The Importance of Marriage in Pakistan
Ambrose Bierce, a 19th century writer, once wrote: "Love is a temporary insanity, curable by marriage bureau.". We can only assume what he meant by that. We could say he doubted the durability of marriage or that he believe love to disappear after getting married. But what about the third, possibly most appealing interpretation? Bierce live in a 19th century, a time when marriage was viewed as an act of political agreement and social responsibility. Marriage in pakistan wasn't based on love but on logic and woman didn't get much to say to it. We can see that by saying love can be cured by marriage, he meant that even though a young girl falls in love with a men and would do 'insane' things for him, it can still be cured by giving her away to marry someone else, someone with a appropriate social status. After all, in time the girl would fall out of love with the first man and obey her husband. Does all of that sound ridiculous? In our modern times, it is. In this essay, I will show you how drastically the importance and the idea of marriage changed during the last centuries, especially for women.
First of all, the reason why the importance of marriage changed is because of the actual reasons to become a married person. In the ancient Greece, a woman was entitled to all sort of privileges once she got married. While her husband was away in the battle she could even manage a whole household and private business affairs unlike all the unmarried women with only the basic or in many cases no rights at all. Woman were often sold to men by their families for various reasons such as straighning the family ties, uniting the property or simply for the lack of money. Women were the property of men, and until the 'Married Women's Property Act Karachi
