What about Khawin?

Assalamualaikum. May Allah bless us all.

The title itself should give a little bit of hint on what I am going to write about this time. In my 19 years of roaming around in this world, I have heard so many daunting truths about the necessity of getting married when you have reached a certain age. As if you are obligated to get married right after you graduate from a university or right after you reached 25! If only it was that simple.

I am 19 now so I am a little bit afraid of entering my 20's, not because of marriage only but also becoming an adult whereby I have to really face the world on my own. That's sucks. I usually don't like going to weddings but I do now, sometimes. So, interesting thing that happened was at every wedding, my sisters and I would just talked about how we wanted this and this kind of wedding, and we would have booked this kind of hall, caterings and gift bags from A to Z. Little that we know, that dream marriage of ours would cost like a quarter of our salary throughout our lives! Well, that's a bummer. Other times, dad would interrupt and explain how much a wedding actually cost today and oh my God I seriously did not expect a simple wedding would cost as much as 10k! Are you kidding me?

Dad also said that we should be grateful to be born as a woman. At least the responsibility aka the money, is not fully on us. Alhamdulillah. But then again, I feel sorry for the men because they are the ones who need to push themselves extra harder for the sake of wanting to make the love of his life as halal, which is not really the case. In Islam, there's no need to throw a big celebration or whatnot as long as you tell the people about the good news, you are okay. That's the whole purpose of walimatul urus. It is sunnah mu'akkad to do so. But the expectations of people around us that makes wedding such a burden rather than something to be at ease about. We have families to please, friends to deal and stuff like that.

If no one dares to break the culture, then no one is excluded from being indebted in marriage. A wedding will just be like another debt to your financial statement. Think about it. Something for us to ponder and wonder.