My Family Abducted And Tricked Me Into A Forced Marriage

But at this point, Daria didn't know what was going on. She'd always had a loving relationship with her family in Pakistan. In fact, because Daria's mom was the first in her family to have children, they spoiled Daria accordingly.

"I had no indication that they would do something like this."

Looking back, Daria now, of course, realizes that the mistaken one-way ticket and what she thought was normal limited access to communication during a family trip was probably an orchestrated choice by her family (a common condition of those abducted to be married). See, her family in Pakistan had found such a "nice" guy for her. They had to take action.

Daria's family apparently doesn't spend enough time on the MRA subreddits, or else they'd know what "nice guy" really means.

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Here's a hint.

The "nice guy" they selected was a doctor from a well-off family. When Daria met him, she told him the marriage was not going to happen. He didn't care. The whole arrangement was fine by him. Daria believes he was eager for a chance to move to Canada. While no plans were totally solidified, her family did want her to stay in Pakistan with her "husband" until he was ready to immigrate.

"I told my mom -- and dad as well -- I'm not ready for this, I can't. I don't want to be married to this guy. And my mom fell really ill and all my relatives in Pakistan kinda played the guilt card, and I started feeling extremely guilty and responsible for my mom's sickness."

As for Daria, her family members took a more direct approach. Every day they would corner her in a room and berate her, "'Why don't you want to get married? You should get married! This guy is like the only person for you.'"

"I'd never been in a situation like that where I had to either leave or stay. I didn't know what to do."

Ultimately, Daria's family dragged her to a city five hours away to marry the "nice guy." The city, incidentally, had no Canadian embassy.

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Because setting up for a wedding is complicated enough without the bride running off to seek political asylum.

"It was actually a really crappy hotel. It was kinda creepy to be there with anybody, and it was really creepy to be there with him."

She was able to delay consummating the marriage thanks to her period. The third day, a big thank-you dinner was thrown by the groom's family.

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Which seems weird, because typically you thank a person for something they did on purpose.

"I was just devastated. I think what made it worse was all the salons I went to, to get ready, were so beautiful and everyone there was so happy and I just felt like ... I can't even explain it. It was the darkest feeling ever, I kept crying at the salon and they're like 'Oh, poor girl, she's gonna miss her parents once she gets married.' I was just in complete shock. And people were coming up to me and they're like, 'Oh, you know you look so beautiful,' this and that, and every time I heard that ... it was like somebody was ripping my heart out from the inside."

Daria spent the three days on autopilot, hoping for a miracle. She recalls thinking that maybe if she closed her eyes, she'd open them again and her actual boyfriend would be there instead of the "nice guy," or that if she looked sad enough, someone would recognize what was going on and help her.

"There were a lot of like safety risks, you couldn't -- as a single female -- just leave the compound and find your way home. It's not something that happens there, especially if you're a foreigner. There's risks of getting kidnapped and, you know, lots of things can happen ... and I didn't have a cell phone. Even if I did, I can't call an emergency service, things like that don't exist there."

"I didn't know what to do, or where to go. I had no money, I didn't have my passport. [A]t that point, if I- if I left, looking like that, with none of that stuff, I probably wouldn't even be alive. It's not like I would've been killed right away ... but I don't live there, I wouldn't have had a clue on where to go -- there's no shelters, there's nothing like that there."

You see, women asserting agency over their own bodies often ends poorly in Pakistan. Even in 2016, people still practice honor killing. Luckily, last October, Pakistan passed a bill to punish perpetrators of such acts. Last October!

The change of tune only came after the brother of a "social media star" murdered his sister because he disagreed with the types of pictures she posted online and believed women should lead "traditional" lives in the home.

Honor killings happen a lot in Pakistan (though it's hard to know exactly how frequently) as they often go undocumented. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan recorded 1,087 honor crimes against women since the first of this year. And according to a 2013 Pew Poll of Muslims, only 45 percent of those polled in Pakistan believe killings of women are never justifiable (despite the victim's "offense"). There may be no better illustration of this sentiment than a 2011 headline in The Atlantic: Refusing to Kill Daughter, Pakistani Family Defies Tradition, Draws Anger.

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Or, you know, read about the practice wherever.

