Since 2017, Tunisian women have had the right to marry non-Muslims. But reality is playing out in different ways down on the local level amid an Islamist resurgence.
Tag: marriage
In India, a centuries-old custom comes up against basic demands for human rights.
BEIJING — “Goodbye,” Ying told her third husband. “Oh,” he responded indifferently. Through their legal, but dishonnest, marriage, Ying earned 40,000 yuan ($6,000). Her “husband” was allowed to buy an apartment in Beijing, which in turn, nets him about one million yuan ($150,000) a year. Ying and her real husband Wang are a couple who […]
Three men tied the knot in a city-sanctioned ceremony that protects inheritance rights of this self-proclaimed ‘polyamorous’ family.
In Beijing parks and throughout the rest of China, “singles’ markets” are held, organized by the parents eager to marry off their children.
Restrictive and sometimes contradictory rules continue to govern issues of marriage and — heaven forbid — divorce for Egyptian Christians.
Many young Muslim women in the West have a modern lifestyle, yet want to be a virgin on their wedding day. But what if they aren’t? One woman’s story from Germany.
Germany suddenly faces hundreds of young girls who have disappeared from schools because their parents have found husbands for them. Lawmakers appear powerless to face the new phenomenon of child brides brought by the arrival of immigrants.
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Iran’s Divorce Rate, A State Secret?
TEHRAN — Iranian officials may restrict publication of the country’s latest divorce statistics so as not to distress the public, which has long been taught that early and lasting matrimony is a key to social harmony. “There have already been enough divorce statistics. Citing more won’t solve the problems,” Ali Akbar Mahzun, of the demographics […]
Women in the government-controlled province of Latakia must decide between love and danger if they are to marry men from opposition-held areas in Syria.
Registration officials in Iran supect there has been an increase of late in the number of informal and “unregistered” relationships. People are experimenting more with Western-style affairs of the heart, in other words — “shacking up” rather than rushing into marriage. And they’re not even going through the bother of entering a “temporary marriage,” a […]
La Prensa, May 18, 2016 MEXICO CITY — Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto has announced a proposal to Congress to legalize same-sex marriage across the country. Tuesday’s announcement, which took place during an event in celebration of the National Day of the Fight Against Homophobia, dominated Mexico’s front pages on Wednesday. “Gay Wedding, OK!” was […]
Twenty young couples in southeastern Hangzhou recently decided to get hitched without a stitch, wearing only leaves and flowers in rejection of the materialistic concerns frequently associated with marriage in China, Hong-Kong-based Oriental Daily News reports. This was the second year that the Songcheng Anthomaniac Festival organized such a collective wedding ceremony in Hangzhou. Couples […]
It sounds like the makings of a bad sitcom. In China’s northern Shanxi province, twin sisters married twin brothers, but uncomfortable mix-ups have led them to seek minor surgery to avoid confusing their respective partners, China News reports. According to the newspaper, a matchmaker fixed up the two Zhao brothers with the Yuan sisters over […]
El Tiempo, April 8, 2016 “Court says “yes’ to gay marriage in historic decision” reads the Friday front page of Bogota-based daily El Tiempo, a day after Colombia’s highest court ruled to legalize same-sex marriage. Members of the Colombian LGBT community, pictured on the daily’s front page, gathered outside the court in Bogota’s historic center […]
Beyond her late 20s, a woman in Asia faces huge hurdles in finding a husband. It’s especially hard if she is educated and has a career.
In Italy, between 5,000 and 7,000 priests have given up their robes. Some ex-priests re-enter lay society with a female companion, others struggle to build a new life from scratch.
No need for Twitter if you are a media baron. Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch placed an announcement in the Births, Marriages and Deaths page of The Times, the storied London-based newspaper he owns, to share the news of his engagement to American actress and former supermodel Jerry Hall. Murdoch, 84, is the executive chairman […]
Thousands of Syrian women face not just grief but also fear and poverty after losing their husbands to war. They often endure strict control from their remaining family and are forbidden to work. Some make the heartbreaking decision to remarry.
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How Much For A Hong Kong Wedding?
