You bring up a good point. You state that you would have no objection to marrying a divorced woman but that your parents would object. How does one overcome familial objection?

In the States noone really blinks an eye when a man or woman marries someone who has been divorced and/or also has children. They become a new extended family together.

Its very shameful that men just ignore to marry a divorced with or without kids,
i do agree its their personal choice,
i m divorced. My marriage life hardly lasted. im willing to give life to someone who is divorced with kid. But my family has a different point of view. Is giving life to sumone divorced or seperated not sunnah?

And I hope work eases up for you! You and your comments have been missed!

I think it’s very hard to make any sort of generalizations regarding divorced women in Saudi Arabia…it’s different from city to city and it is extremely different from family to family…

I have a divorced aunt (whom I beleive has become very famous in this blog:) )..she has been divorced 5 times from 5 different men…lives alone now..supports herself financially…has a free and good socail life…

A cousin of mine was divorced when she was in her early thirties..she has two kids…recently she got married to a really fine man who has two kids also…

Another cousin married three times with no kids…luckily she married a great man with two kids (whose mothers dumped them)..now she is raising her kids and her husband’s kids…a very large family to take care of indeed…..

such stories are endless in my family…many of our girls have married at least twice in their lives…and it is hard at first, but a better rational choice in the second marraige makes it up for them…

I think it depends on the family and the woman’s personality and education….

Regarding the custody of children, it depends on the sex of the children and their age…
My brother divorced his wife….she got the custody because the children are boys under 7…after they become 7 years old, they are asked to make a choice between their mother or father…The court has made a fixed schedule for them to be with their father; that is from Wed. to Fri, and they spend the rest of the week with their mother…and my brother was ordered by the court to specify a monthly payment for his kids plus their medication and their other needs…
All these dicisions were made by the court in less than four months…I really wonder why people suffer when they get divorced..in my brother’s case everything was smooth regarding the arrangments…however, his ex wife is still giving him a hard time..but that’s another story..and that’s a type of Saudi women I bet you’ve never heard of

http://americanbedu.com/2008/05/15/divorce-in-ksa-who-gets-custody/

And in regards to your comment, I think there are a percentage of Saudi woman who prefer not to marry and are content with their lives. Saudi ladies — I need your input on this one as I’m only commenting here from observations as a non-Saudi!

I do think that it is gross when a much older man is looking for a much younger woman, unless the man is terrifically accomplished, but I don’t find it strange that as a woman ages or gets more children her chances at the marriage of her first choice diminish. We all have packages, age and children are certainly part of one. Women have their requirements too, and sometimes they are grossly unrealistic.

I have a Saudi sister-in-law. This is her package: she’s 42, never married, university degree but not career-oriented, has a job of some sort, has a little of her own money, lived with parents all her life, cute but not stunning. I don’t find it odd that men who propose to her are either forty- to fiftysomething widowers with children or already married. She turns them all away because they are not good enough for her. My thinking: Why would a young, never-married, childless, successful guy look for someone like her? Their packages are simply mismatched. If you accidentally meet and fall in love, fine, but that’s not how things work around there. As she ages out of childbearing years, her proposals will become even less advantageous. Of course, perhaps she simply does not want to marry, and that’s cool too.