News Fashion Music Art & Photography Film & TV Science & Tech Life & Culture Politics Dazed 100 Magazine Search Contact About Jobs Legal Dazed Media Another Another Man Nowness Dazed Studio Life & Culture Opinion 15November 2017 TextRuqaiya HarisIllustrationOwain Anderson Share muslim dating 1 What it’s like dating as a young Muslim in the Tinder age Dating apps are stressful, marriage is always on your mind and it’s easy to get FOMO watching people with simpler love lives – but it’s not all bad Finding love as a young Muslim in 2017 Britain can be a stressful experience. Navigating society with all the complexities of dual-identity, coming from a conservative religious background in a hyper-sexualised secular society – it can all be challenging when you’re looking for love. However, the advent of social media, Muslim matrimonial websites and apps such as “Minder” and “MuzMatch” have allowed Muslims to meet each other more easily than before. One of the pioneering Muslim matrimonial websites “SingleMuslim.com” boasts over 50,000 marriages taking place as a result of users meeting on the site over the last 17 years. Digital dating and matrimonial services seem to have replaced the traditional system of being introduced to a potential marriage suitor by your aunty and going to meet them in their living room, making small talk over chai. These apps and websites often provide a platform for Muslims with hectic, busy lives to be able to get to know one another while still being honest and upfront about doing things the ‘Islamic’ way. There’s probably nothing more awkward than joining Tinder as a hijabi and explaining that you’re not really into hook ups but would be happy for them to speak to your parents about marriage. My experience of these Muslim apps wasn’t exactly amazing. Selecting my religiosity on a sliding scale for a marriage app gave me a mini existential crisis, how practicing even am I?! Does it seem insincere to portray myself as more religious than I am? I also couldn’t help but reject men for trivial things, like their profile pic being a blurry selfie they took on the train (seriously, this is marriage bro, make an effort) or a bio that overly emphasised how much they respect their mum, which I couldn’t take seriously at all. “There’s probably nothing more awkward than joining Tinder as a hijabi and explaining that you’re not really into hook ups but would be happy for them to speak to your parents about marriage” I deleted the app after 24 hours feeling completely overwhelmed; it just felt way too intense and I realised I’m only 24 (although in Pakistani match-maker years that seems to be around 45) and I’m in no rush to get married until I’m absolutely sure I’ve met the right person. Other young Muslims I spoke to had better experiences than I did; Javed, 24, said that “it’s easier to meet Muslim women online now because it’s not like we’re white people who can just go to a club or a pub to meet girls, and I’m not gonna meet them in the library am I? So it’s a perfect opportunity online.” But not all Muslims feel comfortable meeting their potential spouse online, there is still some stigma and sense of the great unknown when it comes to online dating and it’s no different in the Muslim community. Aisha, 23, told me “I would much rather meet a guy in person, I mean I have nothing against meeting your spouse online, however I feel like meeting someone in person is different… just because I have this trust issue where I worry that people will make up their persona online and it might lead to false expectations, but I know there are both good and bad stories from couples that met online.” “We understood: if you’re gonna talk to boys on MSN on the computer in the living room, have another tab of Solitaire open just in case” For many Muslim kids growing up in Britain from a diaspora background, often our parents’ cultural and religious values at times felt burdensome and in direct conflict with our own hormonal desires and social environment. Watching shows and films on television showing teenagers pursuing relationships openly made me feel major FOMO when even talking about dating at home was taboo. Well, until we reached our twenties and then we were suddenly supposed to have a string of possible marriage suitors lined up in waiting. For many teenage Muslims, the extent of sex education or conversations about relationships was that sex was ‘haram’ and having boyfriends was shameful. And from that we understood: if you’re gonna talk to boys on MSN on the computer in the living room, have another tab of Solitaire open just in case. I envied the fact that my white friends always seemed to have it easier than me in terms of meeting and dating guys. They seemed free from