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Our parents try to make their girls independent as much as they can.We get highest results in the best colleges and best universities, we get selected on merit, we do our best in each and every semester of university, we do internships that our university offers. All this makes our self-esteem, self-worth shoot high. We are confident with our positivity radiating from each and every pour. Many of us find jobs and become the master of our own fate, become financially independent; making our own decisions while informing our parents (obviously).

But there are certain times and age where our parents have to make decisions for us. And those decisions, on which our future is based. The decision of whom we have to spend our whole life, though I agree it’s not the case with many of us, literally, it is a curious case of many girls. I am not against arranged marriages, but what I am against is, not asking the victim, who’s going to be abused physically or emotionally throughout her whole life. Also, whose sense of being an educated and independent woman will be snatched away after marriage.

Parents should ask their daughters about the kind of spouse they want. Many educated girls have a pretty good idea of what kind of life they want and whom they want it with. It’s okay to believe that parents, too, can make better decisions for their children. But after marriage, every girl has to face the trauma of identity crisis.

Identity crisis is not a gender crisis but how and when will I ever make a decision for myself? Is it after marriage, where I am only limited to the decision of what to wear and how-to breath? Frankly speaking, in many cases, girls have lost their lost decision making power on how to dress just because when they go to their new family, the dress code is different, food code is different, and sometimes, the languages spoken in families are different. And, we,  women, are forced to adapt all these changes.

It’s just a social norm that a girl should adapt to each and everything in her new family or follow her husband, blindly. And if she doesn’t, she is not considered as a good wife. I wonder what people want as wives? A retard to follow their orders without thinking of a human being, who can think and make decisions based on realities?

If we look around us, best-known bahus or biwis are those who don’t speak, think, move or even breath with their own will, but of their husband’s. And I wonder how men want these women to raise their children? Think for a second that what these ‘suppressed’ women will raise? A time bomb for their husbands, whose chain they will pull, any time they want to. And in the end, we have boys who don’t respect or like their fathers because they love their mothers.

With all this happening, this is what breaks our family system into pieces. A woman, who her whole life never gets a chance to make decisions, apart from what to cook (and sometimes not even that) revenging herself in society; making other woman’s life, hell. What would happen, if just for once, we give our daughters a chance to decide for themselves, let them take the responsibility of their own life, let them make them the healthy family healthy lifestyle? What could go wrong?

Think of a healthy future for your children. Believe in your daughters that our lifetime of nurturing, education and tarbiyat have made them a strong, independent woman. Strong enough to raise a happy ,healthy and fully-functional family. In the end, I would say that nobody should steal a woman’s identity.