Marrying Someone Twice Of Age

Haunting Photos Of A 15-Year-Old Forced To Marry A Man Twice Her Age

Refinery29 7 hours ago 

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Photojournalist Allison Joyce was on assignment for Getty Images in her home of Bangladesh last summer when she passed a huge wedding tent being set up alongside the road. Curious what was going on, she asked a passerby who told her the wedding was set for the next day, and thousands of guests had been invited. But the detail that struck Joyce was the fact that the bride was only in the sixth grade. The next day, Nasoin Akhter would be married off to a man twice her age. Joyce returned the next morning with her camera, and was welcomed into the ceremony.
"Photographing her wedding was obviously sad," Joyce told Refinery29 of Akhter's big day. "She didn't seem like she was under any misconceptions about what was happening to her. She was quiet and withdrawn the entire day, even when surrounded by her friends." "In a lot of ways, it felt familiar, like the weddings I attended in the U.S.: Guests were dressed to the nines; happy couples mingled around; children were dancing in the streets to pop music. Everyone was celebrating this forced marriage of a 15-year-old girl to a 32-year-old man. To most of them, the sight wasn't an unusual one," Joyce said. "Most of the women in these communities are also married around the same age or younger." Although child marriage was officially outlawed there in 1929, Bangladesh has one of the highest rates in the world. An estimated 65% of girls are married before the age of 18. Of those, 29% are married before the age of 15, according to UNICEF. And while Bangladesh's female prime minister pledged to end child marriage by 2041, many are concerned by proposals to lower the official age from 18 to 16 in "special circumstances." (It's worth noting that, in some states, Americans can get married before the age of 18 with parental consent.)
Child marriage is incredibly harmful for girls — threatening both their health and education. Most young brides must drop out of school after their wedding, and many suffer violence and sexual abuse at the hands of their often much-older husbands. Early pregnancy puts girls at a higher risk for complications and death during childbirth, according to nonprofitGirls Not Brides.
By documenting Nasoin's wedding, Joyce hopes to raise awareness and push for change."Photography is a universal language and an incredibly powerful tool to affect change. It's one thing to read the statistics and know that things like child marriage are happening somewhere in the world, but seeing the frightened face of a child on her wedding day, personally that's what moves me, and I think most people, the most," Joyce said. Ahead, Joyce shares her powerful photographs with Refinery29. 
Editor's note: Captions were provided by Joyce and have been edited for length and clarity. 

On her wedding day, August 20, 2015, 15-year-old Nasoin looks out of a dressing room at a beauty parlour in Manikganj, Bangladesh.

Nasoin stands in the doorway of a neighbour's home on the day of her wedding. While poverty is often the reason families marry off their girls, Joyce said she was surprised that
"[the bride's] father is a very wealthy man, with multiple two-story houses. Hundreds of chickens and cows were slaughtered for the wedding dinner, and thousands of guests were invited."

Nasoin is bathed on her wedding day.

Nasoin has her makeup done before her wedding ceremony.

Nasoin poses for a photo after her makeup is done.

Nasoin has her wedding sari wrapped around her.

Nasoin sits with relatives while posing for photos on her wedding day.

She is consoled by a friend.

She poses for video of her wedding day.

The groom, 32-year-old Mohammad Hasamur Rahman, arrives to the wedding venue on the day that he will marry 15-year-old Nasoin.

Mohammad poses for photographs with his new bride.

Rahman stands on a bed above his young bride.

Wedding guests dance and celebrate at Mohammad and Nasoin's wedding.

After the wedding, Nasoin is led by relatives to a car that will take her to her new home.

For more information on how to help end child marriage around the world, visit nonprofit organisations Girls Not Brides and Too Young To Wed

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Surprising Ways to Show Your Love

5 Surprising Ways to Show Your Love

Want to let someone know they're loved? Try using actions, rather than words. "Love is an action verb," says Jamie Comstock, a professor of communication at Butler University in Indianapolis. "To really feel the love, the other person has to sense the message in nonverbal ways."

