DECEMBERISTAN
Wedding not a marriage
Every winter, Pakistan transforms. The banquet halls fill, the designers pull all-nighters, the banks issue wedding loans, and millions of women spend months planning the most important day of their lives. Not the day they close on a house, or defend a thesis, or get a promotion. A day that marks the completion of a milestone they are taught to dream of since the inception of girlhood.
Their wedding day.
We call it “Decemberistan” as though the season belongs to the ritual. Denoting the wedding season with its own name and devoting a season to it is deliberate. It reflects our collective priorities. It is our way of declaring that the institution of marriage takes precedence above all else and that the festivities associated with it deserve the same standard.
Before we go further, a disclaimer1 for the reader regarding what this essay is:
This is an essay about a specific slice of Pakistani womanhood. Decemberistan, as I have described it, belongs to cosmopolitan hubs. To the neighbourhoods with backyards that represent generations of wealth hoarded and passed down. It belongs to the upper class that has a particular stake in the upholding of marriage. It is one of the primary mechanisms through which wealth is consolidated and kept within families and the current hierarchy is maintained. For women without access to this privilege the decision to opt into or out of marriage is not a choice in the way this essay describes.
It is also necessary to say this: marriage does not only happen through elaborate celebration and seduction. It happens by force. In situations where the festivities of a wedding are only a way to conceal the bride’s resistance to being placed into a life she did not choose. It happens when women marry to escape abuse at home, hoping that a husband will be less violent than a controlling father or a claustrophobic extended family. For these women the wedding industrial complex is not a seduction. It is a ceremony performed over their objection. This essay does not encompass their experience because that requires its own dedicated space.
Pakistan’s wedding industry is worth2 roughly what the state spends educating its entire population.3 Where a society spends its money tells you what it values and the collective decision Pakistani society seems to have made is clear.
This decision that is ultimately made for women (even when they think they are the ones making it) has consequences that go beyond devoting a season to a ritual. It has tangible consequences on what we owe young girls and what we prioritise in relation to their future.
The population being most underserved by education spending is the same population being most aggressively targeted by the wedding industry. According to Save the Children “A total of 38% of school age children are out of school, with more girls than boys not attending classes. In Balochistan in southwest Pakistan, 75% of girls are missing out on education.” Adrienne Rich identified the withholding of education from women as one of the central mechanisms by which compulsory heterosexuality is maintained, and these numbers make this mechanism visible.
But these figures wane when you reject reality and embrace what you witness through your social media feeds as the only truth that matters. These past few months every time I have opened Instagram, someone I know is either getting married, attending someone else’s wedding, or managing to do both simultaneously. Watching stories and liking posts on Instagram lets you forget the price tag for a while. Decemberistan calls on you to suspend disbelief and forget financial woes.
It makes the extravagance feel accessible and affordable, even if that means a hefty loan from the bank to finance a dream you have always dreamt.
Wrapped in this extravagance is a fantasy and a feeling that most women are raised to desire and chase. The feeling of being, for once, completely and uncontestedly at the center of the world (our world in particular). The allure of the festivities distracts from the extraordinary cost, both material and immaterial. Pakistani families take up loans of up to 3 million rupees to finance a single wedding. But when a woman goes into debt for her wedding, she can calculate what she owes and make a plan to repay it. The cost she cannot calculate or repay?
Herself.
Shaadi is so essential to the indoctrination curriculum for younger girls and unmarried women that it is the main plot-line for popular culture in the country (television shows like Nida Yasir’s morning show or popular drama serials such as Humsafar and Zindagi Gulzar Hai). I remember watching some of these shows while I was growing up and questioning why, even when there was an attempt at critiquing the institution of marriage by showing that abuse and violence were common issues married women face, the solution was somehow still marriage. As if the problem is not the institution but a few bad apples and finding the right one is all it takes to address this structural oppression.
Popular culture now conditions us more rigorously through social media and Decemberistan offers us the salvation we witnessed the women in these dramas experience. The happily ever after that our mothers never got to have but maybe we could.
