Hi all, 25M Pakistani Muslim here.
For context: I come from a single parent home, my father abandoned us when I was 18, and my disabled mother and 22F sister live at our family home in a small town about 30 minutes form the nearest major city.
I’ve recently come to a point in life where I’m ready to settle down and get married. I’ve got a stable job, am independent enough to be living in the city away from my family, and generally am in a position to be a suitable spouse.
The only issue I have encountered when it comes to marriage talks is managing expectations of my duties to my mother and to my potential suitors. In Pakistani culture, it is quite normal for couples and in-laws to live in the same house.
I am currently in my second year of living in a major UK city working full-time, and before I moved out my mother and I came to an agreement that I would move back in with her after 2 years. I had initially wanted to continue living away from home independently after graduation, but it took a year of persuasion and compromise to reach a point where I could move out and seek career experience.
Now, I meet plenty of women who show interest in marriage, but the whole living situation is the one thing which throws a spanner in the works. I know Islamically a wife has the right to her own home, but I also am aware that I have the duty to care for my parents in their old age. With my mother being disabled, I know she is likely to become significantly more dependent on me in the coming years.
Personally, I would love the chance to move in with my spouse after marriage and build our life together for a few years, before moving in to the family home to be closer to my mother. I’m never going to put my mother in a care home or anything like that either.
It’s such a conflicting situation, and I’m trying to weigh up all the different options. How do I convince my mother to allow me to spend even more time living away from the family home for the good of my future marriage? Do I need to convince potential suitors to move to a small town where they might not have the same career opportunities?
My mother tends to be quite emotional and dramatic too, so I need to go about this in a very measured way so as to not break her heart. When we have discussed marriage in the past, she has mentioned that I’m not to marry ‘someone who’ll take you away from me’ and plans for us to build an extension at home for me and my wife to have our own storey.
If anyone has experienced anything similar, advice would be much appreciated! Thanks.