HONG KONG — Couples planning to walk down the aisle in Hong Kong better have some deep pockets. Even as consumer prices generally have dropped on the Chinese island, the average cost for a wedding is up to 314,000 Hong Kong dollars (about $40,000), according to the China Daily News. Retail sales in Hong Kong […]
NEW DELHI — Five months ago, Devanish Meena, a young Indian man from New Delhi, eloped with his longtime girlfriend. Now he is a widower. Adding to Devanish’s anquish is his belief that the young bride, Pratibha Gujar, was murdered — by her own family. In India, approximtely 1,000 young people are murdered each year in name of saving a family’s honor. The “honor killings,” as they’re known, are often committed when a forced or arranged marriage is rejected. Pratibha’s death seems to fit the profile. The young woman’s relationship with Devanish was very much opposed by her family. And […]
SÃO PAULO — Israel Afonso Lima, a janitor in this Brazilian city, suffers from Down syndrome. But that didn’t stop him, at the age of 36, from deciding to go back to school to learn Brazilian sign language. And it’s for a very good reason: to be able to communicate with his wife, 37-year-old Eliene […]
LAUSANNE — After living together for seven years, Guillaumette Sauvé and Pierre Boizot wed on June 30 in a civil ceremony in Lausanne. They are 62 and 59 respectively, and have both been married twice before. The bride didn’t wear white. And only a few friends were invited. “At first, we weren’t too excited by […]
A not-so-veiled effort to limit the population of this Muslim ethnic minority is the systematic denial of marriage licenses. Children born out of wedlock are rendered stateless, without citizenship or education.
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No More Big Fat Afghan Weddings
KABUL — Big weddings, music and dancing were banned in Afghanistan under the Taliban. So after the U.S.-led invasion toppled the regime in 2001, Afghans who could afford it began throwing large, loud and expensive weddings. But the government says the tradition has become a burden for grooms’ families, who are obliged to underwrite wedding costs, and the parliament has passed a law to makes lavish and expensive weddings illegal. The new law limits the number of wedding guests to 500 and caps the per-head cost at around $7. “This law will solve huge problems facing young people that make […]
Why do so many modern couples find it difficult to work out division of labor within their households? After all, even Paleolithic people had it figured out.
A federal ruling legalizing same-sex marriage in Alabama took effect Monday. But in up to 52 of the state’s 67 counties, most judges refused to go through with processing marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples, the International New York Times reports in its issue Tuesday. Chief Justice Roy S. Moore of the Alabama Supreme […]
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My Bogus Marriage To A Refugee Friend
Germany is tracking the growing number of so-called “protective” marriages, arranged among friends to avoid an immigrant being sent back to poverty and peril in their home country.
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Syria, Making Love And War
As Syria’s civil war rages on, soldiers and supporters manage to finding coves of intimacy amidst the violence around them.
KARACHI — Khushboo Rafiq is the first person in her family not to pay a dowry, or bride price, to her husband Usman’s family. Khushboo works for an organization that advocates women’s rights. It was very important to her that her wedding represents the ideals and convictions on which she spends her professional efforts.” We used the wedding invitation to tell guests they should not bring any gifts,” she says. “We also made it very clear that no dowry was being paid. We also are donating our wedding dress to a charity for another couple to use in the future.” […]
Sectarian differences have long created problems for some marriages among Shia, Sunni and others. But with the death and hatred of war, romantic tragedies abound.
A crafty entrepreneur is bringing the canceled wedding market to Germany, where brides and grooms are embracing new ways to save tons of cash off the leftovers of altar breakups.
RIYADH — With more than 257,000 unmarried women in the country, and strict religious codes, traditional matchmaking is a lucrative business in Saudi Arabia. Yet with the rise of social media and online marriage websites, the industry is coming under pressure to stay financially viable, which has led to several recent reports of scandals that […]
In rural Idlib, marriage offices are fixing people up, but some say they’re exploiting the lonely during wartime by selling desperate women to overseas men.
TEHRAN — When Iran’s population doubled to some 60 million between the 1970s and 1980s, it was seen as a problem for a resource-poor country in the throes of a war with Iraq and social revolution at home. Leaders moved to curb this baby boom in the late 1980s by promoting contraception and sterilization. But […]
Iran’s Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani-Fazli is blaming drug addiction for just over half of all divorces in Iran, warning that “youth addiction to drugs” is growing, the official IRNA agency reports. “The judiciary has declared that the reason for 55% of divorces is one partner being addicted to drugs,” the minister told a Tehran conference […]
BERLIN — Sonya* disappeared during the fall school vacation in the German state of Baden-Württemberg. The 16-year-old high school student, the daughter of an Algerian and a German, left her family’s house in Konstanz and never returned. Sonya’s parents called the police fearing the worst. Had their daughter been kidnapped? Was she possibly the victim […]
The neighborhood in Seoul known to Westerns from Psy’s mega-hit single is also the place status-conscious South Koreans go to get married. But something is lost in all the ritz.
SHENYANG — Zhang, who runs a wedding planning service, was doing her best to convince me over the phone to come in to visit what she describes as a “giant reception showroom.” It has been a week since my future mother-in-law put down the deposit for our wedding venue, a newly opened five-star hotel in […]
Marriage in Tajikistan, a Central Asian country of 8 million, is celebrated over days and far over budget. A new law tries to change ancient ways for the sake of modern economics.