IN the old days, it was negotiations about dowries that took up the bulk of time when a marriage was being arranged. Would there be a car or cash, would the groom be set up in business, would the women of his family be laden with gold, would the bride arrive with roomfuls of furniture or handfuls of gold?

These considerations may still take up time, but in middle-class Pakistan’s migration-based marriage market, a new and crucial factor has become the nationality of the prospective bride or groom.

The possession of a foreign passport, the ability to leave and pursue employment elsewhere, has monetary value and consequently now a marital one. Considerations about immigration regulations of various countries, their sundry requirements and their various idiosyncrasies then dangle in drawing rooms.

Tradition and culture, religion and romance must all thus conform to rules made elsewhere, with considerations other than the marriage at hand. Among Pakistan’s middle class, built as it is increasingly around remittances from abroad, this has changed not only the process of choosing spouses but also the process of courtship and the timing and location of marriages.

Tradition and culture, religion and romance must all conform to rules made elsewhere.

The possession of foreign citizenship can bring together unlikely couples, unite families that would not otherwise consider marriage outside sect or social status. In the carefully choreographed processes of matchmaking, visas are wild cards that can make a plain bride beautiful and render a dumb and dour groom suddenly intelligent and charismatic. If leaving soon is on the cards, annoying mothers-in-law grate less on the nerves and overbearing fathers-in-law can seem much less agonising.

Individual cases reveal particular comedies exerted by foreign countries on the mating habits of those marrying in the developing world. Depending on the length of the queues at the embassy in question, the nikah or legal marriage ceremony can be held much before the rukhsati, or the giving away of the bride. This new practice, now quite common in Pakistan, is borne in no small way by the many brides (and grooms) left behind, awaiting pending immigration applications long after the mirth of marriage festivities have faded away.

The nikah thus happens almost immediately, so that it can be used as legal proof of marriage, starting the arduous process of proving the authenticity of the union to the officials responsible for allowing a husband or wife to proceed to the land promised by the passport. It is a carefully wrought compromise, allowing all other wedding arrangements to be in place.

All would be well if the foreign embassies, the ultimate arbiters of the authenticity of the marriage, had not caught on to the practice and questioned the possibility of fraud within it.

In the Western world, marriage is a deal between two people, with families playing an optional rather than crucial role. In the requirements of proof of courtship prior to marriage and then a marital relationship, they therefore require examples of the sort of intimacy that would be routine among couples elsewhere.

In one case, at a certain foreign embassy, an applicant carting her nikah papers and piles of photographs from the ceremony was questioned whether she still maintained residence at her parents’ house (she did).

In another, an embassy interviewer asked whether the nikah had just been arranged as a formality for immigration purposes, while the actual marriage ceremony (rukhsati) was still to take place, making the marriage in their opinion ‘incomplete’. In yet another case, a male applicant was asked why there was no evidence of the couple having spent their birthdays together, no cards or flowers, no evidence of ‘routine’ romantic gestures.

Among the middle class, then, with so many forced to look for jobs elsewhere and consequently for spouses that can make this possible, marriage and migration have become inextricably intertwined.

The safeguards against fraud imposed by foreign embassies can try the fragility of such would-be relationships: how central is the desire to leave and does it outshine the possibility of love? Is it really a good idea to consider passports as central to future happiness?

Does this in turn displace considerations of compatibility, character or even attraction? Are families, traditionally so central, no longer really relevant to the calculations of marital cohabitation?

The insecurities are many, and all of them imply the increasingly transformed landscape of marriage and courtship in cultures where matches are made. Inequalities between the sponsoring spouse and the one being sponsored replicates the power dynamic between the Western countries where residence is being sought and the developing countries which produce workers that cannot be accommodated within their own job markets.

The one granting residence and citizenship thus often gets to decide what a real marriage is, or at least, what it must look like in the photographs, papers, documents and other pieces of life that must be attached to the visa application.

In global discourse, a lot of space is devoted to the inequalities between the West and the rest; the portion of the world that guards its borders and entitlements and the rest sentenced to finding the nooks and crannies through which to squeeze.

The lie would-be migrants tell themselves, to elude the dislocation and pain of leaving the loved and the familiar, is that economic accomplishment will heal all; that cherished possibilities of return, carefully cultivated subcultures, will all somehow equal the best of both worlds.

While the lie is a necessary one, it evades the truth that is already culturally transformative: that relationships, bonds, marriages and ultimately future generations are all now different and changed by the reality that many, if not most, will or must marry to migrate.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.

rafia.zakaria@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, September 3rd, 2014