 So I wanted to start off this first segment, inshallah, by going over what the ideal Muslim marriage looks like. And I know that that's actually kind of like a bit of a challenge actually because that's kind of what everybody wants. That's what everyone seeks. It's one of the topics that I think is requested all the time. It's the most frequently requested topic that what would the ideal Muslim marriage look like. And I want to start us off by mentioning a couple of ayat of Quran because I think it's important to set the stage and to set the tone for the subject. First and foremost, I think one of the challenges is that we receive information. We receive our knowledge about marriage, about family life, about what this is supposed to look like from all over the place. From family members, from what we think we know from our religion, from friends, from social media. And this actually becomes problematic because it creates for us a lot of ideals that may not actually work together very well. So with that being said, I wanted to start us off with an ayat of the Quran where Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala mentions in Surah Al-Rum. So this is the same verse that is often recited at Nikah ceremonies. It is a commonly referenced verse because it describes very plainly and clearly what an ideal Muslim marriage would look like because it talks about balance. It talks about what both sides, both the husband and the wife, the bride and the groom can bring together in their relationship. And if that were to be maintained moving forward or for the duration of the marriage, you would have that perfect system, the perfect ecosystem for what would be a successful Muslim marriage. So Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala mentions that from amongst his signs is that he has created you and your partner from yourselves. Meaning that from mankind, mankind has partners. And then he mentions the qualities of that relationship by saying that what is the quality of that relationship supposed to look like? What is the quality of that union supposed to have? The first of which is that a person should have tranquility and calm and be at peace with their partner. So setting the stage and setting the tone. I guess I should backtrack a little bit by saying, first and foremost, I'm a little groggy. I just got off like an extremely strange schedule. So I was awake since like three o'clock in the morning trying to get here and I just got here. So my mind is still processing and catching up. So I realized I started off without saying salam to everybody. So now I'm going to backtrack and start off by saying, Assalamu alaikum to everybody that's here. I'm welcoming all of you. Mashallah, sister Sana, welcome to everybody. I'm just processing things a little bit slowly right now. But this, I didn't even speak about the conference, the speakers. You guys have seen the Flyers, you've seen the other inshallah speakers throughout the day that will be here. It's going to be a very eventful inshallah program. Before I continue what I was about to say, I just remembered that every speaker after me is going to have a slightly different twist or angle to the way that they present this topic. And that's a good thing. There's nothing wrong with that. Actually, it's a very positive thing. And the reason for that and why we actually set the program up in this way is so that you can see different experts in their field speak about this issue, right? The marriage crisis, the struggles of young people getting married, remarriage. You know, this whole topic, you can see firsthand how different people have a different perspective on it. And the different experts that we have coming inshallah, how their expertise are going to contribute to our better, having a more holistic understanding of what's been going on and how we can combat the challenges that many people have today. So I want to just mention that because of the fact that the angle or the perspective that I'm taking when I start or as I start, it's going to be primarily from the religious spiritual point of view. So this is setting the foundational point. So my topic was the ideal Muslim marriage. It's ideal because we want to get to that point. I'm not saying we're there and I'm not saying that every marriage is going to be like that. But we have the precedent and we want to strive to that goal, to that end. And if we can't get there or if we don't understand how to get there, hopefully this program, this evening, this whole afternoon, will be giving us some tools to equip us with ways to get to that ideal Muslim marriage category. So coming back now to this point, this ayat of the Qur'an, I love it so much and I love to share this ayat because it feels so comprehensive. It's very clear. There's three steps, easier said than done. There's three steps, just three easy steps to have a happy successful Muslim marriage. The first is that you need to make sure that you can maintain Sukun. The category of Sukun is having that peace of mind, that tranquility, that comfort with one another and in each other. So it's not just this idea that one person is happy and the other person is miserable. That doesn't make a successful marriage. That's not the happy marriage that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is referring to. It's that the unity of both parties. That's number one. The second is, then he continues and he says, Then Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is the one who places in that marriage, which is love, that there has to be love in the marriage. There has to be that draw, that attraction, that attention to one another. There's love, and then there's mercy. The commentators and the tafsir mentioned different reasons for the order of this. Why love first, then mercy? As well as this word before that, which is that Allah is the one who places love in the marriage. Which if we're speaking from a spiritual point of view, this takes us back another level. Which is what? Which is the pleasing Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is first and foremost. Because in your obedience to your religion, you attain the love of Allah, which Allah then blesses your marriage by placing in that marriage love. By virtue of you being more obedient to your Creator, Allah places love and mercy in your marriage. Because Allah is the one who is doing the placing of love in that marriage. So he puts love in the marriage, and he puts mercy in the marriage. So love and mercy is another component of a successful marriage. You have to have love. This marriage should mean something. And the funny thing is we live in a world where our concept of marriage is like predominantly like for a lot of people who grew up in the west, it's what you see on TV. It's what you see in pop culture. It's what you follow on all these reality TV shows, which, you know, it's reality TV. It's not real, but for many people that's actually set in stone what they should be looking for in a marriage, which is obviously terrible and completely wrong. But the point is it's already been established that way. People are seeking love marriages. People are seeking Romeo and Juliet and, you know, Disney Channel style love. And the reality is, is that that's highly unattainable, very impractical and not realistic. It's a reason why it's on TV and not real life, right? So if you really want love in your marriage, right, then there's a system by which you can attain that in your life and realizing that your marriages should have love, right? And then mercy. This is such an important concept. Usually when people talk marriage, people are thinking of all the stuff that happens right when you get married. So the cluster of love and travel and attention and Instagram photos and thank yous and pictures and attention, that first moment where just everything is wonderful, right? That's not marriage. That's just like the beginning stages of it. And that's where all the love is at. Jalebeina kumma wedda. The love gets developed. People often ask me, they say, oh, should I, you know, when I get married, should I do all those lovey-dovey things, like, you know, all the corny, stereotypical stuff that people do? And I say, if you guys are into it, just go do it, whatever. You want to write your guys as initial in the sand at the beach. Go ahead and do that. You want to, you know, I don't know, make like those fake breakfasts that they show on TV all the time where there's like 50 things and, you know, nobody eats any of it. And, you know, you want to do all that because it makes you feel good. You're married now. Go ahead and do it. Do whatever you want to do that's going to develop the love in the beginning. But then don't forget because once that slowly starts to fade, and I don't mean that the love starts to fade, but the novelty of the love starts to fade, now you're just pals with one another. You're really close with each other. You know everything about each other. That's where the rahma and the mercy kicks in. Because in the beginning of your marriage, right, like anybody who's been to my marriage seminars, you've heard me say this a dozen, dozens of times. In the beginning of the marriage at the wedding ceremony, anything that