Here are five surprising things to know about gestures that say, "I love you" -- words optional.

1. Small weekly gifts "count" more than rare, splashy ones.

The underlying love message: "I'm committed to you."

Saving up for those pricey Valentine's roses and jewelry in a velvet box? Think twice, if it means you can't afford smaller tokens of affection the rest of the year. That's not to say flowers and jewels aren't welcome or good gifts. But grand gestures shouldn't usurp more frequent demonstrations of your love.

Frequent contact is one of the best signs of commitment, according to Comstock. "Your mom will appreciate a large box of candy on Valentine's Day, but if she doesn't hear from you again until Mother's Day, she won't sense the love in the gesture," Comstock says.

Those small gestures don't have to be store-bought tokens; they can take the form of a daily catch-up with a traveling lover, the everyday loving gestures you show a spouse -- making the bed first, bringing him coffee, scraping ice from her car in the morning -- or a weekly call to your aging parents.

2. Frequent touching speaks louder than words.

The underlying love message: "We're connected."

Whether you're hugging your dad or caressing a lover, touch telegraphs affection faster than words do. Thank your brain and your skin's abundant nerve endings for why touch feels so nice. The emotional brain "gets" touch communication more immediately than it understands words, which have to be processed first through the speech centers, says David Givens, director of the Center for Nonverbal Studies in Spokane, Washington, and author of Love Signals.

"If seeing is believing, touching is knowing," he says.

Touch comes naturally to couples falling in love but notoriously fades over time. Older adults tend to respond especially strongly to touch as a signal of love because they're often "touch deprived," says Comstock.

Counter that trend with a daily intentional hug, a shoulder squeeze, letting your knees touch as you sit opposite each other. See 9 Wordless Ways Someone Says, "I Love You".

3. Doing slightly complicated things for your loved one brings you closer.

The underlying love message: "I'm willing to put forth special effort for you."

"The more effort you put into a gesture of love, the more the recipient feels the love," Comstock says. A perception that you've gone the extra mile decreases the psychological distance between the two of you. So, for example, leaving a treasure hunt of post-it notes bearing hearts registers higher on the "you love me!" scale than a rote "I love you" verbally tacked onto the end of every phone conversation.

More examples: A carefully planned getaway weekend or scanning a lifetime of old prints into digital images. Just make sure the gesture involves planning and forethought on your part -- and that the recipient knows it wasn't contracted out to a third party (executive assistant, travel agent) to arrange.

How corny these efforts are depends on your taste and their execution. But what they have in common: a lover's effort.

4. Activities that "mirror" reinforce a common courtship behavior.

The underlying love message: "We're so in synch."

Go dancing. Take a walk together. The operative word is together. As you take a walk with a companion, for example, you tend to fall into step with each other, matching your strides, going in the same direction, seeing the same things en route. Dancing requires an even more closely matched echoing of your behaviors.

We unconsciously imitate each other when we feel close, which reinforces further closeness. Couples do this unconsciously all the time: Watch a pair who are flirting. Social scientists call this "synchrony" -- simultaneous action "“ when members of a social pair match their behaviors. "It's a strong way of being alike," Givens says.

Those who want to express love that's sure to be felt can borrow a page from the same playbook and mirror their behaviors in intentional ways.

"The more alike you are, the more you like each other," Givens says.

5. Nothing thrills like a little inside knowledge.

The underlying love message: "I know you and feel close to you."

A new shirt is nice. One that's monogrammed (for a recipient who likes them) is even better. But best of all, if you're trying to convey, "I love you": a gift that reflects that you're paying attention to the relationship.

That can mean something you made yourself just for the person, or something that reflects an inside joke or insider knowledge about the person's passions and preferences. How much you spend isn't the point here; it's how much you spend emotionally. So winning choices might include a handmade card, a CD of handpicked tunes, a framed photo of the two of you, an item that you observed the recipient coveting or needing months ago, or a scrapbook looking back on a long marriage or celebrating an older parent's life.

