Dawn Images

Globally, the number of women who want to get married appears to be declining — driven by broad socioeconomic changes, including shifts in societal expectations around equality, emotional partnership, the division of labour within relationships, and widespread intimate partner violence.

By contrast, Pakistan continues to celebrate the December shaadi season as usual, despite ranking among the worst countries for women by nearly all measures, and despite research citing marriage as a major site of gender-based violence.

Seeing this, veteran actor Saba Faisal has bravely emerged as the shero on a mission to alert Pakistani women to the dangers of getting married. She paints such a horrendously bleak picture of marriage for women that even someone who wants to get married would think twice.

Appearing on Nida Yasir’s morning show recently, Faisal remarked, “The biggest mistake the groom’s mother can make is to let her daughter-in-law wear what she wants from the first day of her marriage.”

Sounds like an image straight out of life in patriarchal hell.

I mean, imagine being a twenty-something-year-old woman who loses the right to wear what she wants, thanks to the disapproving gaze and inflated ego of her mother-in-law, who’s approximately 30-something years older than her. Chances are, they have both never had the complete freedom to dress exactly the way they wanted anyway.

Girls are usually stripped of that right very early on — sometimes right out of the womb — especially in our part of the world.

What’s also true is that dressing up nicely is one of the few things girls and women are generally expected to do, whether to serve the male gaze or to keep the bank accounts of exploitative textile manufacturers and sellers flourishing (some of whom later funnel that money into perpetuating misogyny through their sermons and “modernly conservative” Instagram reels).

In between this marriage of the hetero-patriarchal system and capitalism, the Pakistani girl — and, eventually, woman — learns to find joy in the act of getting dressed up, even if it is done within tightly controlled bounds and for a very limited set of social settings.

Some even go so far as to fantasise about getting married just to be able to wear beautiful, shimmery outfits of the kind that only wedding functions boast.

It is utterly sad that this is the extent of dreaming we often allow our girls and women to do.

And this is exactly what Saba Faisal seems to be cautioning against.

On the surface, Faisal’s comment might look like a call for men’s mothers to become control freaks of a higher order towards their daughters-in-law than they already might be. However, given how liberally she herself has lived her life — by building a decades-long career in an industry that most people perceive as too scandalous to ‘allow’ the women from their families to join — that is probably not what she actually meant. Because that would be hypocrisy of the highest order.

Surely, Faisal knows better than to put that hypocrisy on full display for the public to see and call her out on, right?

What she must have actually meant is this: don’t get married — at least not without doing your due diligence — if you want to retain whatever little right you currently have to decide what you wear, lest your saas think that right has been transferred to her along with the dowry her family shamelessly demanded from your parents.

An undercover women’s rights activist in the form of a seemingly obnoxious public figure? We love to see it.

Of course, whatever she meant matters far less than how such remarks land in a society where women are trained to find their life’s purpose in getting married, serving those around them at great personal cost, completely giving up on their sense of self, and then passing the same toxic set of expectations on to their daughters-in-law.

Older women who are currently mothers-in-law to younger women would likely see this as validation of the unflinching restrictions they may have imposed on the latter, under the guise of — as Faisal puts it — maintaining “discipline”. They may even become emboldened to take those restrictions up a notch, meaning that already married women living with such in-laws will be forced into further silence.

As for women who are not yet married and have at least enough autonomy to avoid being forced into marriage, this may inspire them to actually pursue higher education abroad, or immigrate altogether before falling into the trap of marrying in Pakistan, where every choice they make can and will be scrutinised. Here’s to Saba Faisal for sneakily supporting women’s career-related aspirations.

Even after saying all this, though, she wasn’t sure the message had reached those it needed to.

Therefore, in another pearl of wisdom delivered a few minutes later, she advised — quoting her husband — that life with in-laws can be quite beautiful, provided the daughter-in-law pretends to be deaf and non-speaking.

Some critics have rushed to accuse her of promoting women’s silence, submission and self-erasure. However, what if we are missing the brilliance of her warning?

After all, what clearer indictment of our marital expectations exists than the suggestion that a woman must neither be able to hear nor speak to “happily” survive married life?

She framed this as a “tip” to lead a pleasant married life, but it sounds more like a public service announcement for all those women wondering whether opting for a traditional marriage will be the death of their personhood. (As per Faisal, it will.)

And honestly? That level of honesty against a highly revered cultural practice — especially from a widely followed public figure, and that too on national television — is rare.

Ours is a society that romanticises marriage as a woman’s ultimate self-actualisation. Meanwhile, husbands frequently murder their wives over reasons such as suspected infidelity or “bringing dishonour”, food that is ‘not warm enough’, financial disputes, or simply because the wife wants to end the marriage. In-laws are often also implicated in these crimes, both directly and indirectly.

In such a situation, Saba Faisal has (accidentally) done what so many hesitate to do. She has described the horrors of being stuck in a typically patriarchal marriage exactly as they are: marriage not as companionship or partnership between two people, but as a woman’s performance of silence, blind obedience, and the complete loss of her agency.

And if all that wasn’t bad enough, following the backlash to her remarks, she released a video clarification in which she apologised for using the terms “goonga aur behra” (“deaf” and “speech-impaired”), while also insisting that audiences had misunderstood her message.

She explained that what she had meant to say was that both parties in a marriage (i.e., a woman and her in-laws) should forgive each other in their daily lives. Her core argument was that after marriage, a bride must “merge” into her in-laws’ home — sometimes wearing what she wants, and sometimes what her in-laws want her to wear.

This would be an interesting idea if the average desi marriage functioned like the blueprint given to us by Alia and Ranveer in Rocky Aur Rani Ki Prem Kahani, where both partners tried to assimilate into each other’s families to similar lengths, and where the in-laws reciprocated the same effort at merging. However, as sad as it is, Faisal — and our society at large — holds such expectations only of the bride, and therein lies the problem.

The issue was never merely about wording, but about a worldview in which creating and maintaining marital harmony is solely a woman’s burden to carry — at the lethal cost of her foundational individuality. Because even when patriarchal expectations are explained in softer words, the violence behind them remains intact.

The woman is first disallowed from wearing what she wants. Then she is forced to abandon her career because, “Bahu, the women in our family stay at home while the man goes out to earn. Please try to adjust to your new family’s norms.”

Slowly but surely, she ends up living through the same invisibilisation of her entire being that her mother did — despite having once promised herself that she would never let the same happen when she was old enough to be married.

Thus, far from addressing the underlying concern, Faisal’s clarification only reinforces it.

One can only hope that even if this deeply disturbing line of thinking reflects her own forty-three years of marriage, she has had the sense not to pass that intergenerational, gendered trauma on to her own children and daughters-in-law.

What one also cannot help but wish for is that people with worldviews so dangerous that we have to bend over backwards to give them the benefit of the doubt, stop being repeatedly platformed from 2026 onwards.

Because as much as we enjoy watching the patriarchy tell on itself when its defenders speak too freely, we are also exhausted by the cost of that spectacle — a cost women continue to pay with their safety, autonomy, and lives.

Let women wear what they want in peace, and stop expecting them to pretend to be unthinking, unfeeling robots in the face of outright hostility and abuse from their in-laws. After all, extending basic humanity is a grace many of us already readily grant men, even when doing so means denying women the right to basic safety.

That women must still explicitly demand these fundamental rights today — inside and outside the institution of marriage — is reason enough to explain why women at Aurat March raise slogans like Mera Jism Meri Marzi, and why they will continue to do so.