happens, you're just so happy. You don't mind, right? If you put a little cake on someone's nose, they're going to laugh and giggle, and they're going to play it off. Five years later, you try to do that, you know, and it's not going to have the same reaction. So recognizing that later on in the marriage, you have to remember that there's going to come a time where you need to incorporate the mercy aspect, the mercy aspect being what? Being that there's going to be a stage in your marriage where you know everything about them and they know everything about you. They're going to make mistakes that you've seen again and again, and they've seen your mistakes again and again. But what happens is that you use this quality of forgiving them and moving beyond what they've done or looking past their mistakes and realizing what this person has dedicated their life to me. They're working hard for my home, whatever the roles are, whether you're the breadwinner, whether you're the caretaker of the home, whether you're whatever you are. This person has done X, Y, and Z for me. Therefore, yes, my, you know, I don't know his income isn't as high as I wished it was, but I'm looking beyond that because he is an excellent husband and a caretaker and provides and is there for us. You know, he might say that, oh, my food one night I came home and I was so tired it wasn't ready, it wasn't warm. You know, I'm really, really exhausted. But then he looks beyond that. Yeah, but she also took care of the kids, four kids over the weekend for five days or whatever it was, or all day long I was gone at work and the kids were sick and all this stuff. So you say, you know what, it's not that big a deal. I have a microwave. It's there for a reason. I can just go take my food and I can warm it myself. There's no need for me to, you know, get upset about our cause of fight. That's the mercy aspect of it. So looking at this whole thing holistically and looking at this whole, you know, these few ayaat, we recognize that these are the ideal qualities to have in that Muslim marriage. That you have Sukun, that you have tranquility, you have that calm, then you have the love, you have the love and the relationship that's the driving force that helps develop the marriage and then you have mercy. Why? Because then at a certain point of comfort now you're in a place of having to show mercy so that the marriage can continue. Because without that mercy, everyone is on edge. Then everyone's just constantly angry. Everyone's upset. You're at each other's throats every second of every waking moment. It's constant conflict. Look at those relationships that lack these qualities. When the marriage starts without love, it immediately jumps to becoming very vile and rigid and it becomes, I have like a rule of thumb, anytime you see in a relationship people start asking for their rights, it's already gone over the deep end. At that point you need immediate intervention. When people are talking to each other like, hey, can you go get groceries? I got groceries last week. Don't you know what my rates are? I'm so exhausted. Why don't you go get groceries? Automatically for me, that's like a red flag that this relationship needs immediate intervention. Why? Because then we've misused all of the application of these verses, which is you have to have love and then you need to have mercy. Again, I will say this is easier said than done. In practice, we're going to make mistakes. We are going to fail at this. Horribly, we're going to fail at this. But the most successful marriages, and there's a psychology professor who actually mentioned this. He said the most successful marriages are those that deal with their irreconcilable that learn to manage their irreconcilable differences. Meaning there will just be things in life that you will not agree upon. But a successful marriage is that marriage which can bring all of that together and understand that there are differences and still function and still be able to work together. In another Ayat of the Qur'an in Surat Al-A'raf, I believe Allah SWT says very similar that Allah SWT has created you from one body, one soul and from that soul he made your spouse and so that you may do what you may find comfort in that person. Meaning that our concept of marriage, our concept of a union has to have within it the qualities of compatibility. It has to have the qualities of love. It has to have these traits. Why I'm mentioning all this is not just because oh that's pretty obvious I already knew that. That's not the point. The point is that I'm going to mention what a Muslim marriage is not and I wanted to start by saying what a Muslim marriage is first just so that we can set the tone just so that we have that understanding and we have that awareness that what do we want to ensure our marriage looks like and we always have that precedent to go off of. This is where we want to be and now we can gauge where we actually are. So an ideal Muslim marriage like I mentioned it's ideal because we may not be there right now we may have made mistakes we have flaws every one of us have flaws but the goal isn't to identify our flaws and say hey look I'm not like this couple or I'm not like them every relationship and this was one of my own personal growing pains in this field of mental health in particular in this field of marriage and family therapy which was that in the beginning I had these very naive set of eyes that saw which was a blessing in disguise I suppose but I saw everyone as like happy campers and unless someone was like throwing a shopping cart at you at Walmart I thought everybody's relationship was happy you know I just thought everybody was successful everybody was happy everybody was just so good you know and then I remember I had a psychiatrist mentor once tell me he goes you know Jabra here's the thing you're going into this field you're so I don't know what the term for it is like rosy eyed or something but you're just seeing the world you're seeing the world so nicely and I don't want to break that for you or ruin that for you but once you sort of experience what a lot of people are going through you kind of realize like everybody has their own set of challenges or issues that they're working with and navigating and managing and that's just the reality of life so I say this to everyone not to make you depressed or sad or anything but just so that we don't end up maybe subconsciously comparing ourselves all the time and looking at other relationships and sitting there and reflecting and saying oh man look at them they're just set oh they're just doing perfectly fine or look at that couple they're like the ideal couple those are marriage goals you know the reality is everybody has their own struggles and that's why I wanted again just to reiterate for like the fourth time when we say ideal muscle marriage we're setting ourselves up to grow together that's the point of this that there are things that I can learn from this program from this day from this lecture series from all these really really honorable respected skilled experts in their fields whatever they're going to speak about there's something I can take from that and benefit from that and potentially implement into my life starting today that's kind of the point so continuing along these same lines the ideal muscle marriage is what is what I just described what it is not however right these are things that people tend to think a relationship is so you'll find that people oftentimes will engage in all sorts of different behaviors thinking that this is my way of pursuing marriage or pursuing a successful marriage right a muscle marriage is not engaging in any form of zinna before marriage right and again you know I almost feel like I have to apologize for mentioning things that are so obvious but the reason why it's important to mention this is because oftentimes it's not so clear actually and specifically in the time that we live in in the era that we live in with a lot of the things that are being shared online sometimes you know actually my wife is the culprit because she sends me all these things and she makes me watch she's like oh my god look at what this person is doing and look at this and I'm like you got to stop doing that because then I get all excited and I want to write a whole thing about it and I want to go give a lecture and say this is not right but it just stresses me out so it's not good to constantly receive all this information especially just before a conference like this I got like three different videos she's like oh watch this and I'm like no no my focus is not going to be on the program I got to focus on this so it's not Zina and it sounds silly to even say that but you have to realize we're talking about a Muslim marriage being a Muslim has criteria has certain rules and regulations that we abide by to be part of that fraternity to be a part of that sorority to be part of that community part of that community means abstaining from committing any type of Zina or fornication this is not a Muslim marriage it's very important to know that our marriages are started with what's known as the nikah or the aqt or the katben kitab that is what is a Muslim marriage why? because cohabitation dating