the stigma and shame of dating even as young teenagers and were allowed to bring boys home and introduce them to their parents. They didn’t have to get caught up in an elaborate web of lies in order to go to get a burger or see a movie with a boy on a Saturday afternoon. And none of them seemed to feel the debilitating guilt and fear of getting caught out that almost made it not worth it in the first place. “I envied the fact that my white friends always seemed to have it easier than me in terms of meeting and dating guys” However as I grew into adulthood, I realised that the secular Western model of casual dating and sex was not exactly desirable to me either. I grew up seeing so many of my friends heartbroken at a young age, having the freedom to have sex without really possessing the emotional maturity to make informed decisions that their parents hadn’t prepared them for. Being well aware of misogyny in my own culture due to my mother’s strong and outspoken nature, I began to notice the deep-rooted misogyny in British dating culture too. It was clear to me that young women were expected almost without exception to present themselves in a hyper-sexualised way, under immense pressure to look good, whilst boys often navigated this same dating scene with a strong sense of entitlement and lack of respect. As such, it became increasingly clear to me that I was not interested in random hook-ups or throwaway dating culture with no long-term prospects. I found my own spiritual identity in adulthood and realised that I’m not just a Muslim by name, or out of respect for my parents’ traditions or my cultural heritage, but because I believe in this religion and that it holds profound truth about the world we live in. I only wanted to find somebody likeminded, travelling the same spiritual path as me, sharing the most intimate parts of myself with that person alone. I wanted to find and marry a Muslim man. Easy peasy! Well, not really. As it turned out, getting to know Muslim guys and finding the right one was just like getting to know any other type of guy – exhausting and emotionally draining. muslim dating 2 I loved, and still love the idea of getting to know someone exclusively for marriage. Of course it’s not a perfect model, and the institution of religious marriage alienates many queer Muslims, or other Muslims for whom an Islamic marriage (nikkah) is not accessible to, for various reasons. I will be honest in saying I don’t have an answer nor a solution for that other than continued dialogue and understanding, however the intellectual process behind attempting to find a life partner at a relatively young age is something I subscribe to on a personal level too. It sounds really bizarre when I discuss this with non-Muslims, but for me there is some kind of refreshing transparency when two people are both on the same page about long-term commitment. The onus on marriage from the get-go kind of transcends a purely sexual connection and requires a real effort to get to know someone intellectually and emotionally. I guess we kind of see dating and romance in general as a means to an end, rather than the end itself. It gives an opportunity for two people to grow together, sharing the burdens of hardships and the benefits of success as they experience life side by side. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t, but that’s life. However, the ‘marriage’ elephant in the room when dating a Muslim can be a double-edged sword. Every simple argument can send alarm bells ringing in your head when you start thinking “This is the future father of my children? This man who plays video games in his underwear until 3am?” which may not be the immediate thought when one is dating casually and taking things slow. It can add strain to a blossoming relationship and can magnify flaws, creating a whole list of impossible criteria in your head that no partner can ever really meet, because it’s marriage, and it’s scary, and it’s for life. “You start thinking ‘This is the future father of my children? This man who plays video games in his underwear until 3am?’” It can also cause people to lower their standards completely out of sheer desperation and a longing to be loved and supported. Many Muslims don’t see dating or pre-marital relationships as an acceptable practice in Islam, and so try to rush marriage in order to have their romantic or sexual desires fulfilled. Sometimes these people marry young and end up outgrowing their partners and separating soon after. Then of course there are those Muslims that don’t really feel a sense of urgency about finding someone to marry, as long as they can have sex in parked cars and Starbucks disabled toilets without getting caught. I have been in Canary Wharf at 