Decemberistan, we are told, is for the bride. It is sold to us under the guise of something we have always wanted. A celebration. A day which promises to unequivocally prioritise us and our desires. But not in a way that improves our lives even after the bridal wear sheds. Maybe this is why our weddings span over days and sometimes weeks. It is almost as if it is the only way to delay the transition from a bride to a wife. And everyone who profits from this delay—the designers, the vendors, the banquet hall owners, the patriarchs, the institution of marriage—all of them let you perform emancipation, because they all know it ends as soon as the shehnai stops.
The Conflation
A marriage is a contract. In many (if not most) cases one that signals finality and completion for a woman. It is a sense of “completion” that women are taught to crave from girlhood. They are taught that no matter what they achieve in life, it will fall short if it comes at the expense of marriage. In this way, a marriage signals to society that a woman is finally good enough now that she has been chosen once and for all. A wedding is a celebration of this achievement. In essence a wedding is a party for a milestone and the marriage is the milestone.
So if a wedding is simply a party why does it receive preferential treatment in the hierarchy of celebrations? Why does it get to be any different than a birthday or a graduation party or a school farewell—all of which mark important milestones in our lives. What makes weddings so special that most women have dreamt (elaborately) of becoming a bride and walking down the aisle?
When I started writing this essay I was partially unconvinced that wedding celebrations needed to be uniquely and exclusively grand. Now that I am finally putting down every thought I have had since the inception of this idea, I am completely unconvinced that weddings are special enough to justify the debt we accrue (for them). They are only made special because of marriage. Simone de Beauvoir observed that marriage is not one choice among many but the only destination a woman’s life is understood to be moving toward. It offers a finality that achieving academic and professional milestones such as a degree or a dream job cannot. Not because these accomplishments are not fulfilling, but because we are taught to view ourselves as incomplete and unsuccessful until our efforts land us a man who decides to give us his name.
Without it we are not good enough.
We are taught to compete with other women for the prize of life-long male companionship. In a society where our worth is governed by our association to a man at any given moment (father, brother, husband, son), this companionship is social currency. We spend our whole life shrinking ourselves and becoming who we are supposed to become. A good woman. A marriageable woman. The wedding is the shiny medal that signifies that we were successful in this quest. That we do not have to compete anymore. That we are finally spoken for and chosen unequivocally.
That we won. What we have won is revealed only once the bride becomes a wife.
Marriage, we are asked to believe without questioning, is a gateway to a life well-lived. It is a social passport that unlocks the social validation we grow up craving. Trips to the gynaecologist no longer feel as tense when the question of sexual activity comes up and your husband is sitting right next to you. Sex is no longer deviant or unregulated female desire, but an essential ingredient to maintain a relationship. Conversations about “trying for a baby” are met with genuine curiosity instead of shame and sanction. If the police stop you and your partner for embracing each other or engaging in a public display of affection, your nikkahnama acts as a get out of jail free card that lets you look down on unmarried couples doing the same.
In Urdu, colloquially, the term used for weddings is the same as the term used for marriage. Shaadi. Though the wedding industry seems to have reframed it to shaadi ka din (day of the wedding/shaadi). Implicit in this conflation is an intent to associate one with the other. Adrienne Rich argued that the glamorization of so-called sexual liberation of women is one of the central mechanisms by which marriage as an institution is maintained. The spectacle of the wedding, the influencer bride dancing to her heart’s decree, the Decemberistan aesthetic all function precisely this way. They look like freedom.
They are not.
You cannot have one without the other. Silvia Federici argued that the domestic role assigned to women was not natural but constructed, engineered to ensure that the unpaid labour a wife provides would remain invisible and uncompensated. The wedding is the ceremony that initiates this arrangement. The debt families accrue to fund it is, in this light, an entry fee into a system designed to extract far more than it ever returns.
Women do not have to opt into the institution of marriage to go on dates, have sex, or mark every milestone with the same enthusiasm reserved for a wedding. They do not have to spend their entire lives earning this pleasure.
But if women in this country realised this, the institution of marriage and its closest benefactors capitalism and patriarchy, would be in disarray.
What a Wedding Actually Gives Women
When else is a Pakistani woman publicly and lavishly celebrated? When a suitable boy and his family choose her for marriage. When she gives birth, especially to a boy. When her children achieve a milestone she could never dream of. When she proves herself to be a good wife and allows her husband a second wife.
Every item on this list celebrates her in relation to someone else or marks her joyful submission to the roles ascribed to her. She is still not at the center. Her proximity to a man is.