all these things is not the Muslim marriage oftentimes I get this question from a younger population usually a high school college age but I have genuinely been surprised in at least the past three years or so how many people who are outside of those parameters have also been asking these type of questions what does that relationship look like and then the conversation goes well if I'm looking to get married what are the limitations what can I do what can I not do can you define for me halal dating the conversation that comes around that so it's all I'll get to that in just a moment so again a Muslim marriage an ideal successful happy Muslim marriage is not constantly sending pictures of yourself to the other person you're speaking to it's not sending snapchats and private photos and private messages having really intimate deep private heartfelt conversations in secret and in private these are not ideal Muslim marriages that's not how you want to start off a relationship in a best case scenario you're not doing anything like that in a best case scenario there's a whole system set up to prevent you from doing that that doesn't mean that you can't speak to someone that doesn't mean that you can't talk to someone or meet someone for the purposes of marriage but this specific methodology of getting to know someone or to talk to someone doesn't really fit within those guidelines primarily because it usually leads to other things and that's a very slippery slope it starts with a very simple conversation it starts with a very basic introduction leads to late night discussions you know pictures and photos and conversation styles that are probably not appropriate for what we would deem as an ideal Muslim union right it's not always what other people have and that's also quite important understanding a Muslim marriage as being what so and so has would be the wrong way to look at it you can find certain qualities that you like and that you value and that you appreciate and that you would want and that's important for you to understand what it is that you want in your relationship what you want in the future of your marriage or in the future of your relationship going forward but that's not how you should look at a Muslim marriage for the sake of just saying I want exactly what these people have and the reason for that is because oftentimes we set our standards on what my parents have or what my parents didn't have what my aunts had my friends had my relatives had for example people have certain definitions of marriage when they think of that word they immediately think of an incredibly traumatic experience that they remember that was a marriage that failed miserably and it ended terribly that's what a marriage is so therefore I don't want that so when they think marriage they think that scenario and that's not what it has to be all the time and so I know it also sounds kind of odd even saying that but it's important to hear that your marriage is not your parent's marriage your marriage is not your relative's marriage your marriage is not someone else's marriage why because it is what you make of it and if you decide to make it what other people experience domestic violence people experience a lot of adversity there was a person who actually came to me in premarital counseling once and said to me that my guidelines for marriage are quite simple and she said that it's I want to be taken care of emotionally and I don't want to be living basically paycheck to paycheck I don't want to be wondering if I should use this money for gas or groceries or like if I could buy a coffee I don't want to think like that and I asked to just inquire further where is that coming from where is the because it doesn't sound like something which is kind of inappropriate it seems very specific right it sounds like she's coming from a place in her own life in her own experience or that was very serious and she said very simply she said well I come from a lifestyle or a background where that was something that I did not have access to she said when we would have food we would get food from donation centers we would collect cans right this is how we had food growing up and we would not have new clothing we would have tattered clothing and I would always remember late at night my parents having a conversation specifically about so we have X amount of money left for this month should we buy the kids this thing or should we have dinner like this and she said that the older I got the sadder I became and the more heartbroken I became that this is the lifestyle that my parents had to go through to take care of us in our household she said now that I have a job and I'm kind of independent but I'm growing into the stage of marriage or into that next stage in my life I have a very simple request which is I just don't want to be in that position again so having certain experiences that you went through that other people went through that you don't want to go through that's totally fine but to say specifically I want exactly what so and so has or what so and so doesn't have sometimes we basically set ourselves up with expectations that are unrealistic and as a result of that we let ourselves down and that's really the point of this that our marriages are not exactly what other people went through it doesn't have to be it doesn't have to be what you saw somewhere or what you heard elsewhere people sometimes try to do scare tactics and say oh you're too young to get married you're going to turn out like so and so it's a very common thing we hear people say or oh you're too old now you're going to turn out like so and so the opposite of that the other extreme end of that you're going in between that as well so oh you're focusing on your education too much oh you know I met with a young man not too long ago and he said to me he goes well I don't make $300,000 yet so if I'm not making $300,000 living in the Bay Area then I can't even how could you even ask me about marriage and I said okay well you're really narrowing your chances here of getting married if that's your expectation but that's up to you and in any case just to reiterate this point the point is that we are not the experiences that other people have gone through you have the ability to change that for yourself you don't need to limit yourself so when we talk about the ideal Muslim marriage you have that flexibility you have the ability to look at it and say here's what I want out of this relationship and here's what I don't want you can set those parameters for yourself from the onset from the get go and if you don't know what those parameters are there's another issue many people struggle with not knowing what am I supposed to look for what am I supposed to look out for what should I be using as a filter then that's when you consider doing a premarital course perhaps doing a consultation speaking to someone who could guide you in that direction because a lot of people are just excited to get married and I say this often people tend to have this idea of when they think of marriage they think of the wedding day actually so that can become incredibly problematic because that means you didn't think anywhere beyond that you didn't think about the fact that you're probably going to have to work on your character development you're probably going to have to work on the fact that you have certain really nasty traits about you that you don't know yet but that other person is going to pull it out for you and they're going to identify it then you're going to come face to face with this reality and then you're going to have one of two choices confront it and work on it and fight it and that's just the reality of what it's going to be like so if your expectations are when I think of wedding I think of that fantastic day of the wedding day then you are going to be sorely mistaken because then what happens with everything after that day literally the very next morning the very next day and your life begins with this total stranger that you now have to, you came from two different planets you're put together now and now you have to create a life together so however, again just to flip the script a little bit and go over a little bit about what Muslim marriages can be and I shared this section only because the amount of people that have said that my marriage is devoid of any type of quality is very disappointing and I think that's also because at the onset of marriage we were all just googly-eyed and excited and we had no expectation of what a marriage is and what that means and how to plan for it so hopefully sharing this and what the other speakers are going to speak about and share will allow us to kind of understand better what to expect moving forward or how we can pivot and make adjustments but what should a Muslim marriage have or include or incorporate one is communication it seems quite obvious again all of these things sound obvious actually it's kind of like you know when you're in school and you're listening in class everything the teacher is saying makes sense and then the moment you go home and you have to do the homework you're like I have never seen this in my life I don't even know anything it seems like that a lot of these concepts they seem very