Rishta in New Jersey

How to read a New Jersey profile properly

New Jersey is a state, so the county is the useful fact

Everywhere else on this site a profile names a city. Here it names a state of nine million people, and that is close to useless on its own. Edison to Paterson is forty miles and an hour and a quarter on a bad afternoon. Jersey City to Cherry Hill is ninety miles. Parsippany to Marlboro crosses the whole middle of the state. These are not districts of one community; they are separate communities with separate masjids, separate circles and separate weddings, and a family in Middlesex may have no idea who the families in Bergen are.

So write your county and township on your profile, and read the other side’s. Then be honest about distance before a request is sent. A Middlesex and Hudson match is easy — twenty minutes apart, one market, people do it constantly. A Middlesex and Bergen match is a real decision. And a match between North Jersey and South Jersey is, in practice, a long-distance marriage inside one state, because the South Jersey community lives in Philadelphia’s orbit rather than New York’s.

What makes this state worth the trouble is density. For its area New Jersey probably holds more Pakistani households than anywhere else in the country, with Middlesex County alone supporting several large Islamic centres, full-time Islamic schools, halal butchers in every township and a wedding-hall business that exists specifically for this community. The pool here is genuinely large, which means you can afford to be specific about biradari, sect and profession in a way you cannot in Charlotte or Boston, and still have people to look at.

The hour before the nikah: premarital counselling, and why not to skip it

A growing number of American Islamic centres, including several of the large ones in this state, either require or strongly encourage a session with the imam or a trained counsellor before they will perform a nikah. Pakistani families often treat this as an obstacle to get around, or as an implication that something is wrong. It is the opposite. It is the single most useful hour a couple and their families can spend, and we would urge anyone marrying here to seek it out even if nobody asks them to.

What it does is force a short list of questions into the open while they are still cheap to answer. Where will you live for the first two years, and with whom. Who earns, who manages the money, and will there be a joint account. Will she work, and has anybody actually asked her. Children — when, how many, and what happens if they do not come. How will religion be practised in the house, in concrete terms rather than in adjectives. What are the expectations about her family and his, and about how often each is visited. What debts exist. Who decides when the two of you disagree. And how will a serious argument be handled, because there will be serious arguments.

None of that is romantic and all of it is predictive. The marriages that fail in the first three years overwhelmingly fail on this list, not on anything that was visible at the rishta stage. A couple who have sat with somebody experienced and answered these questions out loud, in front of each other, start from a completely different place from one that has never discussed any of it because both families assumed it was obvious.

Two practical notes. Ask the masjid early what it requires, because some centres want the session booked weeks ahead and some will not perform a nikah without it, which can derail a wedding date. And if the couple is marrying across continents, a joint session by video is better than nothing and several imams here will do it. If no centre is involved, a session with any reputable Muslim marriage counsellor serves the same purpose. Nobody has ever regretted that hour.

The beneficiary form beats the will

This is the most useful piece of American financial information on this site for a newly married couple, and almost nobody knows it. In the United States, a retirement account — a 401(k), a 403(b), an IRA — and a life insurance policy do not pass under a will. They pass to whoever is named on the account’s beneficiary form, and that form overrides anything the will says.

The consequence is immediate and unkind. A man who opened his 401(k) at twenty-four and named his mother, then married at thirty-two and never changed the form, has left his retirement savings to his mother, whatever his will says and whatever everyone assumed. The same happens with life insurance from an employer, and it happens with a previously married person who never removed a former spouse. These are not rare cases; they are routine, and they surface at the worst possible moment, when a family is grieving and a widow is told that the money is not hers.

