First Comes Marriage: My Not-So-Typical American Love Story

"Charming, funny, heartbreaking memoir of faith, family and the journey to love. If Jane Austen had grown up as a first-gen daughter of Iraqi parents in the 1990s, she might have written this. Keenly observed, with indelible characters, Al-Marashi portrays the complex mores and manners that govern life and love in the immigrant community of her youth.” —Washington Post"Honest and compelling, this memoir deconstructs the American pop culture idea of love and challenges the taboo within the Muslim community. And despite the rough path, her love for Hadi reconciles and grows to be more than your typical fairy tale." — Hippocampus Magazine"Sweet, candid and poignant First Comes Marriage: My Not-So-Typical American Love Story is part biography, part love story, part cultural narrative and altogether delightful. This charming tale of love not-so-American style does a fabulous job of introducing readers to the idea that not all romances must follow the path pushed upon us by Hollywood."— All About Romance"Al-Marashi’s story reminds us that there are so many ways to be a girlfriend, a fiancée, a mother, a sister, a wife, and a bride. Her book artfully upturns the colonial assumptions that so often govern stories about love and marriage, while also exposing the tensions inherent in building a life and a family while balancing conflicting cultural expectations derived from not one, but two well-loved homelands." —Vida Review“Told with exuberance and honesty, First Comes Marriage is a charming, delightful memoir of love and self-discovery. Huda Al-Marashi has written a smart, down-to-earth, and unforgettable modern-day love story that celebrates the enduring bonds of culture, faith, and family. A wonderful book.” —Jasmin Darznik, New York Times–bestselling author of The Good Daughter and Song of a Captive Bird “This sweet, sharply insightful memoir of an Iraqi American marriage skewers stereotypes as it leaves you cheering for these newlyweds.” —Susan Muaddi Darraj, author of A Curious Land“Determined to weave her own love story from the threads of the two seemingly opposing cultures she grew up in, Al-Marashi fearlessly takes us on a journey into the darkest corners of her young marriage, as well as herself.” —Jen Waite, internationally bestselling author of A Beautiful, Terrible Thing“An honest, often amusing, account of one young woman’s quest to balance the traditional Muslim values she acquired from her Iraqi immigrant parents with the romantic fantasies she acquired from American media. Her story is both unique in that the devout, overachieving narrator is not the rebellious first-generation daughter we’ve come to expect from immigrant narratives, and universal in its instructive journey from youthful hubris and naïveté to learning how to make a marriage work.” —Faith Adiele, author of The Nigerian Nordic Girl’s Guide to Lady Problems, and founder of VONA Travel Workshop for Writers of Color “There comes a time in every relationship (romantic or platonic) when one must decide to leave or stay. With courage, humor, and vulnerability, skilled memoirist Huda Al-Marashi excavates the contours of her marriage, intimately sharing with the reader the journey to her moment of choice.” —Ayesha Mattu, coeditor of Love, InshAllah: The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women and Salaam, Love: American Muslim Men on Love, Sex, and Intimacy Huda Al-Marashi currently lives in Encinitas, California, with her husband and three children. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the LA Times, Al Jazeera, the VIDA Review , the Offing , and elsewhere. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1 - Husband PotentialI cannot remember a time when I didn’t think of Hadi Ridha as a potential husband. The day my family first met the Ridhas, Mrs.xa0Ridha took one look at me—six years old and my hair in braids—and my baby sister, Lina, and said, “ Mashallah, mashallah . We don’t need to look anymore. We found our pretty girls.”At the time, I didn’t know that my father and Dr. Ridha had gone to the same medical school in Baghdad. I didn’t know that they’d found each other at an American Academy of Neurology meeting in San Diego and that Dr. Ridha had invited us to his home for dinner. I didn’t know that the Ridhas were also Iraqi and Shia, because those were descriptors I still didn’t know to apply to myself.All I knew that day was that the Ridhas were different in the same way we were different. They spoke Arabic with “ch” sounds, replacing the “k” sounds; they ate rice with stews called marga; and they kept their five daily prayers, even though Mrs. Ridha, like Mama, did not cover her hair with the hijab. These were my signs that of the two types of boys in the world—those who were pos-sible to marry and those who were impossible—the Ridha boys belonged to the former, the small population of boys from which I’d be allowed to choose a husband.It was a remarkable discovery for the early 1980s. The only Arab community in our small, seaside Northern California town was a secular social group filled with a mix of Lebanese, Palestinians,xa0Syrians, and a few Iraqis who had immigrated so long ago they spoke more English than Arabic. No one in my parents’ small band of friends