"The most valued gifts to a receiver are those the person knows are just for him or her," Comstock says. "If I'm debating whether to buy my dad a shirt or make him a batch of chocolate chip cookies to show my love for him, the cookies send a stronger message because I know they're his favorite thing -- and he knows I know this and did it for him. He could buy his own shirt.

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How to Know If You Talk Too Much

You may have heard the saying, “When you’re in love, smoke gets in your eyes.” Well when you’re talking, smoke gets in your eyes and ears. Once you’re on a roll, it’s very easy to not notice that you’ve worn out your welcome. You may not even realize that the other person is politely trying to get a word in, or subtly signaling that they need to be elsewhere (possibly, anywhere else if you have been really boring).

There are three stages of speaking to other people. In the first stage, you’re on task, relevant and concise.  But then you unconsciously discover that the more you talk, the more you feel relief.  Ahh, so wonderful and tension-relieving for you… but not so much fun for the receiver. This is the second stage – when it feels so good to talk, you don’t even notice the other person is not listening.

The third stage occurs after you have lost track of what you were saying and begin to realize you might need to reel the other person back in.  If during the third stage of this monologue poorly disguised as a conversation you unconsciously sense that the other person is getting a bit fidgety, guess what happens then?

Unfortunately, rather than finding a way to reengage your innocent victim through having them talk and then listening to them, instead the usual impulse is to talk even more in an effort to regain their interest.

Why does this happen? First, the very simple reason that all human beings have a hunger to be listened to. But second, because the process of talking about ourselves releases dopamine, the pleasure hormone.  One of the reasons gabby people keep gabbing is because they become addicted to that pleasure.

Not long after my book, Just Listen, came out, I too succumbed to ignoring signs that I had started to annoy my friend and fellow coach, Marty Nemko,
 host of a radio show about work on KALW, NPR’s San Francisco affiliate. He and I have been coaching each other for some time.  He hit a nerve when he told me, “Mark, for an expert on listening, you need to talk less and listen more.”

After I recovered from the embarrassment, he pointed out a nifty strategy that I have been using. It’s helping me and it might help 
you. Nemko calls it the Traffic Light Rule. He says it works better when talking with most people, especially with Type A personalities, who tend to be less patient.

In the first 20 seconds of talking, your light is green: your listener is liking you, as long as your statement is relevant to the conversation and hopefully in service of the other person. But unless you are an extremely gifted raconteur, people who talk for more than roughly half minute at a time are boring and often perceived as too chatty. So the light turns yellow for the next 20 seconds— now the risk is increasing that the other person is beginning to lose interest or think you’re long-winded. At the 40-second mark, your light is red. Yes, there’s an occasional time you want to run that red light and keep talking, but the vast majority of the time, you’d better stop or you’re in danger.

Nemko says that following the Traffic Light Rule is just the first step in keeping you from talking too much. It’s also important to determine your underlying motivation for talking 
so much. Is it that it just feels good to go on and
 on and get more stuff off your chest? Do you talk to clarify your thinking? Or do you talk because you often have to listen to other people, and when you’ve found someone who will let you have the microphone you just can’t help yourself?

Whatever the cause, filibustering is usually a conversational turn-off, and may result in both of you deteriorating into alternating monologues. And that certainly will do little to move the conversation or your relationship forward.

One reason some people are long-winded is because they’re trying to impress their conversational counterpart with how smart they are, often because they don’t actually feel that way underneath. If this is the case for you, realize that continuing to talk will only cause the other person to be less impressed.

Of course, some people who talk too much simply “may not have a sense of the passage of time,” Nemko says. If this is the case, the cure is not to look inside yourself for psychological insight. It’s just to develop a better internal sense of how long 20 and 40 seconds are. Start to use a watch to catch yourself, for example, when on the phone. You’ll get in the habit of stopping an utterance when your light is still green, or at least yellow.

