Girls of Riyadh

I’m getting many, many responses rebuking and insulting Um Nuwayyir, and censuring the families of my friends who have allowed their daughters to spend a single evening at the home of a divorced woman who lives alone. Wait a minute. Is divorce a major crime committed by the woman only? Why doesn’t our society harass the divorced man the way it crushes the divorced woman? I know that you readers are always ready to dismiss and make light of these naïve questions of mine, but surely you can see that they are logical questions and they deserve some careful thought. We should defend Um Nuwayyir and Gamrah and other divorcées. Women like them don’t deserve to be looked down on by society, which only condescends from time to time to throw them a few bones and expects them to be happy with that. Meanwhile, divorced men go on to live fulfilling lives without any suffering or blame.

Gamrah’s life didn’t particularly change after the birth of her son, since the real burden of caring for him fell onto the shoulders of the Filipina babysitter whom Gamrah’s mother had hired specifically for the job. The mother knew how lazy her daughter was and how she neglected even herself. How could she possibly look after a newborn? Gamrah remained as she was. In fact, she reverted to what she had been before she was married. She was busy enough tending to the profound melancholy that had enveloped her after she cut herself off from chat. She went on thinking about Sultan for quite a while. She often felt a strong yearning to talk to him, but she always retreated as soon as she recalled his situation and her state of affairs. Both would make it very difficult for them to be together in any real sense of the word.

Every evening, her thoughts took her far away. Envisioning her three friends, she compared her life with the lives they were leading. Here was Sadeem, totally consumed with adoring ( full-time) a successful politician and a man about town, who might at any moment rise up to ask for her hand in marriage. That image was based on what Sadeem was telling her about their splendid love and how they saw absolutely eye to eye on everything. Oh, how I envy Sadeem, she thought. She is lucky to get Firas instead of Waleed! An older guy is a lot better than those amateurs who don’t even know what they want out of the world.

Lamees was in her third year of university, and soon she would become a doctor and have the world at her feet! No problem if she was a little late in getting married, since marriage later in life was common in medical circles. In fact, it was so commonplace that one might even hear murmurs of disapproval about the “early” marriage of a female medical student. If a girl wanted to stay single without being labeled a spinster, all she had to do was go into medicine or dentistry. It had a magic ability to turn away prying eyes. But for girls in liberal arts colleges or two-year diploma programs, not to mention those who didn’t even go to a university, those eyes started staring and the fingers started pointing the moment they turned twenty.