easy as we're saying it and as we're hearing it it's like relatively redundant some of you are thinking why did I come this early for this I already know all this stuff it's possible but in practice then it's kind of like having a you know like a toolbox full of tools you don't need to use them all the time but when the situation arises then you're prepared that's the best way to look at it so communication successful and happy Muslim marriages do have communication okay why I say this is because people say that oh my wife she doesn't talk to me my husband doesn't communicate he just like has this expectation in his head of what should happen and there's no way for me to know that how would I be able to pull that out of his head and know that this is what he needs he doesn't communicate, he doesn't talk about it and vice versa right this is not male-female specific it's just apply it across the board but the complaint is that they don't communicate oh she doesn't communicate she doesn't tell me what she needs he doesn't tell me what he wants and so we're always in conflict so to know we're always body surprised a Muslim marriage has communication in it right we can see from the life of the Prophet Aleyhi Salatu Wasalaam actually that in many many situations it's evident that he used to actually spend time dedicated time just to talk to his wife in one particular narration it mentions that once he was late night having a conversation with his wife and he was just outside and he was talking to her and two Sahaba they were walking by and they saw him talking to a woman so they immediately turned around and the Prophet Aleyhi Salatu Wasalaam called them back specifically and he says no no come here this is my wife I'm talking to there's not just anybody I'm not just out here having a conversation with a strange woman this is my wife and I'm having a chat with her and they said no no no messenger of Allah we had no thought like that he goes no even then he just wanted to be clear about it so in that moment that's a lesson for us right that he used to actually dedicate time just for the sake of talking to his wife and like that in many other scenarios the Prophet Aleyhi Salatu Wasalaam used to love we're going to get to that happiness for example to be happy in a marriage really it sounds even silly as I'm saying it like is it okay to be happy in my marriage is that an okay quality am I asking for too much no this is not like asking for a million dollar mad right this is like an okay thing to want right I think it's very fair but truly this is something that comes up again and again maybe I'm not meant to be happy we've heard that right I mean I'm sure somebody has heard that before maybe I'm not meant to be happy maybe it's not my nasiib that I should be happy no subhanAllah the reality is that's not the case that's not a good way of looking at it that's not how we should be looking at this situation every marriage has the right to be happy both husband and wife our responsibilities they may weigh heavy they may be a lot but that doesn't mean that we don't deserve to be happy we do right the Prophet Aleyhi Salam used to say often that I only enjoy my meals when my wife Aisha sitting next to me he would say that to her and that would make her happy and she would blush and she would become happy he would give her a nickname he would give her nicknames for each other and he used to call Aisha you know he used to have this nickname for her or he would call her again another nickname this was just a sign or a snippet of little little actions that would indicate that they were happy their marriage was happy it had happiness as a part of it it was part and parcel of their relationship it's not something you have to necessarily strive for like oh I unlocked happiness now five years into my marriage 15 years into my marriage now I've unlocked happiness it was misery and now I've gotten to the stage of happiness that's not how it's supposed to be so Muslim marriages can be they can have communication right that's not so shocking Muslim marriages can be happy right you're not supposed to be miserable all the time contrary to some strange belief that you know I'm just miserable that's what I guess that's marriage you know I'm just miserable like that no that's not the case that's not how things have to be and there are examples and again I know probably in the back of your mind you're thinking he's mentioning all stories and incidents from the life of the Prophet ﷺ directly how am I going to compete to that or how am I going to get to that point at any stage in my life again to reiterate the point is that we are setting the precedent for what is the ideal Muslim marriage and we all strive to try to get to that point to try to get a glimpse of that to try to get pieces of that to try to get close to that and that's not far-fetched that's not far-fetched at all especially if both people in their relationship understand these concepts they acknowledge them they say you know what yeah I agree I want to be there too I want to not argue with you for no reason why would I want to argue with you over you know what time you come back from work you get back at 5.30 okay that's the end of the conversation that's it you're clear you communicated I communicated I know what time dinner is going to be ready I know what time to be home that's my parameters the end of the conversation whereas you'd be surprised how many relationships just that conversation of what time are you going to be back from work is a literal fight every single day it's kind of shocking you would think like that's not that difficult right but it is for many people for some people and so again the point is just going back to the basics here the reality is that it's okay to have these qualities we have to strive for them if you don't have them and if they seem unrealistic that's not the case they are realistic we just need to strive towards those goals if we don't know how there are means by which we can get to that point one of which is you know you have counseling you have therapy sessions you have scholars you can consult you have consultation sessions you can go to you can speak to an elder you can speak to someone that you highly respect someone that has wisdom and experience in life right and also just because you know I'm part of wassila and the second wassila event doesn't always go to therapy you know I don't know if I'm going to get like terminated after this but like you know you don't always have to go to therapy you can always go to like an elder someone with experience you have a parent a grandparent a scholar there are other people that we can turn to the main thing is to make sure and to communicate right this was something that is I mean part of our tradition the sahaba would go to the prophet so whenever they didn't understand something they would ask for clarity if the men would ask the women would ask everybody would ask the problem is that we're not asking and then even if we knew the answer we're not implementing that's the challenge and it's hard because our ego doesn't want to give up and say yeah he was right oh man I don't want you to tell me that I just I want to stumble across it on my own but the moment my husband has to tell me or my wife identifies something for me I just don't like hearing it from you like you are the you are the problem like I don't want to hear it from you what you're saying may be right but I don't want to hear it from you so this is a matter of ego and the matter of having to work on that and resolving that right so continuing on sadness sadness is part of marriage sadness is part of relationships right these are common things these are things that happen all the time right how we identify sadness in the life of the prophet son I mean there's so many stories one story comes to mind in particular during the very famous battle the prophet had said to three of his very close companions right he said to three of his companions that when you go into this battle because keeping the literal flag like the flag that had the kalima on it was a morale boost for the rest of the army he had told the Sahaba Zaid ibn Haritha Abdullah ibn Arawa and another Sahabi I'm forgetting he had mentioned to them that keep the flag of Islam up at all times right he had said to them Jaffa ibn Abi Atalib he said that keep the flag up at all times and he gave them a specific order he says oh Zaid you keep the flag up first if you become Shahid in the battle then give it to Jaffa and Jaffa you keep the flag up for as long as you can and if you become Shahid then give it to Abdullah and this was their order and so the Prophet SAW as was his habit sat in the masjid while the battle was ongoing and making dua for them and Aisha ad-Dilawata Anha she's sitting in her room which is adjacent to the masjid and she sees like a messenger coming to relay news of battle updates to the Prophet SAW and so she sees this person coming in and she hears that he informs the Prophet SAW oh messenger of Allah you had given a directive to your companions in this particular order and you had said to them to keep the flag of Islam up no matter what and I regret to inform you that exactly in that order Zaid ibn Haritha