Finally, remember that even 20 seconds of talking can be a turn off if you don’t include the other person in the conversation. To avoid that, ask questions, try to build on what they say, and look for ways to include them in the conversation so it is a genuine dialogue instead of a diatribe.

Well I think my 40 seconds is up, so I’ll stop here.

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Why Do I Have To Sit At The Back?

The Four Generations In One Car

We have a situation one day, as we were heading to a birthday party. We decided to take my SUV since there is enough room for all of us. My son will be driving and so my daughter-in-law will be in the front seat with her husband driving. The rest of us will be crammed at the back. There are six of us, me the Great grandmother, a new couple - my son and his wife, and a family of three, my granddaughter, her daughter who's 11 and a baby. I sat behind my daughter and in the middle is the baby in her car seat. Car seat nowadays are huge, enough room for an adult person to occupy. This is how we were seated, Me, baby and my granddaughter, Ana, on the same row.  The last row is where my great-granddaughter sits, all by herself, being the youngest. Well, she is not the youngest but because infants need to be safe; she ends up at the last row and the four generations in one car rolls to head to the party.  It was my cousin's birthday and whole family was there. From great grandparents to great granddaughters, you think it would be chaotic? It was and we had so much fun!

 Having four generations in one place is the best thing in the world. For a moment, I sit in a corner and watch everyone, as if watching TV for the first time; everyone has a smile on their face. The oldest and the youngest are all there, their age doesn't seem to matter. We really love parties like this because we get to know our families from the youngest to the oldest. The cake was also worth its significance, indulging our sweet tooth and there was enough for everybody. The food was fantastic and it was flowing like water or rather mud, almost dry and heavy from Enchiladas, Burrito, Arroz Caldo, and so on, it's like a mud slide but tasty without the gooey mud color. It was festive and colorful with all the flowers adorned. There was just so much food I pigged out! I should not but with all the wonderful things around me, I have no urge to resist temptation today and so I indulge to the best I can. The kids had fun with some games that the host family planned out. And there was no crying at all except for the baby which was not really happy to hear so much noise around, it's hard to sleep without being awaken by the loud laughing and screaming of the older children. The baby would drift into sleep and startled suddenly by the screaming during the game, the baby starts to fuss and cry. We solved that by putting the baby inside the room with a monitor and let the baby sleep while we continue the fun. Am sure, the baby won't miss any of that as sleep is more important at the moment.

When it was time to say goodbye, we hang out by the door, unable to just leave. It was hard but we have to leave for it will take us an hour to get to our destination. Everybody has something to bring home, there's too much extra food we'll help them eat and clean the house too, I mean the party. It was a grad day to remember.

When I was heading to the SUV I noticed that my great granddaughter was sitting in the front seat, busy with her iPod. She seems to be so Okay that she seems ready to go home. So I went to where I was sitting when we were coming and the rest goes on the second row me the baby and my granddaughter. Now, my son was already in the driver side but my daughter was still inside the host family's house. So we waited and waited until she came out of the house. Then realize; that somebody was sitting in her seat. So I said now where is Maria going to sit? I say it loud to get my great granddaughter's attention but she didn't even budge. She was so busy with her iPod that she couldn't even hear us talking about the seat. Nobody said a word to her as I waited for any reaction. I waited and waited; hoping somebody would tell her to go back to her seat. It did not happened! I decided to speak up. Ana, you might want to go back to your seat at the back so your mom can sit in the front seat. And she blurted out right there why do I have to sit at the back all the time?

I began to wonder if she heard me earlier but didn't want to give up the front seat. I was shocked but everybody agreed to silence, nobody said a word I waited again. I waited if somebody would speak up. I was hoping to hear from her mother, yet deafening silence is all I hear.

As I was the oldest in the company, I decided to tell her in a calmly manner: Since you are the smallest, that place is perfect for you.