The wedding day feels different though. The bride is the moment. The groom is merely a side character. It is the only culturally sanctioned moment in which a Pakistani woman is permitted to occupy the center. This day promises to be a celebration of her womanhood.
But there are two other ways a Pakistani woman finds herself at the center. The first is as a warning. To be at the center this way is humiliating. It requires you to justify your existence, to apologize for simply being. I know this because I have been this woman—shamed for being over-confident, for my sexuality, for refusing to shrink. The second is as a prize. When a woman is celebrated in mainstream Pakistan it is conditional. Women who march on Women’s Day are reprimanded. The celebration that is permitted is a celebration of surrender—of a woman accepting her fate, being rewarded for her docility. Her true self is nowhere in it.
The wedding is the only offer that claims to be neither.
From birth, a girl’s existence is met with mourning; parents are commiserated, prayers are offered for a son next time. She witnesses her male counterparts celebrated for the smallest wins while her own access to achievement narrows the older she gets. She does not know what it feels like to be celebrated simply for being. The wedding arrives and says: today, no justification required. No submission demanded. Just you, at the center, uncontested. This is the only day she comes close to experiencing a freedom she had only heard of in fairy tales.
Fatima Mernissi argued that the entire Muslim social structure can be seen as a defense against the disruptive power of female sexuality. Our whole lives we are told to put our lives on hold for this day. Shaadi ke baad jo marzi hai karlena. Shohar se ijazat le ke apni marzi karna (Do whatever you want once you are married. Ask your husband for permission and then do what your heart wills). Our society is organised around regulating and institutionally containing female desire.
Marriage grants women a permit to access and exercise these desires. Her wedding day is a celebration of this containment. The desire has been redirected and channelled into an institution that claims it as its own. What feels like liberation is, on closer inspection, a permit.
As I get older I often wonder how many people have gotten married just so they could date in peace.
The wedding industry goes beyond the designers and the vendors. There is big money in making the union possible in the first place. MuzzMatch (a muslim dating app) renders the traditional practice of rishta aunties acting as a hitch obsolete. It gives you the opportunity to browse bachelors on your own. And while it does make the process of finding yourself a husband less humiliating in comparison to being sold as a product to eligible men by some aunty, you cannot convince me that it is not simply a dating app in modest apparel.
This branding makes a socially sanctioned desire permissible by associating it with the goal of marriage. Kecia Ali has shown that Islamic jurisprudence has historically constructed marriage as the institution that makes female sexuality legally available within it and unsanctioned outside it—MuzzMatch gives this centuries-old architecture a user interface.
The main sell of the wedding day is the ability to occupy the center. But this is also the trap—opt into the institution of marriage and you may never occupy it again.
The Bride vs. The Wife
This year for my 26th birthday, I threw myself a fake wedding. There was a saree made specifically for the occasion, a dholki setup, and every person I love arranged around me. My friends—most of whom had never met each other—came together to ensure I was having the best time. The rituals of a dholki removed the awkwardness between them. They all knew their role as wedding guests and performed it naturally. And in that way the bonding between them came almost organically.
What made it different from every other celebration I had been a part of was the ease of it. I have always felt a queasy feeling when people sing happy birthday and all eyes turn to me. That feeling did not exist that day. I was at the center and it felt entirely natural—because the structure of the ritual said I was supposed to be.
The wedding is the peak moment before the descent into domestic obligation. The bride is allowed the experience of a subject (autonomous) once before she becomes a function (a role or tool). My fake wedding gave me the opportunity to enjoy this autonomy without the fear of losing it. By virtue of it not being real, the pressure of satisfying in-laws and adhering to social standards was removed. The wedding did not have to meet anyone’s criteria of respectability. It was mine to enjoy.