Jaffa ibn Abi Atalib and Abdullah ibn Rawaha Shahid and Khalid ibn Walid was the last person to pick up the flag because he didn't want it to see it on the ground and through him we got victory meaning ultimately through that last stage and the Prophet SAW sat there and he was deeply deeply deeply sat in by that news why because these companions were some of the closest companions to him so why is this story important in this particular piece which is that Aisha is the narrator of this particular incident and she's the one saying I was in my room when I had heard of the messenger coming into the room into the masjid to speak to the Prophet and I was peeking through the door and I saw this unfold and I heard the situation and I saw on his face a serious sadness set in and I realized that I should leave him alone in the masjid where he will find comfort there where he wanted to be so this is sadness in a relationship look at the look at the unity between the Prophet SAW and Aisha that they knew what the other person needed the Prophet SAW received terrible news he's in the masjid but she as his wife knew that when he's overwhelmed he likes to be in the masjid left alone but without any words being exchanged she did exactly that and actually we even know of this situation because of her narration of having fulfilled that beautiful relationship of wife to husband of knowing what his needs were at that time and I let him be in that state so that he can get the comfort that he needs and then ultimately recover from it but this is a shared sadness so is it okay to be sad in a relationship if sadness happens sure it's totally fine it's common as a matter of fact when I had my first child my first daughter I remember it was so strange because I used to not really be an emotional person and then after having my daughter maybe a couple months into that that thing would make me sad and I remember I saw some like somewhere of like a cartoon of something and it immediately reminded me of my daughter and I called my wife and she called me and she was just crying and I'm crying and what are we crying over like a cartoon what is wrong with us and just like everything affected us but the main point the main takeaway from that is sometimes we are very rigid with our emotions with our belief systems that there are certain things that men don't cry or women don't show emotion in front of their wives there was another situation I got a ton of stories for you guys there was another situation once where an elder told me it was in Little Mabon we were sitting in Ertikov it's kind of intense story but this was an elder and he was in the villages and he actually said to me he himself was like 80 years old as he's telling me this story he says when I was 5 years old he is saying so 75 years ago he is saying that when I was 5 years old I remember we were going to a like a tribal meeting in the village in the mountains and all the tribal elders were gathered there in the tribal elders house so all the tribal elders were there in the main elders house and he said I was 5 years old and I came with my father and as I mentioned the point of this story is that some people have a very rigid emotional state that they feel like they have to be this way all the time I can never express emotion this is the mindset I can never be sad I can never be show joy otherwise it's a sign of weakness and my children will no longer value me and they will not want to spend time with me literally living a 50-60 year lifestyle like this this is not the ideal Muslim marriage just by the way so he mentions that I was 5 years old and I was at this elders house and I see all these tribal elders there and I'm sitting quietly in front of my father on the ground and the tribal elder himself had a son that was also 5 years old and he was just running around whereas my father had warned me that you have to sit still you do not move this is very disrespectful you're going to disrespect me, your family, your village if you move around so he's sitting there still but then he's noticing this other kid this is his own house but he's just running around acting like a 5-year-old acting like a 5-year-old and he said at that moment he tripped while the meeting was going on this kid tripped and he made like a silly noise or something like that but it was loud enough where it caught everyone's attention so the father he took the kid and he took him in the back and he beat him severely and everybody could hear it and the person narrating the story was telling me he said I started crying he's 5 years old at the time so I was just hearing it it was so intense that I felt like I was getting hit so he started crying and his father quickly covered him and things like that so just stay quiet and then when his wife the tribal elder who was beating his kid his wife came out and she was crying because his son was black and blue it was bad he said to her if you make a noise or even cry I'm going to do the same thing to you too so wait until tomorrow my guests are going to leave then you can cry like that is such a extreme these are all Muslim people right so this is such an extreme lifestyle and a mindset but keep in mind that many people grew up in households of the same level of rigidity and as a result spent their entire lives having to maintain that not necessarily because they want to but that's how they were trained for 40 years of their life 40-50 years of their life they had this you know like blinders on that they only can function this way thinking that literally here's my 5 year old son if I play with him it's a sign of weakness and he's going to I'm not going to be a man I'm not going to be a father so these are things that are not prophetic in essence they're not in line with our religious you know tradition famous stories include a person who saw the Prophet ﷺ kissing Hassan and Hussain on the head and showing affection and he says I have 10 sons and I haven't kissed a single one of them and the Prophet ﷺ said it's not my problem Allah took mercy out of your heart what's that got to do with me this is a problem for you actually this is not a blemish on me it's a major blemish on you so going back right these are all just anecdotes and stories to share to further this point that can a person show a sad expression can you express yourself of course you can but many women feel like they can't many women feel like I can't cry in front of my husband because he's going to say oh not this again or if a man cries because he's experiencing something very difficult then he is going to be put down and shamed for having emotions or expressing emotion another quality is the quality of being romantic is this something which is permitted in a Muslim marriage can a Muslim in their marriage have romantic qualities certainly you can within guidelines of the Sharia of course you can can you buy flowers for your wife and go on long walks on the beach and draw your initials in the sand and go on a plane ride and do all sorts of stuff absolutely you can you can do all those things you can do all of these things there's no problem with that again for some reason the idea that I can't be affectionate I can't sure someone had actually said to me this is all real stories which really just sometimes blow your mind I should write a book of just all these stories but there was a person who actually said to me my wife started crying because of something that had happened that was deeply emotional for her she started crying so I got mad at her and I yelled at her and I asked them why did you think to react like that why did that kick in as the your reaction to her being sad he said well my logic is that if I console her and I'm there for her and I'm present for her then she's going to begin to like me and become more gentle towards me and that's going to make me soft so I don't want to be like that and I said okay pal you know I've never heard that one before I don't think the army even implements stuff like that that's a weird one but he was serious and he was like was that wrong? I was like I think so I think that was not the right reaction you could have probably reacted a little bit different if you have this whole thing set up and see this is the problem when we have these culturally made stuff in our head or that's not even a culture that's like something he concocted he just thought that would be the right reaction and it's problematic because look how we ruin our marriages we ruin relationships by just doing things we think is the right way to do them and we didn't consult anybody we didn't run this by anybody we didn't check in with anybody we just decided like let me do that you know there are certain things you have some flexibility to kind of like make mistakes in marriages and other things are just kind of silly there are things that you should probably see counsel for before you do them other things include like having children like I want to have a child discuss that with your husband with your wife alhamdulillah you move forward with it other times people just have this idea like I just want to have children that will keep her busy and that way I can go do my own things this is probably an inappropriate way to go about creating progeny