Thursday, August 7, 2008

Torn...

I am torn...its been a few days since I spoke to Mr. Possibility and still I cannot get our conversation out of my head. I see him sign in and sign out, the whole while he is online playing the "message him, don't message him" game. Before you snicker and laugh at how teenie-bopperish this sounds, I am not a love-struck teenager, as a matter of fact I am in my mid-20s. I want so badly to talk to him and square away whatever confusion the both of us have, but at the same time, although I told him that night that I forgave him for everything that he did back in the day, I still have this huge question mark at the back of my mind. I am not sure if I can trust him anymore.

I know brother Salaam suggests that I speak to Mr. Possibility, but my friends think that I should just wait and see what happens and that if he truly cares to make things right, eventually he will contact me again. I would have to admit that since things have gone sour between the two of us over the years, he has been the one to contact me, so I almost feel as if I owe it to him for taking such a huge step. As you can see, I am confused! I am not necessarily sure if I want things between us to work out, but if they did it would be a good thing - provided we are compatible - as he was my friend, my support and the one that I would talk to when I was in need of a pair of ears to listen.

My best friend is on her honeymoon..I could sure use her advice at a time like this.

Anyways...I came across this link...check it out: The Marriage Revolution

1 comment:

Salaam said...

Salaam alaikum sister,

Imam Webb has another awesome post up about the issues with marriage in our community. I'm going to post some here because I think this is important information to circulate. In addition to what's below here, there's an important part of the article about how all parents are looking for is a doctor/lawyer/dentist and that's it. As the article author notes, "young men seriously studying journalism, education, and non-profit administration should have just as good of a chance of marrying from a respectable family as a medical student."

From his page:
Truly, Muslim men and women — especially those in the West — are missing opportunities to get to know one another in informal, yet religiously acceptable forums. With unplanned socializing out of the question, youth are scrambling for an alternative that will allow for careful interaction between genders. Often times, men and women are completely separated to the point where they find it awkward to interact on a basic social level.

“We in southern California pride ourselves on our big Muslim community, but young singles don’t interact much,” Tarek said. “Isn’t it strange that one friend of mine got married to a girl from Canada, and the other got married to a girl from the UK?”

Kahf acknowledges the absence of a social forum in current times.

“Traditionally, there was a forum facilitated through mothers, sisters, cousins, friends of the family, and was conducted in a healthy environment,” Kahf says. “Many men here don’t have such connections. Even a young college student who attends the MSA or a masjid once a week still does not find a healthy medium to find the potential wife.”

Amazingly, one of the biggest complaints among Muslim women and men is finding quality within the quantity of available candidates for marriage. As one anonymous Muslim male puts it, “Lots of times I felt like there were too few sisters to marry. The same four or five sisters would get recommended to me all the time. Sisters complain there are too few brothers, but I know so many brothers who want to get married. There are a lot of good sisters and brothers out there, but for whatever reason they’re not connecting.”

The lack of a social forum may be the biggest hurdle Muslims in America have to jump. Webb places the bulk of the responsibility of creating a forum on the current generation.

“I’m not thinking about finding a wife; your generation is living that narrative,” Webb says. “Come up with ideas on how to find a spouse, and then ask community leaders, ‘Can we do this?’ These things need to be covered by the younger community, but with guidance from pastoral scholarly figures.”
....

Khan is also dismayed at the worldly attitude towards marriage. In her experience, parents are the ones demanding more, thereby limiting the already waning spousal pool for their children. For example, according to Khan, about 90% of parents want their daughters to marry within the same culture, even though the girls themselves hardly care where the young man comes from.

In addition to maintaining that a potential spouse come from the same culture, parents make the process of finding a mate difficult for their children by “having extremely high worldly standards, not giving importance to religion and character, not willing to marry their children until they complete college, and refusing to accept the choice of their children,” says Khan.

Khan estimates that 10% of couples she introduced to each other resulted in marriage. While that may seem like a small number, Khan reveals that many men and women reject proposals based on astonishingly trivial matters. For example, one girl refused an otherwise wonderful proposal because the boy was not tall enough. In another instance, a boy’s mother refused a girl because her complexion was too dark.

“Most people perceive marriage to be just a social obligation rather than a religious one,” Khan says. “I feel that our girls and boys, as well as their parents, need to be more aware and educated about the status of marriage in Islam, and take it seriously.”