Baybay

A friend recently told me that she has a desi friend who is married to a man 20 years younger than her. My first reaction was shock and disbelief. I tried to say something enlightened and profound and with-it, but only managed an inarticulate "Wow". And each time I mentioned this wow-inspiring relationship to someone I thought was a 'liberated' (from the usual societal hang-ups) man or woman, I got a reaction that was less than enlightened. People seemed uneasy and uncomfortable. The more conventional amongst those I polled, had the predictable, conventional response: ’Allah! Tobah tobah!' or a subtler version of it, as if it were not completely respectable marriage we were talking about, but incest, or rape or adultery. To the religiously inclined I pointed out that the prophet Mohammed's first wife, a woman he respected and loved immensely, was a widow, 20 years his senior. But, they pretended not to hear and kept muttering words that expressed shocked disbelief over a moral transgression.
Why is it so shocking? We all know or know of men who are married to much younger women. Some of our celebrated national heroes like Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Imran Khan married women at least two decades younger than themselves. Admittedly it doesn't happen all the time anymore (child brides of men in their thirties), but even now when a man marries a woman old enough to be his daughter, we don't keel over in wide-eyed shock. We don't wonder about their mental health. We don't think they are sexual deviants or morally corrupt. A woman marrying a man old enough to be her son, however, is enough to transfix even the most progressive or liberal, the most enlightened and open-minded amongst us.
I remember when I was growing up, a woman married to a younger man, even if he was a couple of years younger, was always pointed out. If the age difference was not clear, but the woman even looked like she could be almost the same age as the man or older, it formed the basis for a lot of speculation and heated debate. I know of a woman who is married to a man a couple of years younger than her but he doesn't know it because she has lied to him. In fact, he thinks all her cousins and friends are younger than they actually are so that they can fit into his wife's younger age life-story. I wonder how she manages to maintain the lie. I wonder if it's worth it.
Many a times I have heard, and I am sure some of you may have too, ’Its better to marry a man at least 5-6 years older than you. Women mature quickly and start looking older than their husbands'. The implication is that it's okay for a man to look older than his wife but try to turn things the other way around and you are headed for trouble.
When women and men wanted to be particularly unkind, they would say ’Maa lagti hai uss-ki'. Or ’She looks like his baybay, his mother.' Meanwhile, I saw so many couples amongst which the men were 15-20 years older, who treated their wives like mental retards --- told them what to do, what to think, and who to be. In desi vernacular, wives and children are often lumped together under ’baal, bachchay'. Baal and bachchay both mean children, but refer to the wife as well as to the children in a family. I have also heard men refer to their wives, not too much younger than themselves, as ’bachchay' (which is a term Pathans often use in conversation when talking to children). Unlike the use of its English counterpart ’baby', I have never heard a woman address her husband as ’bachchay.' Not that the use of the equal opportunity term ’baby' means anything. Perhaps the West is not as hung up on a couple of years' difference as we are, but anything beyond a few years and you start stepping into unknown, eye-brow raising, tch-tch producing waters. And in the West, as in our part of the world --- or our cultures in any part of the world --- the woman in a relationship is almost always younger than the man.
Many will argue that it's the biological clock. Women are most fertile in their twenties and most women cannot have children in their mid-forties and fifties. Men, however, can produce children until they are in their seventies. I admit this does make sense to me. But, it only makes sense in the most extreme cases, where the woman is already headed towards menopause and the man is in his "prime". Even in these cases what if the man and the woman do not want to have children, or decide that other aspects of their relationship --- the respect, the affection, the sex (women who cannot bear children can still have sex) --- are much more important? I think that's it. What people find most troubling and shocking about an older woman younger man relationship is the sex. Many of us have a hard time accepting women as sexual agents, as opposed to sexual objects. In a relationship where the woman is older, it is impossible to see her as the object and in fact, the man is always considered her boy-toy. To be confronted, thus, by a ’middle-aged' woman's sexuality is more than we can take. Didn't her body wither and dry up already (we wonder silently)? Why is she having sex with a man old enough to be her son?
Furthermore, the biological clock argument doesn't explain our aversion, as a society, to any relationship where the man is even a couple of years younger. Women who are a few years older than their husbands can produce normal, healthy children. Why then are unflattering, misogynistic terms like ’phasaya' ’doray daalay', ’babay' and ’amma' applied to these women? Why is it so troubling to be confronted by women who may be more in control of a relationship? Why are emotionally mature, independent, older women so unattractive? And conversely, why are sensitive, vulnerable, more ’feminine' men less appealing? Why do we not respect men who don't correspond to our ideals of masculinity, like the paternal (and therefore, older), I'll-take-care-of-you variety? Why are husbands who are dominated by their wives, or even those who treat their wives like equals, considered hen-pecked while no such term exists for women who are dominated by husbands?
Patriarchal ideals of man the father and the provider that underlie our ideas about appropriate relationships are just as oppressive to men, as they are misogynistic at their core. To go against the conventions that guide our choice of mate based on their age, takes immense courage.
To my friend's friend who has married a man twenty years her junior I have this to say: Bravo! May she inspire others to follow their hearts rather than oppressive traditions.