was quite like the Ridhas, whose dialect was still so fresh on their tongues, who knew so many other Iraqi immigrant families in the United States, and who matched our family not only in religion and level of devotion but also in ages and interests. The fathers got along. The mothers got along. The Ridha boys played well with my brother, Ibrahim, and Lina and I played well with their daughter, Jamila.In spite of the four-hundred-mile distance between our Northern and Southern California homes, our families clung to each other. When the Ridhas came to our house, we took day trips to Carmel Beach, Big Sur, and San Francisco. We came back dirty and tired, and waited in line for a turn in one of the two bathrooms in our small ranch home. When my family stayed with the Ridhas, they drove us to Los Angeles County, to their newly founded Islamic center or masjid, and to events with the other Iraqi families gradually moving into the area.By the time my little sister, Lina, was four years old, she’d already intuited that the Ridha boys were the marriageable kind. After a picnic one sunny afternoon in Big Sur, she turned to Jamila Ridha, the oldest child among us, and said, “I’m full. Now can I have my wedding?”Lina had been gripped by wedding fever ever since she’d fallen asleep and missed her chance to be a flower girl in Jamila’s aunt’s wedding. Jamila had promised Lina she could have a pretend wedding just as soon as everyone was done eating. At home, we’d baked Lina a cake, using a box mix, while she put on her favorite summer dress, the one with the ruffles and the hula-dancer print, and then she stuck a comb with a short tulle veil in her mess of curly blond hair.Now Jamila brushed the potato-chip salt off her fingers, reached out for Lina’s hand, and guided her off the bench of the picnic table.xa0Together we walked down the poison-oak-lined trail to the creek where our brothers were building a dam. Jamila climbed to the top of a flat rock, cupped her mouth, and called out, “Guys, come here.”I listened to her voice bellow and admired the ease with which she commanded our brothers. Jamila was thirteen years old, four years older than me, and I believed in her authority. The boys, however, were unimpressed. The three of them continued slapping down the rocks they’d chosen for their creek dam with a clank and a splash.“Guys,” Jamila repeated. “We promised.”My older brother, Ibrahim, waded out of the water, looking peeved. He hated it when Jamila tried to organize us.Down from the rock, Jamila said, “Ibrahim, you’ll do the ceremony.”Ibrahim shook his head. His eyes were green and his eyelashes so thick and bold that the girls at school teased that he wore mascara. “I’ll do it for Lina,” he said. “Not because you asked me to.”“Well,” Jamila said, turning to her two brothers who were approaching in their swim trunks, “which one of you is going to be the groom?”Without a word, the Ridha boys stepped into their sandals, which were left at the side of a nearby rock, and moved in behind Ibrahim. The sun had deepened the tone of the brothers’ already dark skin. Amjad, the younger and shorter of the two, was wiry, pure flesh and bones, while Hadi was stockier with a small tummy and a waist that gave in on both sides to a slight crease.I crouched down so that Lina and I were the same height and said, “You don’t need a boy to have a wedding. How about if you get married by yourself ?”Lina dropped her chin so low it almost touched her chest, and pushed her lips into a frown. “But a bride has to have a husband,” she said with such certainty it was clear that Lina already understood there were rules to getting married.“Just play along,” Jamila said to Amjad, but he folded his arms and gave a firm no. She then turned to twelve-year-old Hadi. “You’ll marry Lina, won’t you? She’s little. She doesn’t understand what being married means. You don’t want her to be disappointed, do you?”Hadi stood there with water dripping from his hair and listened to his sister’s argument with his hands on his hips. He looked down and kicked the rock closest to his foot. He watched it scuttle across the ground.“Okay,” he said.Surely Hadi knew there would be teasing—that our parents would laugh heartily at the memory of the little bride and her new husband for years to come—and yet he was willing to put up with this for my sister’s happiness.From the front of the campground firepit, where I stood as Lina’s maid of honor, I watched Lina walk down the dusty aisle between a run of benches, clutching a bunch of artificial flowers with one hand, the other hand trying to suppress a giggle. Our mothers looked on from a bench off to the side, squealing in pure delight at Lina’s irrepressible joy, the fluff of golden hair peeking out from behind her veil. Mrs. Ridha called out to her sons, “Pay attention, boys. One day you will dream to marry such pretty girls.”When Ibrahim opened his facetious wedding ceremony with, “Dearly beloved with the exception of Jamila,” my gaze fell on Hadi standing at Lina’s side, playing along with a sincerity I’d never seen in a boy. I took a snapshot of Hadi in my mind—still in his swim trunks and as tanned as a piece of overdone toast. I decided if I did, indeed, marry Hadi one day, this would be the moment I’d say I first fell in love with him. Read more