You May Now Kiss the Computer Screen

Normally one of the most intimate moments two people can share, the marriage had taken place from opposite ends of the globe over the video chat program Skype, with Ms. Chowdhury, an American citizen, in a mosque in Jackson Heights, Queens, and her new husband, Tanvir Ahmmed, in his living room with a Shariah judge in his native Bangladesh.

Their courtship, like so many others, had taken place almost entirely over the Internet — they had met in person only once, years earlier, in passing. But in a twist that underscores technology’s ability to upend traditional notions about romance, people are not just finding their match online, but also saying “I do” there.

These are called proxy marriages, a legal arrangement that allows a couple to wed even in the absence of one or both spouses. They date back centuries: one of the most famous examples was between Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, who were first married in her native Austria in his absence, before she was shipped to meet him in France. Proxy marriages via telegraph have also been documented.

The procedure had been used infrequently in the United States, usually by deployed members of the military worried about being killed and leaving loved ones without benefits. But it is increasingly being used in immigrant communities, where people are seeking to marry partners from their homelands without the expense of matchmaking trips abroad.

Such convenience has also raised concerns that it will facilitate marriage fraud — already a challenge for immigration authorities — as well as make it easier to ensnare vulnerable women in trafficking networks.

The practice is so new that some immigration authorities said they were unaware it was even happening and did not typically provide extra scrutiny to ensure these types of marriages were not misused to secure citizenship. But even those who conduct or arrange these ceremonies have expressed reservations as the practice has grown more widespread.

The imam Mohd A. Qayyoom, who runs the New York Qazi Office in Jackson Heights and officiated Ms. Chowdhury’s wedding in February, said he had turned away people seeking to marry cousins in Southeast Asia in order to get them to the United States. Mazeda A. Uddin, a community activist from Queens, who often plays matchmaker, said she stopped organizing proxy weddings after witnessing people being married and left brokenhearted by unscrupulous foreigners seeking a green card, not a life partner.

“Part of the reason for having the two people come and appear before a priest or a judge is to make sure it is a freely chosen thing,” said Adam Candeub, a professor at Michigan State University College of Law who has studied proxy marriage. “There are some problems with willy-nilly allowing anyone around the world to marry.”

Technically, the Chowdhury-Ahmmed marriage “took place” in Bangladesh, where it was legally registered, not New York, where the practice is not allowed. Only a few states permit proxy marriages, and most require one partner to be in the military. But the United States generally recognizes foreign marriages as long as they are legally conducted abroad and do not break any laws here.

George Andrews, the operations manager for Proxy Marriage Now, a company in Fayetteville, N.C., that facilitates such unions worldwide for a fee, said technology, like Skype, was driving the growth of proxy marriages. In the seven years the company has been in existence, business has increased by 12 percent to 15 percent annually to between 400 and 500 weddings a year. The share not involving someone in the military has grown to 40 percent.

Some of those couples are trying to circumvent restrictive local laws, like those in Israel and other countries, which recognize mixed-religion marriages but will not perform them, he said. Others who live in different countries seek marriage to pave the way to be together, a first step to attaining a visa or citizenship for a spouse, he said. Couples usually dial in to a ceremony in El Salvador, which has comparatively little red tape surrounding the process.

All people applying for American citizenship through marriage must first be interviewed by officials from the Homeland Security or State Department who are charged with rooting out fraud. Officials said that if the spouses were to explain they had been married thousands of miles apart over the Internet, it would quite likely raise a red flag.

And yet, while the agencies ask interviewees for details of their wedding during the immigration interviews, they do not specifically inquire whether it occurred by proxy.

Archi Pyati, the deputy director of the Immigration Intervention Project at the Sanctuary for Families, an organization that helps battered women, said the center frequently saw ways in which proxy marriage was abused. Some cases involve women, many from West Africa, who were married by proxy without their consent, or as children.

Other cases have involved proxy marriage used to bring women into the country who then find themselves pressed into sex work by traffickers.

The practice of proxy marriage is particularly widespread in Islamic countries where the Koran has long been interpreted to explicitly endorse it.

“After all these advancements in technology and all kinds of telecommunication tools, scholars came to the conclusion that it is acceptable,” said the imam Shamsi Ali, of the Jamaica Muslim Center in Queens.

“Skype is making it easier,” he added. “These days you have Google Hangout, too.”

There are those who oppose the practice for traditional reasons.

“It seems strange; I just feel like a wedding begins your new life together, not apart,” said Angela Troia, who owns the Wedding Company, a shop in Manhasset, N.Y., on Long Island, that sells invitations and offers planning guidance for many Queens couples. “I think it takes away from the meaning of it.”

But for Ms. Chowdhury, 21, and Mr. Ahmmed, 31, the giggling pair pretending to feed each other wedding dessert by holding forkfuls of cake to their computer screens that day, it felt full of the gravity of any other wedding. Ms. Chowdhury noted that her aunt had married similarly, long before the Internet age — by telephone.

