Polygamist matchmaker aims for mainstream
No date, no woo, and happily-everafter.
Azad Chaiwala believes he’s found the strategy for successful wedlock — just a click away on his newly launched GoMarry.com website.
“I shun dating,” the U.K. entrepreneur states, succinctly.
“I see dating as two people, they glam up, they dress up, they go to these nice fancy places, nice music, and they try to woo the other person. They’re trying to show this fake side of themselves or an exaggerated side of themselves. It’s very dishonest. They look their best and they’re essentially playing the human equivalent of the mating dance. Whereas I advocate going on marriage meetings.”
It’s not such a newfangled approach, really, based as the scheme is on non-western cultures that cleave to arranged unions. Hey, worked for him. Chaiwala knew his future wife for three weeks before they tied the knot a dozen years and three children ago.
At the time, he’d warned his brideto-be and his pending in-laws that, as a practising Muslim born in Manchester of Pakistani heritage, he’d probably take a second wife down the road.
“I had nine marriage meetings before we agreed and 11 prior to actually getting married,” he recounts.
One might reasonably describe that as a form of dating, except the couple was chaperoned throughout.
“Love comes afterward, believe me,” Chaiwala, 35, told the Star in a phone interview over the weekend. “Love is this exaggerated thing. We’ve turned love into what it isn’t. Love is being able to grow together, creating a family together. Love is knowing what makes the other person happy and doing it without even thinking it’s a chore. Yet we’ve turned it into this thing where it’s all physical and sexualized and there’s no companionship.” What a crock of generalization. “I love my wife. It took a while. But because we were in a bond of marriage, we both know why we got into it. We weren’t in love in the beginning. It was a thought-out process. Love will come.”
Interestingly, Chaiwala, purportedly a millionaire, has not actually taken an extra wife, as is permitted (up to four) by his faith and legally allowed in some — by no means all — Muslim countries. “There are reasons why it never happened,” he says vaguely. But it still might, he claims.
Online dating, hookups, the app booty-call, is a free-for-all clamour. Men and women look for shortcuts from meet-to-mate. Chaiwala is cutting straight to the chase — without the chase.
He knows the template well, after earlier creating two other allegedly wildly popular websites: Secondwife.com, exclusively for Muslim matchmaking and Polygamy.com for anybody seeking multiple spouses (multiple wives, only; multiple husbands — polyandry — not permitted).
There has been, understandably, intense blowback from an appalled public. Women’s groups, mainstream Muslim organizations that will not sanction polygamy, and politicians have raked Chaiwala — who lives in Newcastle, England — over the coals. His websites were specifically attacked in a report on the failures of social integration.
“The practice of unregistered polygamy appears to be more commonplace than might be expected,” Dame Louise Casey, the report’s author, said last year. “The existence of matchmaking sites like Secondwife.com and the prevalence of unregistered marriage is particularly concerning.”
Her report estimated there were about 100,000 couples living in Shariah marriage, which have no legal basis in the U.K., with a significant number — perhaps 20,000 — believed to be polygamous.
There are no reliable figures for Canada, where the phenomenon is most above-ground notorious in the Mormon breakaway sect of Bountiful, B.C., where religious leaders have been convicted for performing and participating in plural or “celestial” marriages, little more than a canonical construct for old perverts to copulate with young girls.
Chaiwala remains unapologetic and unrepentant. Just filling and formulating a need, he argues — Polygamy.com has 200,000 registered users, mostly from the U.K. and the U.S., two-thirds of them male. “On Polygamy, we’ve had a lot of Canadian users.” GoMarry.com, says Chaiwala, is up to 5,000 in just a month since it launched.
It’s odious, of course, and indisputably medieval in attitudes toward women, especially the wife-plus sites, and culturally accommodating run amok.
“At no point am I advocating legal marriage,” Chaiwala emphasizes, and the disclaimer appears on the site’s splash page. “What I’m advocating is that there are too many mistresses. These are women who are being exploited by married men. They have no rights. They are secluded from family. The women are depressed. There’s no reliability there.’’
In his idealized version of plural marriages — Chaiwala hearkens to biblical scripture as well as Islamic texts for justification — these unions are publicly acknowledged and religiously registered.
“The family would recognize the union. She’d be invited to the funerals, to the weddings, the barbecues etc. And the children would subsequently have a family, uncles and aunts, grandparents. If the relationship falters, you’d have so many invested family members who could come in and mediate. The man would be held responsible.’’
Indeed, Chaiwala absurdly presents himself as a guardian of women’s rights. “What’s happening now is that women are being abused as prostitutes and men are bringing who knows how many girlfriends into the family with an unwilling participant, which is the first wife.”
GoMarry.com, Chaiwala insists, is an antidote for societies falling apart, with the conventional family unit under assault. Yet his fix amounts to no less than acquiescent cheating — for a men-only club.
“I am the landlord of 22 properties in the U.K. and every single one of my properties is occupied by a single person, maybe a single parent. That’s not the way society should be, to die of loneliness. It’s unsustainable from every aspect, financially, emotionally and psychologically for the happiness of the nation. People ending up cold, miserable in old-people institutionalized chickencoop housing where you’re dependant on the state and at the mercy of paid mercenaries who are emotionless. If your children abandon you, what do you expect from third parties basically getting paid a minimum wage?”
Perhaps we are missing the point but nowhere does Chaiwala elucidate how arranged marriages would protect a spouse from the same sad fate. “From the beginning, they know they’re getting into a long-term relationship,” he counters. Though surely that’s the intent of all marriages, whatever happens in the unknowable future.
Parties interested in the service answer 250 questions online to match them with compatible spouse-seekers.
When two people click they are brought together, face-to-face, with a minimum of two observers. “Yourself, the other suitor, and a chaperone for each person, purportedly guaranteeing truthfulness. The parties select from a further 100 questions, potential deal-breakers.
“It’s a systematic process. You’re not in love with them. You don’t owe the other person anything and you’re not playing the wooing game. After 10, 11, 12 meetings, you will know if the person is right for you or not. And those kinds of relationships seldom fail.”
If it walks like an arranged marriage, talks like an arranged marriage, then surely it’s an arranged marriage, no? Chaiwala rejects the term, if not the concept.
“If I said arranged marriages, people have got this weird idea that you are somehow bundled into the back of a van and you’re shipped abroad to marry your one-eyed cousin that you’ve never met before, against your will.” Yeah, well, sometimes. There are innumerable ways to end up miserable and alone. Love dies, attraction fades, differences widen. But there are also innumerable ways to end up alone and not miserable, though Chaiwala seems scarcely able to envision that possibility. In Chaiwala’s fantasy of marriage, a practical Shangri-La, love has got nothing to do with it. Not even a box for ticking on his questionnaire menu.
Adage: Marry in chaste, repent-not at leisure.
If it walks like an arranged marriage, talks like an arranged marriage, then surely it’s an arranged marriage, no?