The exciting thing about having gone to Jordan, as opposed to, say, and East African or Central Asian country, is that the ordinary American tends to be quite curious, or at least emotionally involved in some way, with what’s going on in and around Jordan. Jordan sits between the Palestinian Territories to the West, Syria to the North and Iraq to the East, and almost touches Egypt and Lebanon, all of which are in the news on a regular basis. Americans tend to know just enough about the region to have good questions, but not enough to be able to anticipate the answers, and it’s easy to surprise people with the answers.

For example, people often ask me about the Muslim practice of taking multiple wives, and how that works itself out in practice. At first, the practice disturbed me, but then I started listening to the language people used to speak about polygamous families. An English teacher I knew was the son of such a family. He spoke of “my mother,” “my brother,” and “my sister,” in reference to full relatives, but of “my father’s wife,” “my father’s son,” and “my father’s daughter,” when speaking of his father’s second family. It occured to me that this is the same language we Americans use to refer to the family of a parent who has divorced and re-married.

 As I began to cast Arab polygamy in the light of an alternative to divorce, I began to see it in a new, more positive way. In our American culture, when a man has his mid-life crisis, he may divorce his wife and marry a younger woman. In Arab culture, he skips right over the divorce and just marries a younger woman, and in many ways, I see it as at least as good an option, if not better. Though divorce is possible in Islamic and Jordanian law, it is a severe shame to all parties involved, and like in American divorces, it begins a long process of limbo for the wife and children, financially and in terms of their relationships with their parents. In polygamy, however, there is no shame and far less limbo. By Islamic law, a man who takes a second wife is equally responsible for both wives and all their children. Financially, socially, and in all other ways, he must treat them equally. Each wife should have her own home, furnished to the same standards, and he must split his time evenly among them. The children, also, he must treat and provide for equally.

For the children, I think, it’s almost a better arrangement than divorce. They still see their father on a regular basis, and he is still a very real part of their lives. They tend to treat their half-siblings in the same way as their full siblings, are very involved in each others’ lives, and don’t seem to have the jealousy issues that many children of divorce have of their parent’s other family.

 As I listened to the women speak amongst themselves about polygamy, I realized that it is better for the first wife, as well. Especially in rural Jordan, women have children as often as one a year, but when a man takes a second wife, this often means that the first wife can stop having babies! It can be a real relief. And some women said to me, perhaps half in jest, “My husband is the best man I know. You should marry him, no other man would take care of you like he would.”

I knew a number of girls who became second wives, and while I, as a single woman, couldn’t exactly ask about these things, I could imagine their reasons. Young men marrying for the first time may never have had a real conversation with a girl other than their sisters, but a man who already has a wife is familiar with how to interact with a woman, and it would seem he likes being married.

 I also heard a story from another Volunteer about a woman in her village who, after many years of marriage, was still unable to conceive a child. She and her husband had been to fertility clinics, and were told that the husband was biologically able to father children, it was the wife who was not able to become pregnant. Together, they found for him a second wife, a younger woman who would be able to conceive and bear the children they wanted, but who would have the help of the older wife to raise those children, to tend the household, and for company. It can be very lonely to be a new wife in Jordan, because a woman is often leaving her father’s house for the first time, and usually moving to her husband’s village, where she probably doesn’t know anyone, and is an outsider, at least initially. If the husband has a sympathetic first wife, it eases the transition.