Marriage Tips for Muslim Women (and Men)

Image of a Muslim couple
Image of a Muslim couple

I love married people, really I do, I am surrounded by them on a daily basis in both my corporeal and virtual life. Some of them are my closest friends, I work with them even and I feel that my approach to married people is largely tolerant and caring, despite everything.

I am one of those people that Mr Amin choses to slight in his article, I am divorced and over 30 and therefore not fit for giving advice on marriage despite the fact I have been married and I am part of a family. You could say I am the polar opposite to Mr Amin; not only am I divorced and unashamedly not married I am also unmarriagble, something I regard as a bit of an achievement. As a married friend said to me recently, and it was meant kindly, finding someone who I could realistically marry would be a miracle. Since Islam is not big on miracles I am not holding my breath.

I am often bemused at married people and how they communicate their marriedness to others. Usually they just get on with it and don’t make a big deal out of it and certainly never attempt to involve you in it. But there are exceptions and Mr Amin is one of them.

Mr Amin is what is known as a smugly married. One of those blessed individuals for whom life has been a series of making the right decisions. For whom life has simply been knowing the right thing to do and when it is done knowing that the right outcome will be achieved. Life is reduced to a series of choices in a geography of opportunity or a slightly complex recipe, if followed correctly and performed perfectly will achieve the satisfactory outcome. This result is then presented to the world for us to either desire to imitate or for us lesser mortals such as myself, to remind us of our poor decision making and our failures.

“Not only am I divorced and unashamedly not married I am also unmarriagble, something I regard as a bit of an achievement.”

For many of us life has not been so simple, and I am aware that there will be many married people out there who also grind their teeth in frustration when presented with the smugly married, because there are a lot of unhappily married people out there who made the right decision and the right choices, who married a desirable commodity but who found they had married a human being with all their failings and imperfections and who found that life is complex regardless of what you do and that for many reasons things didn’t go according to plan.

There are also a lot of single people who know that their chances of marriage are hugely reduced or non-existent but we chose to never consider the fates of these individuals. Individuals who in Mr Amin’s capitalist marriage market do not constitute a desirable acquisition, such as women over 30, the disabled, people from the wrong type of family, the divorced obviously.

In Mr Amin’s world these are people who simply didn’t make the right choices.

The reality is that a happy marriage is an accident for which there is no explanation. As an observer and a great listener I am often amazed and delighted at the variety of ways in which people have found contentment with another human being, and how many people, even undesirable acquisitions have, despite the prejudice, also achieved this. Often it is the stories of these individuals that make for far more interesting and relevant reading.

“Divorce is a necessary release and is often the beginning of a far more positive and meaningful phase in a person’s life but again, this is something that is taboo to discuss in positive terms.”

Muslims should weary of the elevation of marriage to a state that it is only accessible by the economically and physically perfect that excludes and divides; it causes misery for those deemed not perfect enough to marry and misery for those who are married but find themselves suffering with that particular misery that can only be found in a relationship. Marriage can also ruin and cost people their lives. Divorce is a necessary release and is often the beginning of a far more positive and meaningful phase in a person’s life but again, this is something that is taboo to discuss in positive terms.

Mr Amin, what us elders should be talking about is how to have emotionally healthy loving relationships and also educating young people on what is unhealthy. We should be giving people the permission to know when a marriage is at an end and that divorce is not in fact the end of life. This would be far more productive and caring than creating the illusion that you can control all your outcomes and that people are simply commodities that are more or less valuable to be traded in.

By Mrs Rumiyya

Image courtesy of Cara_VSAngel on Flickr

Disclaimer: the opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the original author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the website.

2 thoughts on “Marriage Tips for Muslim Women (and Men)”

  1. No Muslim believes that life is entirely under his or her control. It is all subject to the will of God.

    However that does not absolve us of the responsibility to make choices that are as made as well as we are capable of making them. That was the entire theme of my article. One important contributor to success in life (however you wish to define success) is to accept responsibility for your decisions, as explained on my page http://www.mohammedamin.com/Success-tips/Accept-responsibility-for-your-decisions.html

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