Rishta in Abbottabad

What makes an Abbottabad search different

Hazarewal is not the same as Pakhtun, so write what you actually are

Families from Punjab and from the south routinely read Khyber Pakhtunkhwa on an address and assume Pashtun, and in Hazara that assumption is simply wrong. This division is Hindko country. The household language in most of Abbottabad is Hindko, not Pashto, and the biradaris are Hazara's own — Tanoli, Jadoon, Swati, Abbasi, Dhond, Karlal, Awan, Sarara, Gujjar, Turk.

So do not write Pathan on a profile from here and leave it there. Write the biradari and set the mother tongue field to Hindko if that is what is spoken at home. It takes ten seconds and it stops two different kinds of mismatch: the family that passes you over because it reads the profile as something it is not, and the family that approaches on an assumption and discovers the truth at the second meeting. One note for the word Swati in particular — the Swati households of Hazara and the households of the Swat valley are not the same thing, and a profile is clearer for saying which.

Studying here is not the same as being from here

Abbottabad educates the whole north. The medical college, the universities, the cadet colleges and the schools pull in students and young professionals from Mansehra, Battagram, Kohistan, Chitral, Gilgit, Azad Kashmir and far beyond, and a great many of them live here for five or six years. That means a profile showing Abbottabad may belong to a household rooted here for generations, or to somebody who will be gone the month the training ends.

Neither is better. But they are different proposals and the profile should say which, because the real question behind it is where this household expects to be in three years. If the family is from Mansehra or Gilgit or Muzaffarabad, write that alongside Abbottabad. If a job or a training post ends on a known date, say when and say where it is likely to lead. A family that has thought past the degree answers that in a sentence, and it is the sentence the other side is actually waiting for.

If the profile says doctor, say where on the ladder

This city produces a lot of doctors, and doctor on a profile covers an enormous range: a final-year student, a house officer, somebody sitting the first part of a postgraduate exam, a trainee four years into a specialty, and a consultant with a practice. The incomes are not comparable and nor are the lives, because the training years are precisely the years that decide where a couple can live and how much they see each other.

So write the stage, the specialty if there is one, where the training post is, and how many years it has left to run. And for a woman's profile, write plainly whether she intends to complete specialisation — which is years of long and unpredictable hours — and let the other household say just as plainly whether that is something it will support. That conversation is far easier before a nikah than eighteen months after one, and in this city it is the single commonest thing left unsaid.

The motorway changed the map and some families have not updated it

Abbottabad used to be a long day's business from Islamabad. It is not any more. The motorway has put Islamabad and Rawalpindi within a couple of hours of this city, and Haripur much closer than that, and that changes which matches are reasonable rather than merely possible.

If your family's instinct is that the twin cities are too far for a daughter, it is worth checking the drive again before ruling anything out, because the number in most people's heads is ten years old. The same goes the other way: families in Islamabad who think of Hazara as remote are working from the same stale figure. Abbottabad, Haripur, Islamabad and Rawalpindi now form one practical pool, and from here that is the most useful thing to know about widening a search.

What the district does for work, written plainly

Education above all — the schools, the colleges and the universities, which employ a great many families here and are the reason half the district's profiles mention teaching. Medicine and the hospitals. The armed forces, with the academy and the cantonment. Government service. Tourism and hospitality up in the Galiyat, which is seasonal and should be written as such. Trade and transport along the Karakoram Highway and now the motorway. Farming, orchards and livestock in the hill union councils. And the Gulf. On women's profiles from Abbottabad teaching and medicine come up most by a distance, and a family that does or does not want a working daughter-in-law should say which at the start.