9am and seen public gardens and car parks littered with young, visibly Muslim couples who presumably travelled all the way here from other parts of East London just to make out on benches away from the prying eyes of relatives. There is a real generational disconnect if Muslim parents honestly think that refraining from ever talking about sex and dating in the home somehow ensures celibacy and restraint when it comes to romance. While many Muslims today meet their own marriage partners, the traditional practice of “arranged” marriages are still popular amongst young Muslims who find it difficult to meet people. People often tend to associate arranged marriages with ‘forced marriages’ yet in reality arranged marriages nowadays are often more like a family member introducing you to a guy, and then you get to know them yourself slowly over a few meetings and Whatsapp conversations, and then you marry him quickly before discovering his most annoying habits. There is a tendency to see Muslims in the West only through the “clash of civilisations” narrative that pits ‘Western’ norms against ‘Islamic’ ones, which only seems to portray a Muslim as being conservative, backwards and extreme for upholding Islamic practices and values, or an acceptable liberal Muslim who is held back by community stigma, and longs to live a secular, Western lifestyle. It also fails to contextualise the experiences of many Muslims who have been born in Britain but who still hold their Islamic values dear to them while feeling culturally British. A lot of friends of mine have expressed their same frustrations as me when it comes to marriage, but they don’t let that put them off doing things the ‘halal’ way and waiting until marriage for intimacy. Muslims are by no means a monolith, and finding a partner who suits your preferences is just about as difficult and complex as it is for any other person of faith or no faith. Illustrations for this piece by Owain Anderson. Life & CultureOpinionMuslimloveSex Read Next IMG_0745 FeatureLauren Scott on life after death, nudes & losing her arm CATFISH HABBO OpinionI started catfishing people at 11 to deal with being gay Screen Shot 2017-12-06 at 11.38.33 AM NewsInstagram thinks your wild animal selfies are cruel & shitty Noah Schnapp – winter 2017 Film & TVThe new Stranger Things 2 kids on guns, gangs & Demogorgons Life & Culture Opinion 7December 2017 TextEmma Madden Share CATFISH HABBO I started catfishing people at 11 to deal with being gay During one, long confusing summer I signed up to Habbo Hotel, pretended to be a boy called Matt and fell in love – here’s why Sometimes, our identities alone can prohibit us from fulfilling our desires. Contrary to popular belief, the desire to deceive others on the internet sometimes starts with an innocent rather than a sinister intention. I say that largely because it’s true, but also to save some face. Long before I came out as a lesbian, I catfished. It started when I was 10, long before I came to terms with my lesbianism. Back then, pretending to be someone else on the internet felt like the only way to be who I really was. I went to a religious school in a homophobic town, and I had a feeling from an early age that I liked girls. I’d pray to God to make me like boys. In a world where lesbians were depicted as the angry outsiders of society, and were always the first to be voted out of Big Brother, I was terrified when I thought I might be one. I’ve wanted to kiss girls for as long as I can remember, but I didn’t want short hair, I didn’t want to be angry and I didn’t want the world to look at me like they did those Russian girls in the “All The Things She Said” video. I wanted to be with girls, but my body and my shame prohibited it. In the summer before I started secondary school, I signed up to Habbo Hotel. Like any MUD (multi-user domain), which were at their most popular from the early to mid 2000s, Habbo Hotel allowed me to choose my own identity and body. I became my my fantasised self, the one who could pass through the world and love girls without reproach. I was then blonde, spikey-haired, sensitive ‘Matt’. My body was no longer speaking for me. Through the words I typed, I could construct a narrative online that I couldn’t play out offline. I didn’t care to know who was behind the screen, and I didn’t want to think of these 2D characters as avatars for people with 3D faces and 3D lives. We were all there, roaming in our rooms, pixel-dancing on the dancefloor, enacting our own personal and impossible fantasies. Habbo gave us pixels, we moulded our ideal bodies out of them and explored the nascent desires within us. It was consensual deception. I hadn’t really thought about this time in my life until I read the story