It’s been a long time since I’ve read Adri­enne Rich’s essay, Com­pul­sory Het­ero­sex­u­al­ity and Les­bian Exis­tence, but I’ve been think­ing about it a lot lately, mostly because I’ve been talk­ing to the stu­dent in my class from South Asia whose par­ents are try­ing des­per­ately to marry her off. She came to my office yes­ter­day and I ended up talk­ing to her for more than an hour, miss­ing the class I was sup­posed to be teach­ing, because she started using expres­sions like maybe I should just end it all when talk­ing about her anger and frus­tra­tion and rage at feel­ing so utterly help­less in her sit­u­a­tion. When I asked her what she meant, she said she was think­ing of just sur­ren­der­ing to her par­ents and doing what they want her to do, that maybe mar­riage – any mar­riage, to any man – was really the only way she would ever get out from under her par­ents’, but mostly her father’s, rule. Still, I thought it bet­ter to keep her talk­ing than to leave her to go teach my class.

I don’t want to reveal too many details of her life, for obvi­ous rea­sons, but I learned a lot more about her in this con­ver­sa­tion than I had in the brief dis­cus­sions we’d had before. She is the youngest child in her fam­ily and so find­ing a suit­able hus­band is an impor­tant goal for her par­ents. Once they do so, they will have ful­filled one of their pri­mary oblig­a­tions as par­ents to their daugh­ters and, in fact, my stu­dent is not entirely opposed to the idea of mar­ry­ing a man her par­ents find for her. She just wants him to be some­one she feels com­pat­i­ble with, some­one in whom she can find some­thing that attracts her; but the men they bring for her to meet, while they are well estab­lished and could take good care of her, in the way that “good care” is defined in her cul­ture, they have all been, she says, not only bor­ing, but really, really (to her taste) ugly. What she wants is the free­dom to choose her own hus­band. She’s pretty clear that her first choice would be a man from the same cul­ture and reli­gion – though she’s not opposed to mar­ry­ing out­side the first group – but she wants him to have at least a lit­tle bit of the Amer­i­can­ized iden­tity that she has. (Even there, though, her expe­ri­ence has not been good. She met a guy whom she thought fit the bill, but as soon as the started going out, he started want­ing to check her Black­berry to see whom she was call­ing and who was call­ing her.)

Adding to the agony of her sit­u­a­tion is how iso­lated she feels. I am the only per­son, accord­ing to her, to whom she has told her entire story – includ­ing the mar­ried boss she used to respect and who has recently started mak­ing passes at her – and she is sur­prised at her­self that she has done so. She doesn’t have a whole lot of trust in Amer­i­cans’ abil­ity to com­pre­hend much less empathize with her sit­u­a­tion, hav­ing been burned a cou­ple of times when she tried to talk to her friends, none of whom were able to wrap their heads around the cul­tural con­text in which she lives, even though she is liv­ing here in the States, and some of whom actu­ally blamed her for not leav­ing, as if leav­ing one’s fam­ily, espe­cially a fam­ily that might dis­own you for doing so, would ever be a sim­ple thing. On top of that is the fact that telling any­one about her family’s pri­vate life vio­lates a very strong cul­tural taboo that inter­prets such rev­e­la­tion as one of the worst kinds of dis­loy­alty both because it sul­lies the family’s honor and rep­u­ta­tion in the com­mu­nity and exposes the fam­ily to what­ever use its ene­mies (in a social, not a mil­i­tary sense) might make of the information.

One of the rea­sons she trusts me is that I know some­thing about Islam and about the kind of cul­ture she comes from. (My wife’s cul­ture is sim­i­lar.) And so she is not wor­ried that I will think she is weird or weak or “bring­ing it all on herself” – each of which is a reac­tion she has got­ten from other “out­siders” she has tried to tell – and she rec­og­nizes that I respect her desire to find a solu­tion that some­how har­mo­nizes with her par­ents’ (and community’s) reli­gious and cul­tural expec­ta­tions, while allow­ing her the free­dom she wants. (Whether or not that is pos­si­ble, of course, is a whole other ques­tion.) And yet, of course, what she needs to do is talk to other peo­ple, to know that I not unique in this respect; and espe­cially what she needs is to find a com­mu­nity of women from whom she can draw strength, who will help her to feel less alone in a way that I sim­ply can­not do, because of both my gen­der and my age. (I am, after all, old enough to be her father.) So I have encour­aged her, and I will encour­age her again, to reg­is­ter for a women’s stud­ies course; I have given her con­tact infor­ma­tion for South Asian women’s orga­ni­za­tions (and I know she has called at least one of them); I have told her about the stu­dent women’s group on cam­pus; and I have, of course, told her she is wel­come to keep com­ing to talk to me, but there really isn’t much else that I can (or should) do.

One of the themes she kept weav­ing through our con­ver­sa­tion was that she was think­ing of run­ning away, but of doing so in a man­ner that would leave her par­ents think­ing she was dead. This way, they would be able to mourn her and move on and not have to live with the con­stant worry for they would feel and the shame of hav­ing had a daugh­ter they could not con­trol. It didn’t mat­ter how many times I gen­tly sug­gested that there might be other ways of leav­ing that would at least leave open an avenue of return or a chan­nel of com­mu­ni­ca­tion – that other women in her sit­u­a­tion have done it – she kept com­ing back to the idea that it was bet­ter for her par­ents to think she was dead than to have live with the knowl­edge and the shame that she was off some­where, not prop­erly mar­ried, liv­ing who knew what kind of deca­dent and depraved Amer­i­can life and so com­pletely lost to them even if she were to show up right then on their doorstep.

It could not, I would not, argue with her any­more. I don’t know her par­ents and it’s not my place – and, any­way, I am not qual­i­fied – to give her advice. All I could think when she left, though, was that I had just wit­nessed a prime exam­ple of com­pul­sory het­ero­sex­u­al­ity at work, and it really, really, really sucked.