Rishta in Chicago

How to read a Chicago profile properly

Where the family lives tells you where the family is going

Chicago is old enough as a Pakistani community that its geography is a timeline. The first generation settled around Devon Avenue in West Ridge and the streets off it. As they did better they moved to the inner northern suburbs — Skokie, Morton Grove, Niles. The generation after that moved further, to the north-west corridor around Des Plaines, Mount Prospect, Arlington Heights, Schaumburg and Hoffman Estates, or west and south-west to Naperville, Bolingbrook, Orland Park and Oak Lawn. So when a profile names an area, it is telling you something about the family’s trajectory as well as its address.

Use that, carefully and without snobbery, because it works in both directions. A family still living in an apartment near Devon may be newly arrived, or may be a business family that has chosen to stay where the shop is, or may be looking after elderly parents who will not move. A family in Naperville may be two generations of professionals, or may be one person with a large mortgage. The address is a question to ask, not an answer in itself. What you are actually listening for is whether the story is consistent: how long in this country, how long in this house, what the work is, and whether the account they give of themselves holds together.

The practical consequence matters more. Chicagoland is enormous. Skokie to Naperville is thirty-five miles and can be ninety minutes. Devon to Orland Park crosses the entire city. Two profiles both saying Chicago can belong to families who have never met, attend different masjids, and would see each other once a month at best after a marriage. So when you read a Chicago profile, read the suburb, and when you write yours, name yours. Then decide honestly whether you are prepared to have one set of parents an hour and a half away, because in this metro that is the normal arrangement rather than the exception.

Marrying a man who drives: trucking, rideshare and the night shift

A great many Pakistani men in Chicago and across the Midwest earn their living behind a wheel, and no category of profile is more poorly understood by families in Pakistan. The word driver covers work that ranges from a steady, well-paid and respectable career to an arrangement that loses money, and it also covers a pattern of life that a bride has every right to understand before she agrees to it.

Start with the kind of driving. A company driver is an employee: a regular wage, usually health insurance, paid time off, and the company owns the truck. An owner-operator owns the truck, earns considerably more on paper, and carries every cost himself — fuel, insurance, maintenance, tyres, permits, and no benefits of any kind unless he buys them. A lease-purchase driver is paying a company for a truck he does not yet own, and this is the arrangement to ask the hardest questions about: the weekly payment continues whether or not there is work, many drivers end up with nothing after years of payments, and it has ruined households. None of this makes a man a bad match. It makes the structure of his work something a family must ask about in plain terms: employee or owner, truck owned or leased, what the weekly payment is, and what he actually clears after costs.

That last point applies to rideshare and taxi work too. A figure quoted for a week of driving is almost always gross. Petrol, insurance, maintenance, cleaning, phone and the wear on a car that will need replacing come out of it, and there is no employer paying for sick days or holidays. Ask what he clears, not what he takes.

Then the part that is really about the marriage rather than the money. Long-haul driving means being away — three or four nights a week on regional work, a week or two at a time on long runs. Local and night-shift work means sleeping in the day and working while the household sleeps. A young woman arriving from Lahore or Multan into a suburban house, with no car yet, no licence yet, no neighbours she knows and her husband on the road from Monday to Friday, is in a situation nobody described to her. Sometimes that is entirely workable — his parents are in the house, the money is good, he is home every weekend and the marriage is strong. Sometimes it is not. The difference is almost always whether it was discussed honestly beforehand.

So ask it directly, and ask her directly, not only her father: how many nights a week will he be away, who else will be in the house, will she have a car and a licence, and what is the plan for the first year. And one more, because it is the question that protects her most: if the work is self-employed, is there health insurance for her, and if not, what happens if she is pregnant or unwell. These are not insults. Any decent family will answer them in a minute.

If the two families are related, do the one test that costs nothing

A large share of Pakistani marriages, here as at home, are between cousins or within a close biradari, and this page is not going to lecture anyone about that. It is permitted, it is long-established, it keeps property and trust inside a family, and millions of such marriages are perfectly happy. What we will say is that there is one practical step available in America that is not routinely available in Pakistan, that takes an afternoon, that is usually covered by insurance or available cheaply, and that almost nobody takes — and it can prevent the kind of grief a family never recovers from.

