Rahat Jamil was in her early twenties when her parents started looking for proposals for her marriage. Fearing that her parents might marry her off to a man she didn’t know, she decided to tie the knot with the man she had just started seeing seven months earlier. "I was too scared to marry a guy whom I didn’t know, so the boy I was seeing was the next best thing." Unfortunately for Rahat, the next best thing turned out to be the biggest mistake she had made and the couple got divorced a year later.

Rahat’s story is emblematic of a deeply rooted mindset in our society. This mindset, fuelled on by continuous reinforcements from families, social groups and media, almost paralyses women into living a static life, detached and demotivated from looking for other avenues’ fulfilment. "The girls are in such a state of mind that they can’t focus on anything meaningful in the wait to get married", says Rahat. "For them, that is what completes their lives."

Ishrat, who worked in Pakistan for many years before recently moving to the US, agrees. "I remained in a fix as long as I kept worrying that I’m not married," she says. "But as soon as I accepted that it’s okay to be single, I realised how good my life is and that I don’t need the ‘married’ tag to make myself content with life."

It becomes increasingly clear that the problem lies with the thought process of women and the society around them that reinforces those ideas. "It is the social conditioning that comes through this society," says Maria, a documentary film-maker in her mid 30s. "It makes things worse when compared with what’s happening in developed countries. It is not as if we don’t know where the rest of the world is headed. Over here the idea of happiness is tied to procreation -- that as women having progeny is our main aim in life. But when we know there is another world out there where the society has moved beyond these archaic notions, it becomes so difficult to live here."

This idea of a woman’s worth, and her happiness, extends beyond attachment to mere procreation -- to morality. Rahat felt this when, after getting divorced, she decided to move to Islamabad for work. "No one would give me a portion to rent because I was going to live there alone." Eventually, Rahat had to ask her younger brother to come stay with her for a few weeks so they could rent a place. Even then, the house’s owners who lived on the ground floor of the house she rented, told her that they would be ‘keeping an eye’ on her.

This one incident signifies an obsession within our society to maintain, check, and control a woman’s morality and sexuality. "It is tough being unmarried, but it is even worse when you are divorced and single," says Rahat. "The society’s expectation from a divorcee changes and not in a good way. People are more suspicious of and make advances towards a divorcee as if a woman’s morals, ethics, and values are linked to her virginity."

Rameen, associated with a regional non-governmental organisation, feels that this country’s entire social structure needs to be overhauled for any kind of space to be created for single women. "Our legislation is retrogressive. It doesn’t favour women at all because of religious interpretations and our culture," she says. She believes that pro-women legislation is the first step towards creating an environment friendly for independent single women to not only survive but thrive on their own.

"Yes, we still have huge flaws on the implementation of the laws introduced by the previous governments," she admits, "but it was because of this legislation against harassment at workplace that a Punjab University lecturer was able to stand up against the university’s vice chancellor."

These small individual acts can multiply to create a domino effect to change societal attitudes towards women. On a larger scale, Ishrat feels that the media can play a major role in creating awareness. "A big majority of girls and women follow entertainment channels and morning shows," she says. "These shows can introduce new ideas as much as they are reinforcing existing norms. Morning shows that are popular for arranging marriages on air, could invite single women and celebrate their stories."

In addition to maintaining their quality of life by choosing what they want to do, it is also important for women to realise that the decisions they make have a ripple effect. Rameen, who is in her 30s and is single by choice, credits her mother for breaking the conventional boundaries. "My parents were in a bad marriage," she says. "My mother decided to do something about it. She divorced my father and remarried. Now, decades later, I’ve never seen my parents happier in their separate lives."

Rameen feels if her mother had stayed in the marriage, all her children would have probably followed the same path of domesticity out of tradition. But now each of her siblings has made a choice. "Two of us are married, two are still single," says Rameen. "We all support each other and we are happy in our lives. That is what matters."

The importance of a support system is reiterated by all women TNS spoke with. If the families of single women fail to provide them with a support structure, there needs to be a concerted effort for women to find support within each other. Ishrat, during the course of correspondence with TNS, gets inspired to set up an online forum to give single women an avenue to find support and share new ideas.

Also read: The taboo subject

Maria feels that even if women have support of family or friends, they still have the tendency to compound the problem in their minds. "Single unmarried women don’t have the limitations that married women do," she says. "Neither do they have the stigma that divorced women feel they carry. We are somewhere in between. We can either take advantage of that and have a positive outlook, or we can choose to look at the glass half empty. If you have a supportive family, and the kind of attitude that says ‘sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me’, it can be a good life for you."

Names have been changed to protect the privacy of the women.