So: within the first month of a marriage, both husband and wife should log in to every retirement account and insurance policy they hold and update the beneficiary designations, and then confirm it in writing from the provider. It takes under an hour and costs nothing. While you are at it, a few related facts worth knowing. Dying without a will means the state decides who inherits, by a formula that will not match anyone’s intentions and certainly not Islamic shares. Islamic inheritance is not applied automatically by any American court — if you want your estate distributed according to the Sharia shares, that has to be written into a properly drafted will by somebody who knows how to do it in your state, and there are lawyers who specialise in exactly this. A surviving spouse generally has rights under state law that cannot simply be written out, which protects a widow but also means a will should be drafted rather than improvised. And if there is property in Pakistan, it will be dealt with under Pakistani law regardless of what an American will says, so that side needs its own arrangement.

One more, for the woman arriving from Pakistan. Make sure you know what accounts exist, where they are held and who is named on them. Not because anyone intends harm, but because a spouse who does not know what the household owns is in a weak position in the one situation where she can least afford to be.

Her first ninety days in America

When the visa finally comes through and she lands, there is a short list of practical things that have to be done, in roughly this order, and a family that has the list ready gives her a very different first three months from one that works it out as it goes.

First, documents. Her passport carries the entry stamp and her status; the physical green card is usually posted to the home address some weeks later, so check that the address on file is correct before she arrives, because a card sent to an old address is a genuine ordeal to replace. Second, a Social Security number, which is the key to almost everything else in American life — it is often requested as part of the immigrant visa application, in which case the card arrives by post; if not, it is applied for in person. Third, a state identity card or driver’s permit, which is what she will actually use as identification day to day. Fourth, a bank account in her own name, opened in her own name, as discussed elsewhere on this site. Fifth, a phone in her own name rather than as a line on somebody else’s plan. Sixth, health insurance: a marriage and an arrival are both qualifying events that open a short enrolment window, and missing it can mean waiting months, so this is urgent rather than administrative.

Then the slower things. Whether she can work depends on which route she arrived on — some arrive with permanent residence and the right to work immediately, others arrive on a fiancé visa or a dependent status and must apply for work authorisation and wait for it, and a few have no right to work at all until a further step completes. Establish which of those it is before the nikah, not after she is sitting at home wondering. If there is a later interview or a conditional residence to be removed, diarise the date the moment you know it, because that deadline does not forgive being missed. If she holds a professional qualification, start the evaluation and licensing enquiries in month one rather than month twelve. And register her presence with the Pakistani consulate and sort out her NICOP, so that going home to see her mother is never complicated by paperwork.

Finally, the part that is not on any form. Three phone numbers of her own — a cousin, a neighbour, a woman from the masjid — arranged before she lands rather than hoped for afterwards. A driving licence in progress. And one thing in the week that is hers: a class, a halqa, a weekly visit, a job. Families that arrange those three things in the first month rarely have the conversations that families who do not arrange them have in the first year.

The corridor is one market, and you can do it by train

New Jersey sits in the middle of the largest Pakistani population centre in the United States, and the sensible search unit is the whole corridor rather than the state. New York City is twenty minutes from Jersey City by train and under an hour from most of Middlesex. Philadelphia is an hour and a quarter from Trenton and closer still from South Jersey. Long Island, Westchester and southern Connecticut are all inside a comfortable day, and Boston is four hours by road or three and a half by rail. Between them, these places hold several hundred thousand Pakistani Americans.

What makes this corridor different from every other American region on this site is that you do not need a car to work it. Two families can meet halfway by train, a young man can visit without borrowing a vehicle, and a match between Edison and Queens is an ordinary thing rather than a relocation. If the local county pool is not producing, the honest answer here is almost never move further out — it is open New York and Philadelphia in the filter and look properly.

Beyond the corridor, New Jersey families have the widest spread of relatives of any community in the country, because so much of Pakistani America passed through here first. Chicago, Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Northern Virginia and the Carolinas all hold families whose parents are still in Middlesex or Hudson, and a proposal from any of them is likely to be taken seriously here. Newark airport carries direct and one-stop service to Pakistan through the Gulf and Istanbul, which makes both visiting and the visa wait easier than in most of the country.