The term “divorce” is still the cause of stigma for most people these days, particularly in Arab society, and there is a certain fear associated with even mentioning it. Saudi Gazette spoke to a number of divorced women in the Kingdom and found that women are disproportionately affected by divorce as compared to men, especially as far as humiliation and resentment from family, friends and society is concerned. In some cases, women become a victim of family, societal and even workplace pressure. “I was married two years back at the age of 24 but my marriage did not last because of conflict between my husband and myself even on trivial issues,” remarked Bolaq Barzaq, a divorced Saudi woman who did not opt to continue her education after divorce. “In the beginning I thought these problems occurred because we were of different backgrounds so I felt encouraged to continue normally and try to transform my husband in the future.” According to Bolaq, after the first six months she discovered that she was pregnant and though this made her very happy, it made her husband nervous. “When he found out that I was pregnant, he immediately asked me to return to Jeddah to live with my family saying ‘I will not be able to cover your allowance and medical needs',” she added. “I spent close to eight months in my parents' home in Jeddah where he promised to come and take me back home, but often he didn't even call and ignored me for long periods of time. I gave birth to my baby and he neither called nor came to see our baby and called my father to inform him that he had divorced me.” “Being a divorced mother is very tough on me and my family; I cannot go anywhere, or meet any of my friends or relatives because they will all ask me why I am here in Jeddah and have left my husband's home,” she said. Another Saudi woman is a 30-year-old divorcee with four children. She spoke to Saudi Gazette about her own divorce experience. “I got married at a very early age - when I was 12 - but my husband was around 50 years old. This fact greatly discouraged me and made me resent the marriage,” she remarked, preferring to remain anonymous. “For the past 18 years I was living with my husband without getting any of my legal rights since he was not working and unable to have healthy sexual relations with me because of his age. This encouraged me to search for another companion.” Guilt and frustration convinced her that divorce was the only way out so she asked her husband for a divorce so that she could “move freely and get married again.” Tragedy struck twice however, and she found that the man she had divorced her husband for was married with children and flatly refused to marry her. She is currently hiding the truth of her divorce from friends and family claiming that “they will start creating rumors about me if they knew.” She added: “My work is in the field of marketing so I will have to hide this truth, other wise it will affect my career and attract flirting and immoral invitations from men.” The fundamental problem, she concluded, was that society largely blames the woman for divorce. Saudi Gazette spoke with Dr. Mohammed Al-Hamed, the head of the Psychiatry department at Baksh hospital in Jeddah. “The divorce experience is a painful episode, particularly when much of our society does not understand the truth behind divorce,” he said. “I would ask the divorced woman to try and forget her experience and search anew for a purpose in her life and arrange things accordingly.” He added that divorced women should also realize where they went wrong in their previous marriage and try to change themselves for the better. According to Dr. Al-Hamed, society can help divorced women (and men) in forgetting their experience. “Sometimes the divorcee herself wants to move on but the people around her subject her to psychological pressure,” he said. This kind of pressure can be divided into two categories: physiological and social. “Social pressure includes restricting the divorced woman from going out to malls, weddings and parties alone - something that makes her depressed and disappointed; physiological pressure involves sexual frustration and the inability to live alone leading divorced women to start exploring reckless options for companionship. Society assumes all divorced women will immediately start pursuing reckless relationships and starts stigmatizing them from the start
