Spinsterhood: a Choice or a Matter of Destiny?
By Omar Bihmidine

Spinsterhood is looked upon as a nightmare for all women. At any point in her life, no sane woman has ever thought of living her whole life as a spinster. Society in its turn mercilessly deems it a shame, while women falling prey to it continue to suffer from a life-long bout of desperation. In silence, desperate, unmarried women groan out of their failure to find a man of their dreams, if not any man.

In the face of this destiny, they do not know whether they are to blame for something they haven’t brought about or it is a destined curse they will only have to bear for the rest of their lives. At other times, our culture treats spinsters differently from bachelors even though both are trapped in the same shameful curse of singlehood. Whereas the society looks down on spinsters and deems them a burden to their families, it stands in ovation in the presence of bachelors, deeming the latter as the best of today’s men.

In any society where spinsterhood is getting more rampant, we always find that spinsters are inferiorized and treated contemptuously, not because they are single as such, but because their singlehood is biasedly represented as a sign of rejection, refusal, lack of appreciation, ugliness, boredom, misery, etc. Regrettably, spinsters can’t help feeling that they are not part of their community.

When spinsters observe their fellow women getting married one after another, they usually ask themselves why they are unlucky, why they are cursed and why they are unappreciated by suitors. Sometimes, they put the blame on suitors who rarely knock their doors, on some societies who treat women as good-for-nothing, or on the phobia of marrying evinced by some of today’s youth.

Some societies are more aware of this phenomenon than others. Families from Zagora, for instance, take serious