it's probably an inappropriate way for the creation of life your children were meaningless to you actually they were a means of distraction for you actually imagine what that thought would be like for that child if they ever grew up to know that I mean how belittling you know and the last thing I'll mention is romance and affection and just showing like I mentioned an example of this person who didn't show affection and console his wife can I console my wife, can I be there for her romantic on one hand the Prophet s.a.w. would always show signs of his love towards his wife when Khadija passed away the Prophet s.a.w. would visit her friends to show that that love is still there that she's not here but she's still here and when he would be with Aisha there were times where she expressed her jealousy because he would talk the Prophet s.a.w. would talk about Khadija and she would become jealous and say Allah has given you someone better than Khadija this is the kind of things that she used to say it was just because an emotional response but in other instances the Prophet s.a.w. would show for example like direct love or direct affection for Aisha by doing things as simple as if she drank from a cup he would find where she put her mouth and he would drink from that same area if she ate a piece of meat he would look for where she took a bite and eat from that same area that is affection they would have nicknames for one another all of these are signs of what? these are signs of love these are signs of an expression of love you don't need to just sit there and say I love you you do acts of service you do certain things to show your valuing the other person your love for the other person and when it comes to affection and being there emotionally to be emotionally present by getting mad at his wife when she needed emotional support but what are some examples the most common one the most famous one that comes to my mind is an incident of one of the wives of the Prophet s.a.w. they were on a caravan and they were riding and all the camels were moving but her camel for whatever reason was slower and kept stopping and she was at the end and she was sitting in her how-dudge the little home on top of the ride and so every time the caravan would go on her camel and her how-dudge they would stop slow down, stop, slow down and this made her sad and she would say that I'm slowing everybody down I'm becoming a burden upon everyone and I'm bothering everybody and it got her to the point of extreme disappointment that the Prophet s.a.w. had to literally stop the caravan and see what's happening why do we keep slowing down why do we keep slowing down so this situation was very shocking to some of the Sahaba because the Prophet s.a.w. came from the front of the caravan all the way to the end of the caravan he brought his wife out of the little room and he with his sleeve or I think it's with his shawl one of the narrations mentioned with the sleeve or with the shawl he wiped her tears away in front of everybody as they were watching now you have to understand in a society where that time expressing emotion as a man if we thought it was bad now I mean you have to understand that women were not even a good thing in society and for the Prophet s.a.w. who is Amir al-Mu'minin the leader of the believers he is the leader of the Muslim army he is the captain he is everything he is stopping to tend to an emotional need of his wife in front of everybody else that's there and he stops and he wipes her tears away and he's present for her emotionally and then he puts his knee up for her to climb back on top of the the little room on the camel so that she can be comfortable in her space so that the caravan can continue on and in front of everyone he showed his affection he showed his compassion to his wife and he was present for her and everyone saw that and he did not mind and just like that continued the caravan and they continued the journey so the takeaway from that is insha'Allah I'll wrap up here the takeaway from that is that there are expressions of joy expressions of sadness there are certain emotions that we can express we can be happy, we can be sad we can be romantic, we can be affectionate we can communicate these are all qualities that are completely normal and we should be looking to have them in our relationships if we don't, like I mentioned these examples were very difficult to imagine yourself in due to whatever circumstances but the reason it's called the ideal Muslim marriage again is that we strive to get to that point and we work towards that and insha'Allah that becomes our end goal and I welcome everyone to insha'Allah stay for the duration of this program today we have an excellent lineup for everyone and insha'Allah with that I'd like to actually call up the next speaker Jazaq Malaukhayran Jazaq Malaukhayran Shaikh I realized that I didn't actually give a proper introduction to me and who I am but my name is Sanaa Sabhani I am a clinical social worker and I founded the organization Waseela Connections and so what I do want to tell everybody is that I know a lot of these topics and things that we are talking about can be triggering, can be it can evoke some emotion and we are all going through something so what I do want to offer and extend is that if you have something that you are going through that you need to have a conversation after please do come find me I am open to answering any questions my mental health background the Waseela Connections we pride ourselves on the duality of a lot of our of the people that are part of this organization as we have both professional and experiential experience through our own personal struggles and our mental health professional background so as you heard Shaikh Jaber he is a marriage and family therapist and he is also a scholar so we appreciate that duality because it allows everyone to see both ends infused together my background as a clinical social worker I have been working in the community for 10 years and so if you are going through something and you need someone to talk to after this please don't hesitate to come remember confidence is something you know confidentiality is something that we hold very dearly so whatever you say it is a mantra and it will stay between us alright so without further ado I want to introduce brother Ali most of you guys know him as Baba Ali from Half-Ardine but you know we will say some names and welcome alright usually I am not sitting I did stand up comedy for 16 years and usually I am standing this is a sit down but it is not comedy this is alhamdulillah something more important than comedy as I said I did comedy for 16 years and alhamdulillah I did these shows all around the world about 400 of them audiences is the largest 40,000 people but I never really felt fulfillment so I will give you guys little background and why I am here and why I am part of the whole marriage scene of helping single Muslims find other half and that is what I actually found for fulfillment so myself about the age of 20 years old I became Muslim I was born into a Persian family that was extremely secular and they don't practice any type of religion whatsoever my grandfather was the one who brought the refrigerator and the automobile to Iran so he became what you would say almost like today is like billionaire status in fact there is multiple people within my family still right now multiple that are in the billionaire status but what happened was when we came my family used to go on vacation all around the world by the time I was 4 years old I have been to Europe to here I actually came to the United States and when we came here to Southern California I am Northern California when I came to California my family came on vacation and the revolution happened and we end up staying here as we stayed up here me have absolutely no idea what Islam is and my parents hiding it from me I grew up in a very tough situation going through a lot of challenges because there is no Islam to guide me and the reason that has hit it for me is because in Iran the extremely wealthy are as secular as possible and the people who are not wealthy are as religious as possible and there is that division between the two so not only did they not teach Islam to me but it was kind of hidden from me so to their shock I actually discovered Islam in Los Angeles and I became Muslim overnight and many of my friends also became Muslim overnight and that shocked my parents so much so that my father started hitting his head against the wall and my mother started screaming how did you find this religion and how did you find it in America of all places and at that time there was only one Masjid in our entire community today you have about six or seven within the same community but even at that time in the 90s it wasn't very popular average American didn't know what Islam was so for me to discover it it was very shocking to them and as I discovered this religion and I eventually started learning more and more I quickly learned as soon as I discovered the religion and I accepted it that what Islam teaches and what Muslims do are two different things and I say Alhamdulillah Allah show me Islam before He showed me the Muslims so when I eventually got to