A bride and a wife are not the same performance. Being a bride feels incredibly special. Being a wife is an obligation, De Beauvoir would call it a function, the performance of a role rather than the living of a life. Therefore, the emotions each role produces are also entirely different even though the industry sells them as one continuous experience. On her wedding day a woman is centered, adorned, celebrated for herself. Once the wedding ends, the transition to a marriage is marked by the instant change in expectations. She becomes a representative of her husband and his family. Though she remains the main attraction (for a while) this time the spotlight serves a different purpose. It highlights how unfamiliar she is with the script despite having rehearsed it her whole life. As the wife, she must perform the role to the best of her abilities or stay yearning for material security in her new life. Kecia Ali has shown that Islamic jurisprudence historically constructed the marriage contract as an exchange of obligations—the wife’s obedience and availability in return for the husband’s financial maintenance. The wedding celebrates the beginning of this arrangement while decorating it beyond recognition.
The transition from bride to wife begins the moment the engagement is announced (but settles in more firmly post wedding). What follows happens in three stages:
Anticipatory conditioning: From girlhood women are told that compromise in marriage signals virtuosity. Federici argued that the domestic role assigned to women was constructed to ensure that the unpaid labour a wife provides remains invisible and uncompensated. The conditioning that makes compromise feel like virtue is the system preparing her for work she will never be paid for. Women (as wives) are rewarded for their obedience and availability through their husband’s financial maintenance and his (conditional) decision not to share himself with three other wives. The script of this scene is handed to women early in life and so when it actually happens, the sacrifice feels like evidence that they are doing marriage correctly.
Cognitive siege: The identity crisis, the new expectations, and the performance demanded of them is all-consuming and exhausting. Even when women consciously register what is happening to them, they do not have the bandwidth to act on that knowledge. As they lose themselves, they also lose sight of what they truly desire. Deconstructing an identity they were raised to believe as the ultimate destination takes energy. Standing up for what you want requires knowing yourself enough to understand your needs and wants. It also runs the risk of losing all that you have ever known, and with that the privilege that comes giving into the demands of hegemonic femininity. This exhaustion and cognitive dissonance through disconnection from self is what upholds the institution of marriage. I have watched this transition happen to many friends who I have lost to their marriages. Before their wedding our conversations were full. After the engagement it all became about marriage. It is the siege happening in real time and no way to stop it but the next stage.
Retrospective grief and cope: In retrospect the shape of what happened becomes visible. But by then life is already structured around the marriage itself. There is a lot of grief in this process. And it is almost never named publicly—because to name it would be to indict a choice that was supposed to be the pinnacle of a woman’s achievement. Women reconcile the loss by reminding themselves this is what they always wanted. Deniz Kandiyoti identified this as the logic of classic patriarchy. Women endure present hardship in exchange for future power. The wife who submits today is investing in the authority she will wield as a mother-in-law tomorrow. The role does not disappear. It is simply transferred to the next woman in line. This is how the system reproduces itself through the women who have already paid the price and need the next generation to pay it too.
But as traditional patriarchal bargains stop feeling as rewarding, women begin seeking new terms. The woman who throws herself a fake wedding is finding a new bargain, one that gives her the celebration without the contract.
The Feminist Fear Theory
The most recent granular national data on marriage patterns in Pakistan comes from the Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey of 2017-18, analyzed by Gallup Pakistan. It shows that the median age at first marriage rose by 1.8 years over three decades, from 18.6 in 1990 to 20.4 in 2017. In urban areas this increase was steeper—from 19 to 21 over the same period. The percentage of women married before 18 fell from 41% in 1990 to 29.3% in 2017. A reduction of 12% over thirty years. The data also shows that a woman with higher education and workforce experience married more than six years later than a woman with no education who had not worked before marriage. Education and employment delayed marriage. The trend was clear and it was moving in one direction.
Then something shifted.
There is no comprehensive post-pandemic national data on marriage rates yet. What we have instead is anecdotal evidence, and it points in the opposite direction from the pre-2018 trend. Most of my batchmates from high school are already married. The generation before them, my cousins, the millennials, married closer to their thirties. My generation is marrying younger, not letting education or jobs delay this milestone for them. This is despite being more educated and more financially independent than any that came before. I cannot prove this statistically. What I can do is ask why.
My theory is this. The delayed marriage trend among educated urban women was a threat. A woman who earns her own income, who has a degree and a social life, who can date and travel and build a career, has less practical need for the institution of marriage than her mother did. Silvia Federici argued that capitalism’s development depended on women’s unpaid reproductive labour—any threat to the supply of that labour is a threat to the system itself. The wedding industry is the recruitment mechanism for that system. When recruitment starts to falter the incentive has to become more extravagant.