"I would call him and just let him know, this is what's going on. And the day after I got married I called him and I'm like, 'Ya know, I think I'm gonna have to stay here now,' ... I didn't expect him to understand. [I] thought he was just gonna abandon me at that point as well, and he told me, 'Just get out of there, I just need you to come back home.' So he wired some money into Western Union the day that I was going to run away."

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"Any way we could also wire a passport, plane tickets, and a bodyguard, or is there an up-charge?"

Daria's father had arranged a stay in a resort town for the newlyweds. She told her husband she needed to get some clothing tailored for their trip. He drove her to the tailor and waited outside. Daria ditched him there, found a cab, and asked to be dropped at the Marriott. She checked in using the money she'd saved from the salons and told the manager about her situation. Turns out this was like a fire drill for them -- they had a procedure at the ready for this exact scenario. Throughout the course of her stay, Daria was not allowed to leave her room without a staff person escorting her. The hotel staff was strictly prohibited from disclosing her name to anyone who called. The front desk only transferred Daria's boyfriend's calls to her room; when her family called, they denied she was there.

What's the proper tip for a bellhop who doubles as the forced marriage underground railroad? 25 percent? That's crazy talk. But ... probably at least 18 percent.

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"Ten bucks per bag?! If I was that naive I wouldn't be fleeing the country right now."

"I didn't contact any of my family from that moment onwards because I was scared that if I contacted them they would know where I was and they would find some way to get to me and I would be taken back. So, I didn't contact them at all, I called my boyfriend from the Marriott and I told him, 'I'm here, I'm safe now.'"

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Or at least as safe as she was gonna get in a country where this kind of thing could actually get her murdered.

The Canadian embassy arranged a flight for Daria, but it was three days away. She realized she'd need more money, and went back to the Western Union ... where she learned that her family had bribed the staff into refusing her service.

"I had to leave there very quickly after I found this out. And I came back to the hotel, called the Canadian embassy, and spoke to the woman that I was in contact with and told her what happened. She then transferred me to another hotel (just in case they might have known where the hotel was, too) and got me on an earlier flight and told me that I can leave on the temporary passport and the Canadian Government would pay for the flight. If I wanted to travel anywhere again on my passport I would just have to pay them back before I was allowed to do that."

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Because if Canada was a person, it'd be an actual nice guy.

Daria boarded a flight back to Canada within 24 hours -- an escort from the embassy stayed by her side en route to the airport, all the way up until she boarded. Her boyfriend met her at the airport and drove her to her parents' house. She packed all her belongings and left. She moved into an apartment on her own and didn't speak to any of her family for a month-and-a-half.

"My parents have apologized to me multiple times. I mean actually until this year, I'd never told them about what happened with my ex-boyfriend. And their reasoning was always, 'You know you looked disturbed. We didn't know what was going on with you. We thought this would help you.' It took me a few years to get them to this point where they were like, 'OK. We understand that didn't help you, and that was wrong of us to think that that would help you.'"

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Typically, if your helpful plan requires a country with less stringent consent laws, it merits a rethink.

That's not a great apology -- or even really an apology at all -- but Daria is so, so much more understanding than we would ever be. "My parents had a pre-existing notion of what [life was] supposed to look like. So you know, 'Our kids are gonna get married at this age, married to a doctor, engineer.' And, 'Hopefully, our kids won't have any crises in the middle.' I wasn't doing all that stuff that they had in mind, according to the timeline they had in mind, so instead of talking to me and sorting through that (communication wasn't really a big thing for them for some reason) they just thought this was the next best option."

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Apparently, there's no life problem that a loveless, involuntary wedding can't fix right up.

Daria even finds a way to fault herself a bit in this whole scenario:

"I do think that communicating with them [her family] more openly and not being afraid of disappointing them would have been beneficial. They really started to get nervous about the future after I had shut them out and it sort of slowly spiraled downhill for many years. Things only started to pick back up once we started to openly communicate."

In the years since her abduction, Daria has mended relationships with her parents, and even some of her extended family in Pakistan. In fact, she recently returned from her first trip back there since her forced marriage. This trip was on her own terms: To buy stuff for her wedding. To the person of her choosing.

Also check out 5 Cultures With the Most WTF Wedding Rituals and 5 Reasons 'Traditional Marriage' Would Shock Your Ancestors.

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