the age of like not age but getting to the time of looking to get married and like many of us have gone through or maybe going through right now I wasn't looking to get married I was just learning about Islam like brand new to Islam so I'm going to tell you guys my quick story of how my struggle started for marriage and say if it resembles some things that you may have gone through so I couldn't go through my family if I wanted to get married my parents are not religious whatsoever I couldn't go through my friends because they're all single like me and I couldn't go through my community because they had no programs like they have here in MCC MCC by the way let me just take a quick note here this is a free plug for MCC and they're not telling me to tell you guys this but I've been through all these mosques from all around the United States actually around different parts of the world and I've rarely seen a mosque like MCC that cares so much about the Muslims and cares so much about especially the single Muslims and trying to help them and my hat goes my hat goes off to them Hamdallah because they're amazing they're very unique so you are blessed to be part of this community not most communities do not have anything like this with that said when I was looking to eventually I came to a point in my life that I started learning more and more about Islam but I'm about a year, year and a half into Islam at this point I go to an Islamic conference with Isna before do you guys know what Isna stands for I'm single and available I didn't know that until I went to the conference I thought it was something to do with teaching I went there to learn to be at the bazaar and all this other stuff and what I quickly realized when I went there is a lot of people are looking to get married and I wasn't even looking to get married I was just like going there to meet friends and other things what happened was I was selling this one product at my booth and this one sister would keep coming back to the booth asking to buy the product but she couldn't buy it because she had Canadian dollars and she said I need to find a place to exchange the money so I can buy your product and the product was only like $5 it was nothing but she said can you hold one for me so I held one for her and she came back and forth and back and forth and eventually on the last day of the conference Ali, sorry I could not find anywhere that exchanges Canadian dollars to US dollars here at the conference just sell it to somebody else and so sister just take it she was like are you sure? she took it and she left as she took the product and walked away the brother who was standing next to me did this hey what was that? he said I was watching you and how you talk to every single person at this conference you didn't talk to anyone the way you talk to her you didn't look at anyone the way you looked at her there's something that was about her that caught your interest and I said look just because I gave her a free product no no no I'm watching and he said Ali I came to the conference with the intention of finding a wife my friend came to the conference with the intention of finding a wife I know you didn't come but what if that is your future wife if you don't go and speak to that sister for marriage you'll always ask yourself what if and I kind of froze because I wasn't even thinking about marriage I was really thinking about her for marriage and now I'm thinking myself what if so I'm like I don't know what to do this year is like 1990s something in the late 90s and I'm like what do I do what do I say so what I did is I asked him for a piece of paper and I got the piece of paper and I quickly wrote was writing something down and he's like what are you writing go she's leaving I said hold on let me think let me think I don't know what I'm doing I wrote a piece I wrote it down on a piece of paper and I'm okay I know what I'm going to do now so I'm walking around the conference and I'm trying to look for the sister who's wearing a white hijab and I quickly realized there's a lot of sisters wearing white hijab so I'm like oh that's not her and eventually I gave up and I started walking back towards the direction and as I'm walking back she's walking away and we see each other and I'm like Assalamu Alaikum and she walks right past me this is getting really awkward so I'm like how do I do this so as I turn right around in front of her I say Assalamu Alaikum sister this is Assalamu Alaikum hello not Assalamu Alaikum goodbye I wrote my contact information on this piece of paper I was wondering if you were single and if you're looking to get married if you're open to speaking to me just contact me if you're not open to it just throw the paper away but don't throw the paper away until I walk away because it'll hurt my feelings okay Assalamu Alaikum bye I just walked away I just gave her the paper and I walked away I walked left and right and left and right all the way until I walked back to the booth when I got back to the booth the brother was telling me he went and told all the brothers what I was doing now everybody's wondering I didn't think you were even looking to get married who is this sister what's going on what was on that piece of paper and as I start to explain this entire story to them they all start smiling and I'm like you guys are smiling and then suddenly I remember the guy specifically his name was Amber from Milwaukee he would do this I'm like why is he doing and I keep talking I'm a male brain so I'm not really thinking smart so I keep talking and talking and talking and until every single brother stops smiling and they just stare at me like this and then I realize something's wrong and I said is she behind me so now I'm thinking to myself this sister probably thinks I did this as a joke and this whole thing was a joke and I came back to tell the guys all ha ha ha ha she doesn't know what my intention was so I'm like what should I tell her but then on the back of my head I was thinking also I don't know how much she's heard and how much she hasn't heard so I turned around and I said As-salamu alaykum and she's like walaikum salam and every single brother like seven of them are behind the booth staring at us I'm staring at her and she's staring at me and for like this four seconds of awkward silence and she's like okay I just came back to let you know here's my dad's contact I said okay is that it she's like yeah what else would there be I'm like no nothing so I took that contact information contacted the father went down and met the father there's a whole story behind it and you think this part was crazy that's ten times more crazier but long story short I married that sister and what happened was two years later I was in a divorce situation with my sister I will never speak negative about her it was that I found someone and we just saw each other on the surface but we didn't have any type of deep compatibility and we didn't discover that until after we were married and after we were married we didn't like typical fights where husband and wife are like divorcing because they saw all these emotions and people yelling at each other and it's just like really really messy it wasn't like that I mean the stuff she would say and the stuff I was thinking of like one day she would say we should sell all our belongings and just be like nomads going from Europe to here to there I'm like that sounds good but not realistic and then her world was completely different than mine and I realized that we're going two different directions so did she and we say if we have children it doesn't get really really complicated so we decided mutually to all that emotions weren't there it still hurt me more than anything that hurt me in my life and after I experienced that I said I never want to go through this again I'm going to do everything I can so I never feel this pain again so I can only imagine people who had really bad experiences through marriage what they feel like probably ten times worse than that so you have this fear of ever getting married again you have this fear of ever wanting to make yourself vulnerable so you become into a painful situation so at that point instead of blaming her or the situation or all the stuff that happened I told myself what could I have done to make that marriage better what can I do to be a better husband if I get married again so what I started doing is I started studying these books about how men communicate, how women communicate how the differences between different types of personalities the different types of way people do things how people handle stress differently all these different layers I never even thought about I didn't even know it existed as I study and study and study I realized that I think I'm ready to get married and this time around I will fall into the same trap of looking just for surface I will see something deeper than that I will find compatibility so I decide to do the unthinkable in 2001 on the internet to look for a wife and say in 2001 in 2023 there's two different worlds guys in 2001 the internet is brand new I mean most people aren't using it for most things they just barely have the hotmail and email and yahooing everything there is no one's barely using