A WEEK ago, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Malala Yousafzai tweeted pictures of her wedding day: Two young people looking at one another with so much hope for their futures, standing against the fiery redness of the autumn leaves. His eyes were kind, hers at peace.

Ahhhhhh, but no sooner did a warm fuzzy glow envelope me than the judgers appeared on my social media feed: ‘In June, you said you didn’t agree with marriage and five months later boom! you’re married,’ they opined. ‘How come you got married so quickly?’

It seems Malala, an activist for female education, can’t even get wed without the keyboard warriors getting in on the act.

Even Andrew Marr’s line of questioning on his Sunday TV show alluded to the fact that she may have been a bit inconsistent with on her views on marriage, with Malala patiently explaining that her remarks in a June interview for Vogue magazine related to the power imbalance that can exist in marriages especially, but not only, in some parts of the world where forced marriages still exist within a patriarchal system. She added that “women make more compromises than men” and the system should be questioned.

The more prosaic explanation for her change of heart is that, at 23 years of age, she is as human as the rest of us. She is also a young woman juggling different cultural worlds: brought up in the Swat Valley in Pakistan, shot on a school bus by gunman when she was 15, she went on to study at Oxford and at one point was dubbed 'the most famous teenager in the world'. Living with social media, having friends from different countries and backgrounds, all mixed in with the protective cocoon of her parents’ culture and faith, there’s bound to be a bit of ‘thinking out loud’.

And when Malala thinks out loud, people in different parts of the world with different ways of doing things will interpret her words according to their own cultural and social standards. Here we see it one way, in the tribal villages of the North West Frontier Province it will be interoperated another.

I suspect what she meant to say back in June was that marriage should be more of a partnership and if it didn’t feel like it was going to be a partnership then what was the point of doing it? I think we can all buy into that as it pretty much cuts across all cultures.

In her friend, now husband, Asser Malik she sees shared values and sense of humour, which is always a great start. Many marriages in Asian/Pakistani culture happen through introductions – and for most, it seems to work.

Thankfully, it has largely moved on from the days – like with my parents in the 1960s – when the arranging was done by the parents and the bride and groom met on their wedding day for the first time.

It was 30 years ago, but because my parents’ love was (and is) still as strong, I decided aged 23 – despite being a feminist – to try out the Asian marriage system myself.

Despite saying I’d never get married, because ‘I want to be free to be myself’, I was introduced to Suliman. He was a couple of years older than me, handsome, and well-dressed, with dark chocolate eyes and smelling of Versace.

Suliman was small in stature, but confident without being cocky. He had impeccable manners and said all the right things in terms of equality for women. He was a massive improvement on the last chap who, when I approached him with a firm handshake and said, “Hello, I’m Uzma, pleased to meet you”, had been so terrified he’d started chain-smoking and continued to do so throughout the entire half-hour meeting.

Anyway, back to Versace man, we went on a few dinner dates and, yes, we definitely fancied each other, even if I did tower over him like Hagrid.

Mum was beside herself with excitement. At 23 and a half, just out of uni and starting a job at the BBC, she was simultaneously proud of my achievements but petrified that I’d somehow be left unmarried and without offspring if I didn’t strike while the baby-making iron was hot.

It’s fair to say she was already buying the Asian equivalent of Cilla Black’s hat. She never got to wear it, though, as I quickly realised that Suliman and I didn’t share those same values that Malala talks about. He called me to say he’d been offered an amazing business opportunity in Dubai and we would move there. The pause-without-end on the phone when I asked what broadcasting opportunities there might be there, spoke volumes.

When I told my parents, they were appalled at his lack of consideration for my aspirations. They had seen too many girls amongst their contemporaries study for medical degrees then give up medicine when they got married because the expectation was that the women would not work and instead bring up the children.

‘What a waste’ my dad would say. Similarly, my white, Scottish friends bemoaned the fact that they found themselves having to go part-time or give up work after they had had their babies, because they had not had ‘that’ conversation with their partners beforehand. This for me was the patriarchy in action, and Suliman went off to Dubai alone to make his millions.

It warms my heart to think of Malala having dinner dates with Aseer discussing her aspirations, her work for the Malala Fund and empowering girls around the world, as well as his work too, of course.

I hope he’s told her how her work inspires him and makes him want to share that important mission with her. As role models they can together show girls and boys throughout the world, especially where women’s rights are not at the top of the list, that it is possible to aspire to do great work and be married if it is a genuine partnership of equals.

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