Rishta in Manchester

Reading a Manchester profile properly

What family class actually means on a profile

There is a family class field on every profile here, and in a city with both old wholesale money and a large salaried professional class it gets used harder in Manchester than almost anywhere else. It is also the field people are least honest about, because it is the one that feels like a judgement.

Decode the vocabulary first. Business family usually means self-employed, often across brothers, with wealth in stock, premises or property rather than in a salary. Educated family usually means the parents are graduates and professional work is the expectation, whatever the money. Zamindar means land back home, which may be considerable or may be nine acres shared between four brothers. Respectable family means almost nothing on its own — everybody writes it — and where it does carry weight it is usually about conduct and reputation rather than income. Upper middle class is whatever the person writing it believes it to be.

So write facts instead of grades. The father's actual occupation. Whether the house is owned. Whether the business is owned, rented or worked in. How many siblings and what they do. That tells a reader more in four lines than any amount of class vocabulary, and it cannot be argued with later.

Two warnings. First, land in Pakistan is the single most over-stated asset in this whole process. If it matters to the decision, ask whose name is on it, whether it is partitioned, whether anyone is in possession of it and whether there is a dispute — a great many British families discover at the worst moment that the family land is tied up in a court case that has been running since the nineteen-nineties. Second, status is not character. A wealthy household can be a miserable place to live and a modest one generous and warm, and the field that predicts a happy marriage is the preferences paragraph, not the class dropdown.

The first sitting: what actually happens

Every page on this site tells you the first meeting is at the girl's family home with the elders present. Nobody says what happens in the room, so people arrive anxious and leave having learned very little. Here is the shape of it.

Who comes. Usually the boy with his parents, and perhaps an aunt or an elder brother — four or five people at most, not fifteen. The girl's side is her parents and whichever siblings or elders they want present. Keep it small; a crowd makes it an inspection rather than a meeting. Agree numbers beforehand so nobody is caught out.

How it runs. Tea and something to eat, half an hour of ordinary conversation between the families — where everybody is from, who knows whom, work, children, health. Then, in most households, the two young people are given a short time to speak together in the same room while the families move slightly away, or in an adjoining room with the door open. Ten or fifteen minutes. That is the part that matters most and it is routinely squandered on small talk, so go in with two or three real questions: what do you actually want from the next five years, where would we live, what do you expect of a wife or a husband day to day.

What not to do on the day. Do not settle the wedding date, the mehr, the guest numbers or the money at a first sitting — those come later, in a separate conversation, once both sides have said yes in principle. Do not let anybody interrogate the girl about cooking, or the boy about his salary, in front of a room; those questions are fair but they are for the families to put to each other privately. Do not ask for an answer before everyone leaves. And do not bring up what another family offered.

Afterwards. Both sides take a few days — a week is plenty — and reply through whoever made the introduction, or directly if numbers have been exchanged. Say yes or no clearly. If the answer is no, no reasons are owed and none should be demanded. If it is yes, the next step is the video or telephone contact between the two young people with the families' knowledge, and then a second meeting where the practical things get settled.

More than one proposal at a time

In a pool the size of Manchester's this comes up constantly and almost nobody will say out loud how they handle it. So, plainly: it is entirely normal and entirely acceptable to be considering more than one proposal at the early stage. Looking at three profiles is not a betrayal of any of them. What matters is where the line is.

The line is roughly this. Reading profiles, sending photo requests and having an initial family-to-family conversation with several people at once is fine and sensible — that is what the early stage is for, and the connection tokens exist precisely so you can make more than one approach. Once a sitting has happened and both sides are seriously considering, you owe that family a straight answer within a reasonable time, and you should not be running two serious processes in parallel while telling each one they are the only consideration. Once anything has been agreed in principle, it is finished: you do not keep a second option warm as insurance.

Being honest about it is easier than people fear. You do not have to give names or numbers. A sentence does it: we are considering one other proposal at the same time and will give you an answer by the end of the month. Most families respect that enormously, because they are almost certainly doing the same thing.

What is not acceptable is the thing that actually damages people: keeping a family interested for months with no intention, so that a girl in her late twenties loses half a year, or accepting a proposal and then quietly continuing to look. In a connected community that behaviour becomes known and it follows a family for years. And if you do have to withdraw after a yes — which happens, and sometimes for good reason — do it quickly, say it yourself rather than through a third party, and return anything that was given.

Widows, widowers and remarriage

This site lists widowed members on exactly the same terms as everyone else, with no separate section and no marker on the profile, and it is worth saying why that is the right way round.

Remarriage after a death is not a second-best arrangement and it is not something to be whispered about. The Prophet's own household included widows, and the religion treats the remarriage of a widow as entirely ordinary. What our community sometimes does instead — treating a young widow as permanently spoken for, discouraging her from looking, or regarding a proposal to her as charity — has no basis in the faith and causes real harm, particularly to women left in their twenties and thirties with children.

The practical points. There is a waiting period, the iddat, of four months and ten days after a husband's death, during which a new marriage is not contracted; a new proposal is not usually raised during it either, and a family that pushes is out of order. Unpaid mehr from the first marriage is a debt on the late husband's estate, not a favour, and a widow is entitled to it along with her share of the inheritance. If there are children, settle the real questions before the nikah rather than after: where they will live, who maintains them, what the new husband's role actually is, and what contact the late father's family keeps — grandparents who have lost a son should not also lose their grandchildren, and a good second marriage makes room for them.

And one thing every married Muslim in this country should do, which almost nobody does: make an English will. If you die without one here, the statutory intestacy rules decide who gets what, and they do not follow the Islamic shares at all — a widow can find the house, the business and the savings distributed in a way nobody in the family intended, with the costs and the delay falling on her. Note too that in England and Wales getting married automatically revokes any will you made before, unless it was written in contemplation of that marriage, so a will drawn up before the nikah may already be void. See a solicitor who does Islamic wills, soon after the marriage, and keep the mehr written down in the nikah nama where it can be proved.

Greater Manchester is ten boroughs: know which one

This is the practical half of the page. Manchester, Salford, Trafford, Stockport, Tameside, Bury, Oldham, Rochdale, Bolton and Wigan are ten separate boroughs with their own councils, their own housing markets and, for our purposes, noticeably different communities. Oldham and Rochdale are strongly Kashmiri and Bangladeshi; Bolton has its own long-settled mix; Manchester proper is the broadest and most professional; Trafford and Stockport are where families move when they have done well.

So read the area field, not just the city, and when you widen, widen deliberately. The inner ring is Salford, Trafford, Stockport and Tameside, twenty minutes or so. Then Oldham, Rochdale, Bolton and Bury, half an hour on a good day and an hour when the M60 is not. Then over the tops to Huddersfield, Bradford, Leeds and Halifax, and up the M61 to Blackburn, Preston and Burnley — all of them an ordinary drive, and all of them places Manchester families have married into for sixty years.

One honest word about the journey. Half an hour on paper across this conurbation is often an hour in practice, and a daughter marrying from Longsight into Bolton or Rochdale will not be dropping in on her mother after work. That is perfectly manageable — most people manage it — but say the real travel time out loud during the proposal rather than the optimistic one, and settle who is expected to visit whom, and how often, before anybody agrees.