So Liz wrote me a while back ago about a mutual friend who ran off to Las Vegas and married this girl that he had literally just started dating two months before, and when I heard the news I wasn’t shocked at all. So I started wondering, why is this not huge news to me? And then I realized: this happens all of the time here. I believe I mentioned a little bit about boyfriends and girlfriends running away and getting married in an earlier blog entry, but here in Baoba, it’s happened again and it’s the talk of the town. So using this latest couple (we’ll call them Carlos and Ana), let me explain how so many marriages occur here:
Carlos is 27-years-old and doesn’t have any kids, which is an oddity in this country (because he’s male and above the age of 16). But with all of the pressure from this society to have kids, his biological clock is ticking and he really wants to settle down and start a family. He has been dating a 19-year-old for the past two years, and he proposed marriage six months ago, but she refused, saying she needed to continue studying in the university before she settles down and has kids (you go girl!).
Carlos and Ana, who is 22-years-old, have been friends since childhood, and even dated a little bit when they were younger. Because they have always been friends and continue to hang out, everyone in Baoba is gossiping that they are having a secret love affair. But the two deny any relationship and maintain that they are only friends.
Carlos ended his relationship with his girlfriend in December for multiple reasons. One reason was that they weren’t compatible since he wanted marriage and kids and she didn’t at the time. And another reason was that he had begun to like another girl in Baoba. Since things have ended with the girlfriend, Carlos spends all of his time with his new girl. The people of Baoba notice a change in Carlos- that he’s not spending any time with other women, including Ana, and things seem slow and normal for about a month.
In the first week of February, scandal breaks out. Ana is pregnant. With the child of Carlos. So everyone (including Carlos’s ex-girlfriend) knows that he cheated on her with Ana. To further complicate matters, Ana’s parents had no idea that this was even a possibility. So Carlos does what all respectable men in this situation do (and believe me, this is a common situation). He stops talking to the girl that he has been enamored with during the past month, and during the middle of the night, he takes Ana to live with him…in the bedroom that is attached to the garage of his mom’s house. So now the two are officially “married.” And now Ana, who was studying in the university has to stop her studying, live with her mother-in-law (good luck, Ana), and turn into a doña by spending her day, cooking, cleaning and waiting for her man to come home from work. And to make matters even more complicated, Carlos has now told various people in Baoba that he doesn’t love Ana, he only “married” her because society demands it.
It has taken me six months to realize that when people speak of their spouse or of getting married, they simply mean that they live together and have children. And when I ask people why they don’t get married “with papers,” they say because then it is too difficult to have a divorce and split up. I also asked them why the couple must marry even if they’re going to have a baby. If Ana and Carlos don’t love each other, why can’t they have a child together, but still have separate love lives? Why can’t she continue living with her parents? But apparently that is more disgraceful than moving in together because it shows that the man is denying that the child is his.
To further complicate matters (and because their definition of marriage is so lax), many of the men here “marry” one woman and have children, and then “marry” another woman a couple of years later, and then sometimes return to “remarry” the first, original woman. So basically, it’s cheating on your live-in girlfriend. And what surprises me the most is that many times these women are friends. They accept the fact that they both have children by the same man, and arrange play dates for the kids, and sometimes even go shopping together.
UPDATE: Ana had a miscarriage. Miscarriages are very common in this culture due to the young age that the girls have when they get pregnant. Even though Carlos and Ana married solely because of the child, they must now stay together for at least a month, because it would look bad on both of their parts if they split up so soon after they lost the baby. But the people here in Baoba seem to think that as soon as a respectable time period passes, the two will split up, and go back to their normal lives, pretending like this whole "marriage" didn't happen.
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