Peering from the screen of a laptop, Mr. Ahmmed agreed. “This is my lawful wife,” he said.

At the last word, his bride squealed with joy.

Why Working In The Office Is Bad For You by Ann Brenoff

Posted: 03/06/2013 6:56 am

It’s a safe bet that nobody has ever quit a job because the boss stopped providing free Gatorade. But as Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is quickly learning, there are some benefits — like flex time and the ability to work from home — that are just a little harder to mess with.

It’s hard to overstate the value of being able to work at home on a day when the cable guy is coming sometime between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. or when your kid is home from school with a fever. Flexibility is one of the things employees regularly say is important to them.

I’d add another item to that list of important things: Being able to have a life outside your job and a boss who understands that need.

Years ago, I had a boss who insisted I take the day off when I had to put my 15-year-old dog to sleep. My boss’ act of kindness allowed me to grieve in peace and relieved my stress over missing work for a reason that a non-dog owner might not get. It translated into a mountain of gratitude for her kindness and for years after, I never said no to anything she ever asked of me. The bosses who get that you have a life outside the office are the bosses we love the most and work the hardest to please.

The operative words in that sentence? A life outside the office. Somewhere in the digital age and the recession, the idea that we have families and kids and friends who we’d like to see outside the office got lost if not deeply watered down. And now, in the heat of Marissa Mayer giving a rousing “let them eat cake” display, along comes several academics with what I think is a very plausible explanation why: Blame it on the free Gatorade.

Yes, for real. Call it the new downside of the free lunch. (Free lunches, by the way, were kind of Ground Zero for the New Workplace Order. Once free food came delivered to our desks or the cafeteria was subsidized, we quit having a reason to step outside in the noonday sun.)

Some new research has shown that all those cool benefits — originally intended to lure and keep workers — have blurred the boundary between work and personal life and contributed to a stress-inducing environment for those they were intended to woo. Those work freebies become “psychologically problematic,” said Nancy Rothbard, an associate professor of management at Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, when they encourage employees to make “their work life their entire life.” And that’s what’s happening, she said.

By providing free yoga and aerobics classes, in-place swimming pools, employee lounges with pool tables, dart boards and ping-pong and on-site hair and nail salons, offices have been turned into corporate cocoons. Everything is made so convenient, and it’s so much fun to be there, that you never want to leave.

And that’s precisely the problem with the perks, believes David Lewin, professor of management at UCLA Anderson School of Management: “Employees stay on the work campus for 12 to 18 hours a day — and even if they are only working 10 of those hours — the company is still coming out ahead.” And here you thought they gave you Gatorade because of your awesomeness, right?

It gets even dicier. The operative word in Lewin’s sentence is “campus.” Most of these boutique perks target young workers, especially those for whom college was a recent experience and who don’t have spouses or children. For them, it’s the perfect job — and great fun to be creating, building, all hanging out together in an office with a lot of flexibility and the freedom to do pretty much anything except maybe leave at 6 p.m.

But once these workers want to start a family, things apparently can go to hell in a handbasket pretty quickly. Rushing home to take care of kids just doesn’t fit in the work culture where everyone else on the team is staying late and being available at all hours.

Lewin said that a team dynamic kicks in when one team member starts to disengage from the bee hive: Others who are still staying at the office for long hours and remaining connected 24/7 resent the employee who is no longer always available. It’s peer pressure, not any company rules, that keep workers in the go-go mode, said Lewin. And yes, that’s where the stress comes in.

It’s no surprise what happens to these workers: They burn out and/or they leave, and the company has to hire and train someone else to do their job — not an inexpensive proposition.

But what’s most remarkable of all is the research that says having workers stay late isn’t just unhealthy for the workers, it’s also not such a great thing for the company either. A Harvard Business school professor and researcher found that all those extra hours spent connected to the office don’t actually improve worker productivity. Rather it’s the opposite. Worker productivity actually improves if the worker is allowed to have a life outside the office, found Leslie Perlow, author of Sleeping With Your Smartphone: How to Break the 24/7 Habit and Change the Way You Work. Perlow says we are trapped in a “cycle of responsiveness where we believe that every email, every text, must be answered at that very moment. That doesn’t prioritize the work but rather treats everything with equal weight and importance.

When teams of workers agreed to disconnect during certain hours, Perlow found, they were not only more satisfied with their jobs and more likely to want to stay working there, but the company’s clients reported that nothing fell through the cracks.

So are the boutique perks the new evil? We asked a guy who advises large- and medium-size companies on what non-financial perks resonate the loudest with workers. Easy-peasy, said Tom McMullen, head of the Hay Group’s North American Reward Practice unit. Three-month paid sabbaticals after seven years on the job are the new gold standard of employment perks.

You got me, and you can keep the Gatorade.