The problem with wanting to get married.

Ooooooooohhhhhhh. Where do I start? With the bloke? With my parents? With me? With everyone else?

I’ll start with me. I guess I’m what everyone calls a hopeless romantic. I truly believe that there is someone out there for me, that Allah knows who he his and will guide us together at the right time. I trust in Allah to show me who the right person is, and to make it easy for me when it is the right person. I trust Him 100% in this. I’m not going to lie, there are a lot of things where I should trust Allah more, but marriage is not one of them, for two reasons:

1) I went on Hajj when I was 18 and one of the things I prayed for really hard was a good, righteous husband who would be the joy of my life and I the joy of his. I have asked, the answer comes from Allah.
2) There really isn’t anything I can do about it. It really is in the hands of Allah. There is NOTHING I can do that will directly make a difference to my getting married to the right person.

Ok, so in all honesty, that last one’s not entirely true. I could improve myself. I mean, really, right now, I wouldn’t want to marry me. I’m a mess. I need to get my act together, especially in Islamic terms. I need to bring myself closer to Allah. But then that’s something I need to do regardless of whether or not I want to get married.

The next problem is my parents. I’ve always assumed – and you know what they say: to assume is to make an ass out of u and me – that my parents and I are on the same page with regards to this. We’re not. My mum and I are in the same chapter, but I’m not sure my dad’s even in the same book! We need to talk. I need to know that I have their 100% support in whatever decision I make… whether they like or agree with my decision or not.

The bloke isn’t really a problem… I’m just leaving him to the All-Wise. I’m human and I can’t worry about something I have zero control over. Done.

Everybody else, however, is a problem. An entire post of a problem, but basically it can be summed up in one word: pressure. Having been engaged for six months before, I know what I’m talking about. People have no idea of how the Islamic marriage system works (it’s way more complicated than the western single-meet someone-date-get engaged-married system) and so you say ‘engaged’ they think ‘wedding’ and ‘ooh lets re-enact the Spanish Inquisition and ask a gazillion questions’. ‘Engaged’, to them, means you know exactly what you’re doing, you’re madly in love and all you can think of is the guy, wedding stuff and living happily ever after. It doesn’t. BELIEVE me, it doesn’t.

Hence I no longer want to use the word ‘engaged’. It’s misleading. So, consulting my thesaurus, I’ve decided to change the word, for Islamic purposes of course, either to: ‘unavailable’, or to: ‘reserved’.

Hopefully, I’ll get around to explaining the Islamic marriage system soon. I just have to start writing…

P.S. This is not an entirely new thing in my life - my concentration on it since I've finally finished uni is what's new. However, the reason that I haven’t written about this before and why I won’t be writing about all about my experiences in this journey is that it's intensely personal and involves discussing things that I feel that I can only talk about if I’m not being judged. And this is neither the format nor the place for that.