The medical position, stated plainly and without alarm. Every person carries a small number of recessive genetic faults that cause no problem unless both parents happen to carry the same one. Two unrelated people rarely do. Two first cousins, who share a set of grandparents, are noticeably more likely to, and the likelihood compounds when cousin marriage has been repeated across several generations in the same family, as it often has. The result is a raised chance — not a certainty, a raised chance — of conditions such as thalassaemia, certain forms of congenital deafness, metabolic and enzyme disorders and some forms of blindness. Pakistani families carry thalassaemia at a significant rate in particular.

What to do about it is simple. Before the nikah, both the man and the woman should have carrier screening. In America this is an ordinary blood test ordered by a family doctor or arranged through a genetic counsellor, and in a city like Chicago it is widely available. If neither is a carrier of the same condition, you will never think about it again. If both carry the same one, you will know in advance, you can speak to a counsellor about what it means, and you can make a decision as a family with the facts in front of you rather than after a child is born. That is the whole of it.

Alongside the test, ask the family-history questions, and ask them of the older generation rather than the young couple. Has any child in the extended family been born with a serious condition. Is there deafness, blindness or any inherited blood disorder in either line. Have there been repeated miscarriages or infant deaths that were never explained. These are difficult questions and asking them is a kindness, not an intrusion. A family that answers them openly is telling you a great deal about itself, and so is a family that refuses.

The house with elders in it

Because this community is sixty years old, Chicago has something newer Pakistani cities in America do not: a large first generation now in its seventies and eighties, living with or beside adult children. A very large number of Chicago rishtas are therefore marriages into a house that already contains a grandparent, and that fact deserves to be on the table from the first conversation rather than discovered at the rukhsati.

There is nothing to apologise for in a three-generation household. It is how most of the world has always lived, it is a blessing for children, and caring for parents is an obligation that Muslims take seriously and should. But the arrangement makes specific demands on whoever marries into it, and those demands are usually made of the daughter-in-law. So they should be said out loud. Who is in the house. What their health is. Who currently does the cooking, the washing and the hospital appointments. Whether there is paid help or a home-care service, which in America is often available and often used. And the question that nobody asks but everybody is thinking: is the new wife expected to become the carer.

If she is, that is an acceptable thing to ask of someone — provided it is asked, and not assumed. A woman who is told honestly that her mother-in-law needs daily care, and who agrees to it with her eyes open, is in a completely different position from one who finds out in month two that the household was looking for a nurse. The second situation breeds a resentment that does not heal, and it is entirely avoidable with one honest sentence before the nikah.

Two further things worth knowing. In a house with elders, the real decision-maker is often the grandmother rather than the father, however the family presents itself — so if you are being assessed, understand who is actually assessing you, and if you are assessing, make sure you have met her. And practically: elderly parents in America are usually covered by the public insurance programme for over-sixty-fives, but long-term care is largely not covered by it, and families are frequently shocked by what residential or full-time home care costs. If the proposal involves moving in to look after someone, a family that has thought about the financial side as well as the moral one is a family that has thought properly.

The Midwest is the pool, and O’Hare makes the rest easy

Chicago is the centre of a very large regional market and families here search it as one. Milwaukee is ninety minutes. Madison, Indianapolis and Detroit are three to four and a half hours, Northwest Indiana is a local suburb, and Minneapolis, St Louis, Columbus, Cleveland and Cincinnati are all within a day’s drive or a short flight. Pakistani families across the Midwest treat Chicago as the capital of the region: this is where the large weddings happen, where the shopping is done and where the conventions are held, which means a family three states away is both findable and likely to come.

Beyond the Midwest, the strongest links run east. A great many Chicago families have relatives in New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia, and a growing number have children who have moved to Texas, Atlanta or the Carolinas for work and housing. Open those cities in the filter rather than exhausting Illinois first.

O’Hare is one of the busiest airports in the world and that is a practical advantage. Direct flights to almost every American city, and one-stop routes to Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi through the Gulf and Istanbul on most days, usually at reasonable fares. For a family managing a visa wait, or for parents who want to see a daughter settled three thousand miles from home, that is worth something real.