. It was life giving. But I had been deemed a person who did not know how to keep a marriage alive.
“If you go for it, don’t mess up again,” my mother said after I told her about him. The shame of being divorced — of having once declared my marriage a failure — had taken root deep within me in a way I had not fully recognized. And so once Mahmoud proposed, I declined. I had thought that divorce would free me from a decaying marriage, and it had, but it had also metastasized into an internalized stigma that was preventing me from allowing a new relationship to flourish.
On describing their decision to marry, people often say, “When you know, you know” or “Go with your gut.” I was not one of those people; I didn’t know, and my gut was uneasy either way. If I never remarried, I would never have to go through divorce again; yet if I didn’t remarry, I would lose the person I had come to love.
Despite my no, Mahmoud took his chances and stuck around. And I took my chances and eventually said yes. This summer, three years after we married, the two of us and our baby daughter visited my old medical school campus. At one point, we drove by my old condo, where I had lived during my first marriage. Mahmoud slowed the car and asked if I wanted to look around. When I hesitated, he assured me he would be fine waiting for as long as I needed.
I got out and looked up at the fifth-floor Juliet balcony of my old condo, remembering how it had lacked sufficient depth for me to comfortably sit out there. When I chose my own apartment post-divorce, I made sure it had a lovely balcony. After moving in, I set up a rocking chair and side table and would sit out there nearly every evening, embracing my hard-fought peace.
When I got back into the car after only a few minutes, Mahmoud said, “You don’t want to stay longer?”
“No,” I said. “I stayed long enough.”