And I waited again,  if she would move and go back to her spot. Well, she did but with a pouty mouth. So we went home in silence and I was thinking how in the world did that happen?

It is time to have a talk with everyone. From my understanding, everybody was sympathetic to her having lost her dad. Yes, she lost her dad and it was heartbreaking for a child. I understand that. But that doesn't change the fact that she has a mother, grandmother, uncle, aunts, cousin and all the relatives in her life. She needs to learn to know her place. As a child, she needs to understand that losing a father is not losing her life. Yes, a part is lost but a part is still there - her mom.

We had a talk after we got home. I invited them inside my house and sit down to chat about it. We agreed from now on, we keep her dad alive in us so she won't miss him that much. We told her about how we miss her dad too but there is always tomorrow to look forward and someday, the pain of losing someone you love will eventually be an instrument to be a better person for the love of someone you lost.

I am relieved after the talk for she came forward and gave me a hug. As she hugged me tight, she said: Grandma, you are right. I still have daddy in me. See, I look like him. Thank you for your love. 

Generation Gap

One evening a son was talking to his father about current events. He asked what he thought about the shootings at schools, the computer age and just things in general. 

The dad replied,” Well, let me think a minute…I was born before television, penicillin, polio shots, frozen foods, Xerox, contact lenses, Frisbees and the pill. There was no radar, credit cards, laser beams or ball point pens. Man had not invented pantyhose, dishwasher, clothes dryers, (clothes were hung out to dry in the fresh air) electric blankets, air conditioners, and he hadn’t walked on the moon.

Your mom and I got married first – and then lived together. Every family has a father and a mother and every boy over 14 had a rifle that his dad taught him how to use with respect. And they went hunting and fishing together. Until I was 25, I called every man older than I , “Sir” – and after I turned 25, I still call the policemen and every man with a title “ Sir”. 

Sundays were set aside for going to church as a family; helping those who are in need, and visiting with family and neighbors (I miss that most). We were before computer-dating, dual careers, daycare centers and group therapy. Our lives were governed by the Ten Commandments, good judgment and common sense. We were taught to know the difference between right and wrong and to stand up and take responsibility of our actions. Serving your country was a privilege, living here was a bigger privilege. 

We thought fast food was what people ate during lent. Having a meaningful relationship meant getting along with your cousins. Draft dodgers were people who closed their front doors when the evening breeze started. Time sharing meant time the family spent together in the evenings and weekends – not purchasing condominiums. We never heard of FM radios, tape decks, CD’s, electric typewriters, yogurt, or guys wearing earrings. We listened to the Big Bands, Jack Benny, and the Presidents speeches in our radio. And I don’t ever remember any kid blowing his brains out listening to Tommy Dorsey. 

If you saw anything with “Made in Japan” on it, it was junk. The term “making out” referred to how you did on your exam. Pizza Hut, McDonald’s, and instant coffee were unheard of. We had 5 & 10 cent stores where you could actually buy things for 5 and 10 cents. Ice cream cones, phone calls, rides on a streetcar, and a pepsi were all a nickel. And if you didn't want to splurge, you could spend your nickel on enough stamps to mail 1 letter and 2 postcards. You could buy a new Chevy Coupe for $600, but who could afford one? Too bad because gas was 1 cents a gallon. 

In my day, “grass” was mowed, “coke” was a cold drink, “pot” was something mother cooked in and “rock music” was your grandmother’s lullaby. “Aids” were helpers in the Principals office, “chip” meant a piece of wood, “hardware” was found in the hardware store, and “software” wasn’t even a word. And we were the last generation to actually believe that a lady needed a husband to have a baby. No wonder people call us “old and confused” and say there is a generation gap. And I am only 55 years old….

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The fruit of SILENCE is Prayer 

The fruit of PRAYER is Faith 

The fruit of FAITH is Love 

The fruit of LOVE is Service 

The fruit of SERVICE is Peace