Al-Jazirah newspaper

DURING wedding parties for women, you will find university graduates and beautiful girls nervously waiting for the mothers and sisters of young men to look at them with a focused stare so that they may tell their boys about them. They will expect the looks of the mothers and sisters to end in their engagement and finally marriage.

Our homes are replete with young and beautiful girls waiting to be married but for some of them, the marriage takes a long time to come during which they may wither out or lose their good looks.

We are a society at the bottleneck whether we like it or not. We bring our children up armed with good manners and spend lavishly on their education until our daughters reach the age of marriage when we start worrying.

We do not usually find the ladder on which our daughters can climb to reach their projected husbands.

First and foremost, our girls are secluded. The boys and girls have no opportunity to know each other. There are no social means to bring them together.

Therefore the wedding parties for women are the most suitable occasions to hunt for husbands. The marriage in this case is not done directly between the boy and the girl but through the eyes of their mothers, sisters, relatives and friends..

Can you imagine that the marriage contract which is the most important contract in one's life is done through intermediaries and not directly?

This is really amazing!!.

Let us suppose that one of the girls is lucky to be spotted by the mother or sister of the would-be husband. Other complexities will follow this step. The questions will be asked about his and her origin. Where they have come from? What is the tribe?

Our society is fighting to keep the tribe alive for no good reasons which are not commensurate with our present time.

Under the tribal barrier, the girl's chances of getting married will dwindle by 50 percent or more. These are the fetters of the tribe which are still very much alive in our society.

Let us say a lucky girl finds a suitable husband through the eyes of his mother or sisters. Complex negotiations will ensue about the costs of marriage, the dowry, the gifts for the mother and sisters, the feasts, the house, the furniture, the honeymoon and many other issues.

There will be horrific details which are both money and time consuming. They include, among others, the trays of chocolate which may cost more than SR10,000, the wedding dress, the gowns for the mother and sisters, the type of invitation cards, the wedding party, the singer and many others until the bride and the groom reach their home.

When they do that, they would be spending their savings of three years on their honeymoon.

Since the marriage is arranged through intermediaries, the groom may only see his bride after all the marriage formalities. The couple will need time to get used to each other and to build a humanitarian relationship which usually takes a long time to construct.

This what makes the divorce rate in our society extremely high. The couple will begin their conjugal life barren of all factors of its success which are prior knowledge, love and security.

They will not have known each other better despite the first Shariah look and the telephone calls. Living together is an entirely different matter.

The society should endeavor to find more practical channels for the girls and the boys to know each other before they tie the knot. These may be government, private or charity channels which will enable the boys and girls to have a fair knowledge of each other before they come to live under one roof.

In a number of other countries, there are institutions which will look for a wife or husband for you. This means a modern matchmaking through the social media where the men and women will enter their data waiting to be matched.

According to the General Authority for Statistics (GaStat), there are 227,806 spinster women in the Kingdom. Spinsterhood is counted at the age of 32.

The important question here is: do we have quick solutions for the girls before they wither out or miss the marriage train?

Can we do something for the girls who are waiting in their homes with no freedom or guts to ask for the hand of a man whom they may like?

These girls are crying with loud voices: take us out of the bottleneck!!!