Recently, while having a cup of tea with my dad, he gave me a couple of sideways glances and then posed the question I’ve been quietly dreading. “Don’t you think it’s time you and Chris… formalised your relationship?”
In Indian father speak, what he was really asking was, “When are you going to stop the indecency of living in sin with your long-term partner and just get married already?”
To be fair to my father, he isn’t the only one asking. I’ve been in the same relationship for over a decade now, and as we’ve entered our 30s, couples have sprung up all around us and are off to the altar within a year or two. Meanwhile, my partner and I rarely make it through a conversation about marriage without getting weighed down by all the conflicting expectations we’ll have to navigate should we ever try and tie the knot.
Many of my friends can’t understand why we wouldn’t get married. Most of us espoused similar anti-marriage views through our 20s on the basis of feminism (marriage being an outdated institution that involves transferring a woman from one man to another as though she is property), or wanting to wait for marriage equality, as an ally to LGBTIQ+ people. But when the time has come to make a call for themselves, my friends have chosen to get hitched. When it comes to it, getting married feels like the logical and natural next step in a long-term relationship.
For me and my partner, our cultural difference means that we have so many things to consider when planning a wedding, including conflicting expectations from our families
But for me and my partner, our cultural difference means that we have so many things to consider when planning a wedding, including conflicting expectations from our families. I’m Fijian-Indian and my partner is Caucasian, from a British-Australian family.
In my culture and family, marriage has always been a foregone conclusion. I knew from as young as I can remember that I would be getting married, and to a man that my parents vetted and approved of, if not one that they chose directly. I knew that he would be Indian and Muslim, and that my wedding itself would be a traditional three-day affair.
I also knew that within the marriage, I would have certain expectations of me as a wife and eventually as a mother: that I would run the household, care for my children, prioritise the needs of my husband. These may not have been spelled out to me as a child, but they were the gender roles modeled to me in all the marriages I saw in my family.
As time went on, I grew less and less capable of seeing myself in this dynamic. It didn’t feel true to me, and I told my parents when I was 18. They accepted this, but they did still expect to me to get married if I were to be in a relationship.
And yet, here I am, in a committed long-term relationship with no ring on my finger. They have fully accepted my partner despite his cultural differences, we own our home and plan to have children, and yet there has been no engagement announcement from us. It’s perplexing to them.
Writer Zoya Patel (Photo: Linda Macpherson) Source: Linda Macpherson
The heart of the issue is two-fold. Firstly, any wedding we have would have to be repeated so we could meet the expectations of both sides of our families and our broader communities. My family would want at least some elements of a traditional Muslim, Indian wedding. The clothing, the ceremony, the food. Some of that is also important to me, but large parts of it absolutely aren’t.
On the other hand, both my partner and I would likely want a more casual celebration with our friends and his side of the family, with music and dancing - which wouldn’t be the environment my folks would feel most comfortable in.
Not only would this be difficult to coordinate without potentially hurting feelings on both sides, having two events on that scale would be bigger and more complicated than either of us would really want.
Interracial relationships can sometimes feel like living a double life
And secondly, as important as parts of my Indian heritage are to me, having an Indian Muslim wedding when I don’t practise Islam doesn’t quite sit right with me. More so, having not meaningfully connected with my culture outside of family events over the past decade, my partner hasn’t had the chance to really engage with and understand the rituals that form the basis of Indian weddings.
Interracial relationships can sometimes feel like living a double life. You spend a lot of time code switching between the different environments, and it can be mentally draining trying to accommodate everyone’s expectations for the sake of harmony with family and friends.
It’s taken us such a long time to come to a point of comfort, straddling my Indian heritage and our shared Australian culture with a level of ease, that navigating a cross-cultural wedding feels like opening a can of worms we’d managed to successfully close.
When we consider all these factors, even if we really wanted to get married (which I would say we only 80 per cent do), it feels much easier to either forgo the whole thing, or opt for a swift legal ceremony and leave it at that.
Of all the bridges we’ve had to cross to forge our lives together despite differences, this feels like one easily avoided with a detour to de facto.
Zoya Patel is the author of No Country Woman.