of Ryan Schultz about a fortnight ago. Ryan was a somewhat well-known baseball writer, he dated women on Twitter, and Ryan wasn’t actually Ryan at all. For eight years, Ryan Schultz existed as an online presence and Becca Schultz was behind it all. She logged on as Ryan for the first time at 13, wanting only to use his name as a byline. Becca was right – her identity as a teenage girl would have prevented her from being taken seriously. The original intent was innocent, admirable even. Becca was only following the thousand-year-long tradition of using a male alias to publish her work. But Becca isn’t George Eliot, and things quickly became sinister. As Ryan, Becca fell in love, and after a series of tempestuous relationships with women, Ryan got his first big character development. He became abusive, manipulative, a drunk – and he forced women on the internet to send him nudes. Dark. There have been no records to suggest that Becca enacted similar behaviour offline. Maybe it was the thrill of anonymity, or maybe it was the intoxicating lack of reticence; what cyber-psychologist John Suler calls the ‘online disinhibition effect’. “In Becca’s case,” professor and researcher of catfishing, Dr. Kathrin Kottemann tells me, “she realised a dream and then descended into a nightmare”. Consulting Kathrin over email, I ask how this young woman could act with the creepiness of a sleazy man on the internet. “This probably stems from Becca’s own feelings of powerlessness”, she replies. “If she can’t be what she wants to be as herself, she channels that insecurity and hopelessness into her persona and treats women the way she knows she would be treated if her identity were revealed”. “If she can’t be what she wants to be as herself, she channels that insecurity and hopelessness into her persona” – Dr. Kathrin Kottemann I can’t help but compare myself to Becca, and sympathise what I imagine may have been her original intent, however fucked up things got. For those who don’t hold positions of power, or whose bodies don’t automatically entitle them to privilege – of course the online world is preferable. When we pass through the world of space and faces, our power and identity is negotiated for us. In a new social situation, we are judged by the other person within seconds, before we even have the chance to introduce ourselves. "What I’ve found in my research is that catfish frequently adopt an online persona that is ‘enhanced’ in some way”, Kathrin tells me, “someone with a better job or someone who is better looking or someone who is the gender or sexuality that the real world person wishes they could openly be”. What’s so terrifying about catfishing and getting to be your ideal self is that when you do it, you not only deceive the other person, you deceive yourself. Scarier still, is the lack of safety you feel on the internet because of people like Becca and me. The abuse Becca caused others is unforgivable, even if I think her story, or the origin of it, is understandable. My ‘Matt’ was an arbitrary character; abuse and manipulation just weren’t in his storyboard – but it was the character, not me who was in control. IMVU Becca is a year younger than me, we’re both digital natives, and I imagine that she would have played an MUD like Habbo Hotel, too. If you were born in the mid-90s, it’s very likely that you did. Habbo Hotel, IMVU – even Club Penguin. All of these games helped to blur the borders between human being and game player; real life and simulation. Each of them engendered catfishing early on. Like playing ‘mummy and daddy’ or ‘doctors and nurses’ in the schoolyard, this was personal development disguised as play and maybe it affected more of us than you may think. I asked a batch of people who didn’t have privileged identities (queer, non-white, physically disabled) if they had ever pretended to be somebody they weren’t on the internet. ‘Yes’ was the resounding answer. “On Habbo Hotel I pretended to be a boy and I used to try and get into as many relationships as possible”, one said – having treated it like a game. “The stuff I used to do online, if anyone found out that was me, I would definitely be in jail right now”, another said. Did you ever fall in love as this pretend person, was my final question. The very vast majority answered no. I realised that at this point, my story might not be so relatable. At this point I was more like Becca and less like them – or maybe they’re just lying, I reassured myself. “Aged 11 I fell in love for the first time. My Habbo girl agreed to add me on MSN after I had made a fake email account. We spoke the entire summer” But it’s true. Aged 11 I fell in love for the first time. My Habbo girl agreed to add me on MSN after I had made a fake email