This essay is the first instalment in our February Healthy Relationships Series
I grew up understanding what love should be and feel like. Romantic love, especially, was a beautiful thing to me. My parents were very affectionate with each other, and they made it clear with their actions and words that they loved each other. With each passing day, I looked forward to finding a love like that. I strived to make myself the type of person willing to be patient, loving, romantic, expressive, and all the other things I saw my parents display in the way they expressed their love.
I was fortunate to get married early, and I was ready to begin to do all that I had fantasized and imagined love to be like now that our relationship was halal. We loved each other to the point that everyone knew it and felt it when they were around us. I remember I would jokingly say that I would never be worried should my husband take another wife because I was sure the love we had for each other would still be solid. Even though we were battling infertility, not once did I doubt my husband’s love, devotion, or trust.
But then, something changed. My near-perfect husband began to snap about issues I couldn’t understand, and even if he was right there with me, something just felt different. I spoke to him about it, and he insisted it was all in my head. Months went by, and he finally dropped the bombshell: due to our situation, he had gone ahead and married another wife. And not just that, she had done what I couldn’t do – give him a child. In that one big swoop, my world crashed. Not because I was now sharing my husband with someone else, but because my husband, the one I trusted with my life, had been lying to me.
He had hidden a part of himself that greatly affected my life away from me. It hurt even more when I thought of the fact that one of his shining qualities, which made him a perfect husband for me, was that he was an honest person who never lied. Our relationship was one where I was always proud to say that we could talk through anything, but it felt like all I knew about my marriage and my husband was a lie. It hurt me so deeply, and I went on for weeks and months breaking down at intervals and wondering why my beautiful love story could become this.
I prayed and fasted a lot because I couldn’t handle the amount of pain I was in, and no matter what my friends, parents, and family said, I couldn’t get over it. It didn’t matter how many times my husband apologized or bought me a gift; I just couldn’t be pacified. I mean, I was never against him getting married; I only asked him to be honest with me, to talk to me, and let me be in the know. And yet, it was the one thing he didn’t do.
I am still coming to terms with all that went down, but one thing has become clearer as the weeks go by: I am certain, more than anything else, that one of the vital lessons Almighty Allah was trying to teach me was that I couldn’t trust creation more than the Creator. Because, knowingly or unknowingly, I had placed my husband too dangerously close to Almighty Allah, and I had all these high hopes and expectations of him that I had forgotten that he was human, too, and that he could be influenced, selfish, and prone to mistakes, misdeeds, and forgetfulness.
I am learning more and more to detach myself from humans and the world and place all of my trust in the Source and Creator of love Himself, Almighty Allah. I have no idea what I want to achieve with this piece, but I guess my one message to women who have wonderful spouses and have that dreamy relationship is to remember that our spouse is human, and at no point should love for them, no matter how perfect or wonderful they are in our eyes, trump the love we have for Almighty Allah. As He is the Source and all other kinds of love should be because of Him and flow through the guidelines He has laid for us.
