ariane

Last week I had a potential business associate visiting me from Iran. The gentle man in question was in his mid forties, wearing a smart suit and a tie accompanied by an impeccable manner. First hand, I was impressed.

When you want to do business with someone, you have to analyze their character traits. You need to get as much information from talks, body language, appearance, actions, mentality, body language etc, as you possibly can. You also need to get your intelligence on the guy as well and combine it with your other findings to see if he can be a reliable partner or not.Beside business, he talked about his wife and son and how his late father taught him a lot of lessons in life and so on and so forth.  He looked like a man with principles. 

The only thing that bothered me up to this moment was if he is so happily married, why he isn’t wearing his wedding ring? Then I thought that’s a common trade among Iranian men.
As the meeting went on and towards the end of it I asked the guy if he had already made a hotel booking to which he answered no and all he wanted was a hotel that was “comfortable” and won’t pay much. I had just the place for him, a safe, comfortable, family, budget hotel owned by an old friend of mine. I gave him a tour of the town, had a meal with him and checked him into the hotel and went home.  

Around 1:30 AM I received a surprise call from my friend, the hotel owner. He was upset! Very upset! Asking me why you brought this SOB to my hotel while you know this is a family place. It appeared to be that the meaning of a “comfortable” hotel by that gentle man was the one he can bring prostitutes, to stay the night with him and on this occasion the hotel management stopped him and they had an episode at the end of which he checked out in protest and went to find another hotel in town.

That did it for me. I was not going to have any more business relationship with him. The reason, plain and simple, is that if a man cheats on his family, the one that he talks about so indulgingly, would have no problem cheating on you. My night was already ruined and and the chain of thoughts took me by its wave, I thought what if the table was turned, and it was the guy’s wife on a business trip and looking for a quickie? How would that make him feel, should he found out? How that woman will be judged or treated by the society? The wave took me further and I asked a fundamental question from myself. Do we, Iranian men, give Iranian women a fair share of understanding in affairs of heart and sexuality? 
Let me share:

1-      Upon marrying an Iranian woman, we want her to be the perfect picture of chastity. She has to be a virgin never had a romantic past and saved herself up for us prince charmings. We can have a past and we love to boast about it to our future partners but a glimpse of that from her side and we all are suddenly guarded and judgemental. To deny a woman a past is to deny her ever having a body and a heart before she came into our lives.  That’s not fair. But why does it bother us so much? Although suffering from the same problem myself, I think we need to worry when we find someone who DOESN’T have a past. That might be the cause of so many psychological disorders.  

2-      We all know that in this day and age, finding a woman without an amorous past is rather impossible and unrealistic to ask for. But the trend is still so much in demand that women who face it have no choice but to fake it and lie about their history. Men on the other hand prefer to be lied to in these circumstances and shut an eye. It’s less painful this way. 

3-      Speaking on basis of experience, Iranian men keep the option (allegedly, god given right) to have flings along the marriage, while depriving their counterpart from the same privilege. The usual arguments range between a “working men need a break” to “my woman has let herself go”. Having a society that promotes polygamy and facilitates temporary marriages legitimizes this activity.  

4-      Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to initiate a female fan base here for myself, but however you look at it, the Iranian society is not fair to women. They have to cover their basis through some other means to become secure in these uncertain waters, so they have to take advantage of other means such as “Mehrieh” and likes of it. When they do that, we men accuse them of being money grabbing gold mongers. I think for us to harbour a society with better mental balance and more social equality, we need to work on these issues and treat our women with more fairness. After all a women who had a heart break or two before meeting us, appreciates a loving life partner more than a one with no basis of comparison.