Unfortunately, the new life he offered wasn’t much of an improvement. The husband was basically as controlling as her parents. He would get upset when she went places without telling him. Leila was ready to be a modern, independent wife, but her husband wanted something more traditional. Neither Leila nor her husband was happy with the situation, and one day he came home and announced that he wanted a divorce. “The decision wasn’t mine,” Leila said. “And it wasn’t easy. My parents kept things hanging—they wouldn’t let me sign the divorce papers, because they had an idea that we might get back together. I had to move back in with them. I had a curfew again, around eleven P.M., depending on my dad’s mood. I had to report where I was going. They called me all the time.”
Leila was stuck in limbo. Her husband didn’t want to be with her. Her parents wouldn’t help her find another man because they didn’t want her to get divorced. “So I actually waited for them to leave town and then I went to court and got divorced without them knowing,” she explained. “They were furious, and they basically grounded me. I was on house arrest for months. Now the guy I was with is getting remarried, and my parents are willing to move on too.”
Grounded? You realize I haven’t been grounded by my parents since I had a bed frame that was shaped like a bright red race car. I couldn’t imagine being under such strict supervision. I would do anything to get out of it—and so would the Qataris.
Qatari women’s stories about feeling trapped at home and lacking basic adult freedoms sounded surprisingly similar to the stories we heard from the older American women we interviewed at the senior center in New York City. And, as for the Americans, for Qatari women marriage offered a way out. But the contemporary Qataris also have another option for getting a taste of freedom: digital technology.
With the rise of smartphones, social media, and the Internet, young Qataris are using technology to flout these repressive rules. For instance, socializing with the opposite sex in public is not allowed, so Qataris are using the Internet to organize small private parties in hotel rooms. One of the young women we met told us that hotels are a big part of Qatari culture, because that’s where you find bars and restaurants, and these days it’s not uncommon to receive a group message that tells people who know one another to meet in a certain room. Once they arrive at the hotel lobby, the cover provided by the females’ burkas allows them to wander in anonymously and go wherever they need to go. By blending something old, the burka, and something new, the Internet, Qatari youth have created their own novel way to connect.
Qataris are not getting all the benefits of the Internet. Online dating sites have yet to take off. Instagram is starting to spread, but the culture frowns upon taking photos of all things personal, so instead people shoot and share interesting objects that they see in public life. “We’ve always been a photophobic society,” one of the Qataris we interviewed told us. “People don’t want any record of themselves in public. Especially when people are out in clubs or malls. Their families could get very upset.” The record of such photos would be potentially scandalous.
Then came Snapchat. The app works on the promise that the image you send will disappear from users’ phones after a few seconds. The app has allowed young Qatari singles to take risks in the privacy of their phone world that would be unthinkable otherwise.
“People send all kinds of photos, from explicit to casual,” a young woman explained. “The technology is making people more ballsy. It gives people a way to connect.” Occasionally things go wrong, of course. Sadly, “guys sometimes get photos of girls [through screengrabs] that would dishonor them and then use that to extract things from them,” we learned. But overall, the young people we met argued, social media is giving people in Qatar and in the United Arab Emirates more new ways to meet and express themselves.
In the Emirates, and pretty much everywhere, social media and the Internet are introducing all kinds of new options into social and romantic life. And while it’s exciting, sometimes even exhilarating, to have more choices, it’s not necessarily making life easier.
CHAPTER 4
CHOICE AND OPTIONS
My parents had an arranged marriage. This always fascinated me. I am perpetually indecisive on even the most mundane decisions, and I couldn’t imagine leaving such an important choice to other people. I asked my dad to describe his experience to me.
This was his process.
He told his parents he was ready to get married, so his family arranged meetings with three neighboring families. The first girl, he said, was a “little too tall,” and the second girl was a “little too short.” Then he met my mom. After he quickly deduced that she was the appropriate height (finally!), they talked for about thirty minutes. They decided it would work. A week later, they were married.
And they still are, thirty-five years later. Happily so—and probably more so than most older white people I know who had nonarranged marriages.
So that’s how my dad decided on whom he was going to spend the rest of his life with. Meeting a few people, analyzing their height, and deciding on one after talking to her for thirty minutes.
It was like he went on that MTV dating show Next and married my mom.