Rishta in Los Angeles

How to read a Los Angeles profile properly

Five markets, not one: name the county

Every large American metro on this site has a distance problem. Southern California has something different and worse: it has several Pakistani communities that genuinely do not know each other. Irvine to Northridge is sixty miles and can be two hours on a weekday. Chino Hills to Torrance is the same. Corona to Culver City is an hour and a half each way in the morning. These are not suburbs of one community, they are separate communities with separate masjids, separate circles of aunties and separate weddings, and the people in them see each other at a convention once a year.

So the single most useful correction to make to a Southern California search is to stop thinking in terms of the city. Write your own county and area on your profile — Orange County, San Gabriel Valley, San Fernando Valley, South Bay, Inland Empire — and read the other side’s. Then decide, before any request is sent, how far you are genuinely willing to go, because in this metro the answer determines everything that follows. A match between Irvine and Granada Hills is a real commitment: one set of parents will be seen monthly rather than weekly, and whichever of the couple moves is leaving their whole circle behind, not just their street.

There is one more thing worth knowing about the clusters, because it affects how a family will read you. They are not socially identical. Orange County and the Irvine area skew towards higher-income professional families, often more recently arrived. The San Fernando Valley holds an older, more settled and more mixed community. The Inland Empire is where the younger families went for houses they could afford, and there is sometimes an unspoken snobbery about that which is worth naming and dismissing — a family in Corona with a house and no mortgage stress is in a better position than one in Irvine paying half its income in rent. Do not let an address do the judging.

Why the house is worth more than the income suggests

California housing has a peculiarity that no Pakistani family would guess at, and it explains something that otherwise looks like a contradiction: a family living in a house worth a very large sum, on an income that would never buy it.

Property tax in California is calculated from what a house cost when it was bought, with only a small capped increase each year, rather than from what it is worth now. A family that bought in the 1980s or 1990s therefore pays a fraction of what a new buyer on the same street pays, and their annual bill may be a quarter of the neighbour’s on an identical house. The practical effects are everywhere in this community. Parents can afford to stay in a house their own children could not possibly buy. A family may look wealthy on paper and have a modest income, because the wealth is in a house they have no intention of selling and could not replace. And the children cannot afford the street they grew up on, which is why so many young Pakistani couples here end up in the Inland Empire, in Las Vegas or Phoenix, or out of California altogether.

For a rishta, three practical consequences. First, do not read the house as the income. Ask what the work is and what it pays, separately from where the family lives, because in California those two facts have come apart. Second, if the plan is for the couple to live with the parents, understand that this is often arithmetic rather than tradition here, and ask the questions that go with it honestly — whose house, whose name on the title, what happens if the parents need to release money from it later. Third, if the plan is for the couple to buy, ask where, because the honest answer in Southern California is usually an hour further out than either family was imagining, and that should be agreed rather than discovered.

One correction in the other direction. California has no informal or common-law marriage, so unlike in some states a nikah with no county licence creates no legal marriage here at all. Get the licence and the certificate. It is also a community-property state, so what either spouse earns during the marriage is generally owned by both, which is worth understanding before a house or a business is bought in one name.

A security clearance asks about your wife’s family

Southern California is one of the great aerospace and defence regions of the world, and a large number of Pakistani engineers here work for the manufacturers, the laboratories, the satellite and launch companies and their suppliers. A great many of those posts require a United States security clearance, and almost no Pakistani family understands what that involves until it is happening to them.

The essentials. A clearance requires American citizenship — a green card is not enough — and a background investigation that goes well beyond a criminal record check. It examines finances and debts, past conduct, and in particular foreign connections: relatives who are not American citizens, property held abroad, money sent abroad, foreign bank accounts, foreign travel, and contact with foreign nationals. Dual nationality is not disqualifying in itself, but it has to be declared and some people are advised to give up a second passport or to stop using it. And the obligations continue after the clearance is granted: holders are generally required to report foreign travel, significant financial changes, and close and continuing contact with foreign nationals — which, after a marriage, includes the spouse and the spouse’s family.

