A QUASI PSHYCHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS.

Well, here is my view in this fascinating debate. I think the real point here is not the problem of not knowing about the wedding rituals or where she met him. What the guys who talk about knowing their partner are trying to say (I think) is that if she doesn't know about the wedding customs, what else doesn't she understand about the whole culture.


Lets begin by making a few educated guesses and assumptions here.

I would say her guy is not that educated or sensitive to her individual needs or expectations, because if he was he would not be expecting her to marry him with no knowledge of the ceremony. Already he is taking it for granted that she will just come and be organised and prepared for the wedding by his family. Maybe she will bring her own dress and family, but everything else will be organised by his relatives and she will have to go along with it.

He is quite confident that there are no alternatives to the Turkish way and it therefore doesn't occur to him that she might want some choices. He obviously hasn't offered her any choices about anything because of her lack of understanding about the ceremony itself. This suggests he can't think more broadly or understand the meaning of diversity. It clearly doesn't occur to him that she should have choices. (this will continue after their marriage of course), he obviously has not thought about the importance of this day to her (again,he hasn't told her anything about the ceremonies, and it therefore seems logical to assume that her views on it are not important and this will set the pattern of their marriage.

The adherence to tradition is apparent all over Turkey and each generation accepts the traditions of the past without question. In my experience, there are obviously some exceptions to this, but these are rare and doesnt' seem to be the case here, because if it was an exception he would have asked her views or at least been sure she knew what would happen both at the wedding and throughout their marriage and life together. I am not criticising the adherence of tradition when it is positive but in this case I feel it is doubtful because of the suggestion that she should not have choices. Choices when he does offer them are almost certainly going to be limited to the choices he offers rather than of her thinking of things for herself.

She is not just marrying him, she is marrying his whole family and to some extent she will be marrying the views, beliefs and traditions of the whole community, because she will never be able to anything that would be disapproved of by the wider community. This may be simply small things, like not putting your lipstick on in public, but this refelects the reality of her daily life. OK so what if you can't put your lippie on in public, I hear you say. Well that is just a tiny example of lack of freedom and in my view is just a token of the wider implications of living in a society seeped in ancient tradition.

Maybe she comes from a culture herself where these small restrictions are normal and so she expects this. But if she doesn't then she is for some shocks. If a person enters into this culture prepared and fully understanding of what they are doing, then this is different, but again, her lack of knowledge of the ceremony suggests otherwise.

SInce she knows so little about the wedding ceremony (at the very heart of the beginning of her new life), there are doubtless hundreds of small things which will impact on her life which she doesn't have a clue about. Some of these things will be positive and some negative but at the end of the day, when you marry someone, anyone, there is a learning process about that individual (unless you have lived with them already), this process is hard enough, but the addition of cultural pressures and differences add to the burden. She may well love her husband enough to make changes and sacrifices in her life for him. But does she know she will have to make changes and sacrifices to satisfy his mother? His father? His brothers? Her new sisters? The neighbours who will watch her every move and report back any misdemeanours to her new family? Does she know that everything she does and says will be reported to her husband? Anything she does that is unacceptable to them, he will be expected to talk to her about and he will, because the pressure on him to maintain cultural traditions and behaviours will be so great that he will go along with the wishes of his family and the behaviours of the wider community.

Again, maybe she lives in a cultural community of her own with the same values and behaviours and this will not be new to her but if she doesn't then she will quickly feel oppressed and friendless.

I suspect that she has no idea of the change that will take place in her relationship when she becomes a 'wife'. If she is not from a culture like this, then she probably believes that her relationship with him will stay the same, but they will just be married. To be a wife in Turkey changes your status enormously; in some ways positively, but in many ways negatively, because her new status will bring new responsibilities which she will not be able to choose for herself. Her own husband, who she probably thinks she knows so well will also gain a new status and with that he will also have new responsibilities to her and more importantly her behaviour and obligations. He will be burdened to behave in a certain way and his burdens will become her burdens.

One of the reasons I was so dismayed at the removal of the forum topics 'My Turkish boyfriend/girlfriend' was that these discussions clarified many of the problems facing relationships with a Turkish partner. This is I felt was an essential learning tool for everyone considering marrying someone from Turkey. Positive and negative experiences could be exchanged and discussed and to the interested eye, the cultural difficulties to be faced were clear in every post. Equally, these forums were valuable to any Turks wishing to marry someone from another country, because they were also able to learn of the expectations, views and values of people from outside Turkey and give them something to think about in relation to their ability to maintain and nurture their relationship.

Marriage to someone from any different culture always requires compromises and sacrifices from both sides, and in this case the lack of information about something as fundamental as the actual wedding ceremoney suggests that her guy hasn't considered this two way process at all and she herself has not considered his lack of consideration as being just the beginning of a long and rocky road.