Marriage: Meeting each other

When two people want to get marry in my country they have two different ways of finding their soul mate.

1: Suitor

This is the traditional way of marriage which is still preferred by most parents. In this way boy and girl don't meet for a long time. The story is like this: 

A boy announces to his parents that he wants to marry and asks them to  find a good girl for him! So his mom and sisters try to look for a good girl ( I know how lame it is). They ask their friends and neighbors, etc. to find her. Some people give the phone numbers of some girl's families who they know. Then the boy's mom calls girl's mom [ these two moms have never met in real almost always]. Boy's mom says to girl's mom that they are a suitors family and if girl's mom is interested she will ask boy's mom further questions on the phone. These questions are: 1- how old is boy? 2- what's his job? 3- if he had a university degree and if the answer is yes what is his degree (e.g. B.A., M.A.,etc)? 4- how many brothers and sisters he has? 5- is his salary enough to provide a family?

If the girl's family is ok with the answers they will schedule a date for boy's family to come to their home to visit the girl ( in my city boy doesn't come first and this is why i hate to marry a suitor, because i feel like a piece of cloth. most of the time the boy's family may never come again because his mom may doesn't like the girl! Imagine that! All of these can happen without boy and girl meeting or even talking to each other ever!)

2: Dating

This is the modern way of marriage in my country which is new and people still barely talk about it. If you have a boyfriend or girlfriend you'd better keep it a secret! Yes. Here we don't live together with our partners. bfs and gfs usually just talk on the phone (most of the time when parents are not home) and text each other. They don't meet outside too much. They may sometimes go out to have a pizza or something. On their bdays and Valentine's Day and any other occasion, they buy each other gifts of course but by playing a lot of trick for their parents! They even usually hide the gift from parents. So I think you can guess now that bfs and gfs don't make love too. Because a girl MUST be virgin before marriage.

P.S. on the next post I will tell you more about how boy's family come to girl's to suit.

All of these are things which are usual not only in my city but also in my country generally. There are exceptions all the time you know.