Muslim woman from the United Arab Emirates named Halima Abdurahman. I decided to dissolve my marriage. Everybody is born with a pair of “innocent” rose-colored glasses, but this “gift” is quickly outgrown. Every year the lenses will get tighter and tighter until they don’t fit anymore. For the majority of my childhood and adolescence, my glasses allowed me to see clearly. But when you’re twenty, it’s almost as if they don’t exist. Soon after I outgrew my spectacles, I said goodbye to a stage of my life that I had been looking forward to since I was a small child: I no longer desired to be married. I became interested in marriage and what it meant when I first started college because I started to notice patterns in the family lives of my friends and I. Friends’ parents, who seemed to be happy and loving most of the time, got caught up in a web of lies, adultery, and divorce. Everything about marriage that I had been told was beginning to seem false and out of the ordinary. The situation was all too familiar to me as I searched for solutions: a young couple gets married, things go smoothly for a while, but eventually problems crop up. The couple starts to fight frequently, yelling profanities at one another, and soon they are sleeping in different beds. Both parties have the uneasy feeling that they made a mistake and that the other isn’t the person they married. The couple will either divorce or “selflessly” stay together in the next ten years, typically for the benefit of their children.