The sell has had to change.
Fatima Mernissi argued that Islamic fundamentalism is in part a defense against recent changes in sex roles and perceptions of sexual identity. The wedding industry’s intensification follows the same logic. When female self-determination rises the institution responds through a rebrand. Deniz Kandiyoti identified this pattern as a patriarchal bargain entering crisis — when the old terms stop feeling rewarding women begin to seek new ones, and the system responds by making the original bargain look more appealing. The spectacle of Decemberistan is precisely that response.
For my mother’s generation marriage offered survival through financial security. For my generation it offers the relief of being permanently chosen. In a generation defined by situationships and the exhaustion from uncertainty, marriage promises stability by removing you from a dating pool that only seems to be getting worse. You no longer have to audition and perform perfection for someone to choose you.
You are spoken for once and for all.
And the industry knows exactly which demographics to target and what story to tell.4 Every shaadi season my social media fills with influencer weddings. Grand, lavish, multiple outfit changes, every moment documented. The photography page tagged as a collaborator, the designer outfits that are almost certainly gifted, the catering subsidised in return for a major endorsement. Much of these favours stay undisclosed or land up in footnotes the audience glosses over. Pakistan’s Competition Commission formally warned influencers in 2024 that undisclosed endorsements constitute deceptive marketing under the Competition Act 2010. This is not an anomaly specific to Pakistan. Research analysing over 100 million social media posts found that the vast majority of commercial content globally is not appropriately disclosed and that consumers cannot distinguish paid from organic content without disclosure labels. This is deliberate and by design to ensure that the cost (and how it was managed) is only a post-script to the main sell.
The women watching ache for the euphoria of this ceremony. The feeling of being at the center and having nothing else matter. The narrative being sold weaves in a fairytale romance so seamlessly that getting married seems like the only possible way to attain the certainty of forever. Once married, the content from these influencers centers their new life and their partner. Their happiness is emphasised through a constant bombardment of wedding photoshoots and romantic captions for months after the wedding is over. The influencer stays a bride for however long she wishes to be observed as one and through this performance she cloaks all the compromise a marriage demands of women.
The Provocation
In 2023 the students at LUMS threw a fake wedding. A bride and groom were selected from among the cohort and the campus transformed into a banquet hall as their batchmates joined the celebration of this union. This wedding spanned over multiple days to give each traditional ritual the service it called for. It was organized communally to make sure that no one person would have to incur huge costs. With no vows and no debt, this wedding became the subject of mass scrutiny as it was labelled a bastardization of the institution of marriage. The girl who played the role of bride had to face an angry set of parents while the boy playing groom did not.5
The asymmetry of that backlash tells us what we need to know about the limits of celebration placed onto women. A woman who discovers she can have the celebration without the contract is a danger and must be confined. Marriage is the container for this deviance.
I am not arguing that women should not marry or that weddings should not exist. I do not think that doing away with elaborate celebrations would cause women to stop opting into marriage because a (grand) wedding is only one of the ways in which women are inducted into the institution. What I am arguing is that celebration should not be exclusive to marriage. That the elaborateness and the spectacle and the ritual of being publicly centered should not require a contract. That the industry has made these things appear inseparable because it needs them to appear inseparable. And that if women were given more space to be celebrated as themselves—at graduations, at career milestones, at the simple fact of surviving another year—the lure of marriage as the only door to that feeling would be less total.
What I call for is a suspension of disbelief. The woman who dreams of the wedding knowing and not knowing what comes after. The woman who has been so starved of being celebrated that she will sign any contract that promises her one day of it. The woman who wants the party and is handed the institution. I call for women to recognize that surrendering our being in service of the day is not a necessity, no matter how many times we are told otherwise.
When I threw myself the fake wedding I understood, somewhere in the middle of it, that I did not need a marriage to access the feeling of being loved and worthy of celebration. The feeling was always available to me. I never had to earn it (I was only taught I needed to). It just required safety, and community, and people who loved me without conditions. None of which required a contract.
The celebration was never about the marriage.
I love seeing your writing again after so long! This is so well-written and powerful
Omg thank you sooo much! I really did feel like I lost touch with my writing for a bit but I am glad to be back and I am so excited to interact with more intention and commitment