What that means for a rishta is worth saying without alarm. Marrying a Pakistani national, or anyone with family in Pakistan, does not prevent a clearance and thousands of people in this position hold one. It does mean paperwork, declarations and sometimes delay, and it means the household will be living with an ongoing reporting obligation that the spouse needs to know about in advance rather than discover. So ask, if the work is in this sector: does the post require a clearance, at what level, does he already hold one, and has he spoken to his security office about what a marriage to a foreign national requires him to file. A man who has asked that question and has a clear answer is dealing with his life properly. A man who waves it away may be about to create a problem for himself at work and for his wife at home. And on the other side: nobody should ever be asked to conceal a relative, a trip or a transfer of money to make a clearance easier. Concealment is the thing that actually costs people their careers.

Therapy is not a defect, and a diagnosis is not a secret

This belongs on a California page because the second generation here is more likely than almost any other Pakistani community in the world to have seen a counsellor, and because the way rishta conversations handle that is still dishonest in both directions. It is worth setting out plainly, because families get hurt on both sides of it.

First, the ordinary case. A great many well-adjusted, capable Pakistani Americans in their twenties and thirties have been to therapy — after a bereavement, during a hard degree, through a difficult patch at work, or simply because it is normal among their peers here. That is not a defect and it is not a disclosure that needs making like a confession. A family that treats having seen a counsellor as a disqualification is ruling out some of the most self-aware people in the pool, and often on worse grounds than the ones they accept elsewhere.

Second, the serious case, and here we will be direct. Where there is a significant and ongoing condition — a diagnosis under treatment, continuing medication, past hospital care — that has to be said before the nikah. Not because it disqualifies anyone; people with managed conditions marry and build good families constantly. It has to be said because the spouse will be the person most closely involved in that life, and because a marriage that begins with something that large concealed begins with a betrayal the other side will eventually discover. It is also, in Islamic terms, information the other party is entitled to before consenting. Families sometimes argue that disclosure will end the proposal. Sometimes it will. That is the right outcome, and far better than the alternative, which is a marriage that breaks in its second year with a great deal more damage done.

Third, two things that should never happen and do. Nobody should be taken off medication so that they appear well for a rishta season; that is dangerous, and the harm from it is real. And nobody should be married off as a treatment, on the theory that a wife or a husband will settle them — a spouse is not a care plan, and that arrangement is unfair to both people in it. If a family is weighing something like this, the right next step is a conversation with the treating doctor about what is realistic, not a conversation with a broker.

For the family asking: ask about health in general, calmly and once, of both sides, in the same breath as you ask about everything else, and without any suggestion that an honest answer will be used against them. Families answer that kind of question honestly far more often than they answer an interrogation.

California is the pool, and it is a flight rather than a drive

Once you have widened beyond your own cluster, the sensible unit is California, and it is a large one. San Diego is two hours south on a good day and has a settled community of its own. Bakersfield and Fresno are two to three hours up the valley. Sacramento is six hours, and the Bay Area — Fremont, San Ramon, Dublin, Santa Clara, San Jose — is six hours by road or an hour by air, and Southern Californian families treat that flight as entirely routine for a serious meeting. Between Los Angeles, the Bay Area and San Diego, California holds one of the largest Pakistani populations in the country, and limiting a search to one freeway corridor inside it makes no sense.

Beyond the state line, the natural extensions are Las Vegas and Phoenix, both a short flight or a four to five hour drive, and both full of families who left California for the cost of living and still consider themselves part of this community. Further out, the strongest links run to Houston and Dallas, and to New York, often because of where the previous generation first landed.

Los Angeles airports carry one-stop routes to Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi through the Gulf and Istanbul, but there is one practical thing a family in Pakistan should factor in that no other American city on this site shares to the same degree: the time difference is twelve or thirteen hours, so a call with Pakistan means one side is talking at six in the morning or eleven at night, every time. Fix a workable hour early in the conversation, and be a little patient with each other about it.