account. We spoke the entire summer between primary and secondary school; infancy to adolescence. I’d wake up each morning at 6am, when there’d only be us and a few others in the hotel. We’d speak all day and say goodnight at 4am, before I’d spend a hazy and drooping two hours sleep. I filled my closed eyes with visions of us together, visualising Matt’s body, my body, with hers. It was my favourite part of the day. When I didn’t have access to my computer I would daydream of us together for hours throughout the day. Throughout lessons, lunchtime, dinner. I wasn’t looking at the world, I was projecting images of us together under my eyelids. Then when I was finally reunited with the machine, I’d put my hand on the warm mouse, like I was holding her hand. I’d be lit up by the screen and when I saw her name pop up, my stomach would lurch like a seesaw. The words on the screen hit hard like shy kisses. We’d talk ourselves to happy exhaustion, before shutting down the computer and taking our phones to bed. Texting was always the most romantic part. Under the sheets, with her lighting up and vibrating in my hands. “Goodnight, I’ll love you forever” we’d say. Then I’d wake up each morning with my cheek stuck to my phone. “Good morning, darling.” cyborg manifesto In that summer of catfishing (I killed Matt off when secondary school got the better of me), it didn’t just feel like a performance, it felt like a total and holistic embodiment. Now that I’m in a relationship with a woman and have had my desires satiated for a long time, I look back on my Matt days with bemusement. How had I convinced myself that I really was ‘Matt’, and how had I fallen in love as him, I ask Kathrin. The answer is less romantic than I’d expected, as she points me towards Donna Haraway’s influential work A Cyborg Manifesto. Published decades before the term ‘catfishing’ was coined, this manifesto talks about how “there is no longer a distinction between human and computer. They are a part of us and we are a part of them. So much so that we’ve almost become powerless”. These ideas still circulate today and Kathrin tells me about a work published in 1995 by Sherry Turkle called Life on the Screen. It too argues that “people have started valuing technology over people...that we are really friends with our computers and cellphones more than we are friends with the people we’re connecting with through them”. “There is no longer a distinction between human and computer. They are a part of us and we are a part of them” – Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto These are radical ideas, and if it weren’t for my own experience, I would have rejected them. Computers are frighteningly lively, and people in the lowest positions of power offline are more likely than anyone to abuse the power of the machine. Take me, take Becca. Like her, I had deceived someone into loving me, or so I thought. While writing this piece I’ve tried each day to track down Matt’s love. It’s been 11 years since our summer together and the details she gave me were minimal. I didn’t even have a surname to work with. Neither of us ever asked to see a picture of the other, or to hear each other’s voice, or to meet up. After hours and hours of scrolling through names on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, I gave up. It took me that long to realise that this was a classic case of a double-catfishing. They provided no bodily identification then, and there’s no evidence that they exist in the world now. I won’t provide their name in case I am wrong, but their forename was distinct enough to only bring up three results on Facebook. Out of those three, none of them were anywhere near the age range of my summer love. Who I was speaking to could have been anyone, but I remember the rush of their words and the hours spent with them lighting up my face under the covers, and the days spent hearing the sound of their voice after they’d rebooted. I was in love. The love was so intense because it was entirely my own. Like a drug addiction, part of me wishes I could feel that again. But then I think of Becca now, lost without her online alias, and I realise that you should never bring a fantasy into the world that was never supposed to be there. Life & CultureOpinionFeatureinternetsocial mediaLGBT Read Next IMG_0745 FeatureLauren Scott on life after death, nudes & losing her arm CATFISH HABBO OpinionI started catfishing people at 11 to deal with being gay Screen Shot 2017-12-06 at 11.38.33 AM NewsInstagram thinks your wild animal selfies are cruel & shitty Noah Schnapp – winter 2017 Film & TVThe new Stranger Things 2 kids on guns, gangs & Demogorgons Follow Contact About Jobs Legal Dazed Media Another Another Man Nowness Dazed Studio