“3o2balek“, the word we’ve been hearing since we were kids. Or actually to be fair it used to be directed at our parents and would be more of “3o2bal banatek“. Why at the age of two someone would be thinking about our marital status should be shocking, but it’s not when we live in Egypt.
Yes, I know that marriage is “Sunnet el 7ayah” or the purpose of life, but how much of a deal we’re making out of it is starting to become an issue. Nobody wants to end up alone and believe it or not the thoughts of dying alone are concerns of many people, even if they don’t talk about it. The question is, why is the thought there to start off with for someone who’s just in their 20s and have their entire life ahead of them?
We live in a society that expects women to wed at a very early age. Within the different social classes we have, the age differs from as early as 13 to a maximum age of 25. After that, people start to get worried whether you’ll ever get married – in other words, you start to be labelled or thought of as ‘3anes‘?
Or maybe not necessarily 25, it differs from social class to upbringing and definitely between age groups. For instance, women who went to college in the 1950s got married after their second year of university or straight after they graduated. Meanwhile, women born in the early 1900s didn’t go to college, so were expected to get married and start a family at an earlier age.
These women from different age groups look at our generation and do not understand why a young lady at the age of 25 or over is not married yet. To her and to most people in the society we live in, one worry crosses their minds: “Will she ever get married?”
Being a 27-year-old single female who does not plan on getting married anytime soon, according to society, I have earned the label of ‘3anes‘. I can see it in the way older people look at me when I go to weddings of people who are at least five years younger, in the different versions that 3o2balek has evolved to like “msh hanefra7 beeky ba2a?” or “Enty msh 3ayza tetgawezy wala eh?“.
It has always amazed me how something so personal is widely and openly discussed, how everyone feels they have a right to express their fears of your marital status. Being an Egyptian, I know that it is out of good intentions and concern rather than curiosity and that people only interfere as a way of expressing that they want you to be happy.
Why are people labeled as ‘3anes’ even if they’re just in their late 20s or early 30s?
Trying to understand where the root of this label has come from, I spoke with a few women from the older generation. Their point of view is that there aren’t that many places where females are exposed to men in large quantities.
People mainly meet their future husbands at university, student activities, through family friends or friends of friends or weddings (or arranged marriage setups, if you’re into that kind of thing). Which means, in other words, that you have a greater opportunity of meeting a spouse in your late teens or early twenties.
The next possible place to meet a possible suitor would be at work – that’s why society was kind enough to allow a few years after graduating before you become an outcast…
What if a women was to meet someone later on, what would stop her from getting married?
From their point of view, as a woman gets older, she becomes more independent. She becomes financially stable, has a life of her own, is successful in her career and is more confident with what she wants in life – and that scares men.
Wait, what? A woman being confident and stable is scary? Shouldn’t that be more appealing to men?
Of course not. Men marry women at an early age because she still hasn’t fully formulated her own view of life, is a lot easier to adapt to any situation that comes her way and hasn’t discovered who she really is. In other words, she doesn’t give him a hard time.
She’s more flexible and easy going and depends on him too much to let things go easily. Whereas successful women don’t need men (or at least don’t make them feel needed the way they want to) and so they’re always threatened by them! Is it really our problem that men have ego and self-confidence issues?
The thing I don’t get most about our society is the role religion and culture play and why sometimes they are substituted. According to religion, there would be nothing to worry about, as we know the term “naseeb” (fate or destiny) and the belief that only what God wants will happen. If we truly had that faith, then age would be just a number and whether we got married or not wouldn’t or shouldn’t be a concern because, after all, isn’t that God’s will?
But let’s put that aside and discuss the issue from an insider’s perspective. It might be true that the majority of people meet their spouses through college or work and it is true according to our society that most females get married straight after university or a couple of years after meeting the so called “man of their dreams”. So I get where their concerns are coming from, but it doesn’t mean that it is something to be worried or concerned about.
You could meet someone by chance at a supermarket, or bump into an old school friend 10 years later, or be lying on a chaise lounge in Dahab only to find someone with common grounds sitting right beside you and you just take it from there. A few months or years later, that random person could be your husband.
Fate and faith are two words we know so well, but only choose to apply in the situations we like. There is more to life than getting married. There’s a whole world out there waiting to be discovered and every person can add to that world in their own way; it doesn’t have to be only through the children they raise.
And please, don’t even get me started on how successful or independent women are a threat to men and therefore doomed in the eyes of our beloved society. Because if that is really true, I will glady be ‘3anes‘ for the rest of my life…
WE SAID THIS: Don’t miss “5 Reasons Why Getting Married Before Your Late 20s Is Self Destructive”