it for anything like serious it's not like it is today so when you go and say I'm going to go find my wife or husband on the internet it was like really really weird but I can go through my parents I can go through the local messages I had to go online as I go online and I'm looking for my other half I was like which website works probably a question you guys probably ask yourself which one of these works I don't know which one works so I joined all of them but I don't want to talk to a bunch of sisters I just want to talk to one sister just one so what I did is I made a very very detailed profile exactly what you're going to get if you marry me these are the pluses and here's the negatives these are the things I'm expecting in a wife and these are things you should expect in a husband blah blah blah non-person response unfortunately I don't want to say unfortunately but I had a problem where 17 people responded now the problem was because I joined all these websites if I joined one website I probably would have 17 people responding but 17 people responded and right there I realized the websites were broken that something's wrong here that there's no way there's 17 people interested in me so either they're telling me what I want to hear or maybe one of them or two or actually being sincere and they're telling me the truth so I need to filter all these people out because I don't have the time or patience or the mental capacity to talk to 17 people I want to talk to one sister so what I did is I came up with a series of questions I didn't have right or wrong answers and I sent it to all 17 sisters only one of them answered it correctly the problem was I was hoping she lives in California but she lives in London it's like that's really far away but I'll also point out she lives in Paris but I don't know where my other where he created the other pair where he made the other half of me I assume that many of us assume we hope they're in Northern California we hope they're Pakistani or Indian or Arab or African American or whatever you assume and make these false assumptions sometimes where they live right now what their ethnicity is and what their age is and all these other things but you don't know that where is my pair? I love those best and I thought to myself let me go meet the sister and I did and I married her 22 years ago as soon as I met her well let me tell you what happened I had conversations back and forth with the sister and asking her questions that didn't have right or wrong answers and I did this for months for about three months as soon as all the questions have been asked and she sees me because it has to be mutual if there's chemistry I'll know in a few seconds because all the rest of the boxes have been checked so when I went to meet her I said I want to do everything in the Halal way we're going to meet in a public place and she sat on a park bench I stood up and it was really awkward and we were in a public park and there was this Halal gap so like social distancing before COVID and as soon as I met her she was the one and I can tell from the smile and her shyness she thinks I'm the one but we don't know what to do after this point because there's no manual of what you're supposed to do next so at that point I got nervous and I had a little handheld camera with me that I brought only to sight see because I said look if I want to go to London to meet the sister it may work out may not work out at the very least let me record a bunch of this footage to send to my friends I had this camera in my bag and I totally forgot and I put my hand in the bag and the camera was there and I took it out and I don't know what to do because I'm just using this as my safety blanket and she's like and this was completely unplanned she's like what's that for I said what if one day we get married and our kids ask us how did you guys meet this is the exact word I told her by the way she gets all super nervous and I started recording that footage from the moment that I met her literally 20 minutes after I met her today we got married which was 9 days later and I presented to her in a movie on DVD with all the things to her like a movie poster like legit real movies a 2 hour film and she got married 5 years after marriage and her response was ok I'll watch it later I tell my wife she's the most hardest person in the world to impress I've done so many things to my wife and she's like ok but humdala she brings me down to earth a lot so that 22 years of marriage have been a lot as my witness I still feel like I'm newly wed till today and I wanted to help others find their other half and that's why I came up into the marriage space of saying how can I give the people the tools they can to get married let me tell you guys some of the challenges we have as a person who was a divorcee not married but still experienced divorce as most of you guys have heard some of the statistics but some of them you may not know that the divorce rate here in the United States is about 50% like non-muslims muslims are not that far off by the way but what you don't know is that in California we're in the top 10 states in fact in California we're at 60% divorce rate we're higher than other states the second thing that you may or may not know is that a lot of these divorcees about 43% of them are dealing with children involved and these are children under the age of 18 this makes it quite challenging often times so it's not just ok in my situation it's a lot easier because I can separate but when there's children involved they don't divorce their father and they don't divorce their mother but they are always going to be connected and that always makes things a bit more complicated as well the other challenges we have is that overall in the United States 70% contrary to what most people believe because your experience may make you have one belief to it but I'm talking about in general what are most people experiencing 70% of all the divorces that are happening in the United States are considered no fault divorce this is where they have said no abuse from the male or female there was no drugs, there was no abandonment there was no alcohol it's just there's no fault and the number one answer that's come across is that we've grown apart and you guys are nodding because you guys heard this quite a bit and you guys experienced this because people have sort of expectations of what marriage life will be like and let me tell you where some of these expectations have been now put on steroids in our generation now that they didn't have in just one generation ago to get married this this phone when people wake up this is the first thing that most of us check this is what we do when we get bored this is what we do when we stand in line this is what we do all the time if you're in class, if you're at work wherever the situation is you're swiping swiping swiping swiping as you're swiping you are seeing things and sometimes our brains are not thinking while we're seeing things because when kids used to watch television they would say oh that's not real life and you can separate the two or those are actors and sometimes when you're a kid you can't separate it things that are so scary for you because it feels like it's so real but as you grow older you realize that this is all acting and this is our movies and behind the scenes you go to Universal Studios and blah blah blah but when you're watching things on social media these people look like me I don't see camera sets I don't see scripts they're very natural you're watching couples and they're like your friends and people you know in the community and look what they're doing today and look what they're going today and look at all the amazing experiences they're having today and then you look at your spouse and you're like what's wrong with us why aren't we doing these type of stuff so now people constantly comparing themselves to other people wondering why is their experience so different than mine and what you don't realize is that the girls that are putting this show on for you are probably having more problems than you are but they only show the best parts online they only show you the parts that they're not fighting in fact most of your friends who ended up getting divorced how many times would you all did you see it coming and how often did you say wow who got divorced why do we get shocked sometimes the reason why we get shocked is because when we see people from the outside we don't know what's happening behind closed doors we don't know this guy who's like so charming everyone in the community loves him how he treats his wife you have no idea she knows maybe her even her kids know but you don't know this person you don't know her you don't know him they know each other so when they get divorced it didn't just say overnight they're going to get divorced it's happening just built up and built up and built up and now we see it all happen and we get shocked and the reason we get shocked is because we don't see the negative side and so we don't compare the negative stuff that we experience we only experience oh they're having so much amazing positive experiences I'm not having those so maybe something's wrong with me maybe something's wrong with my marriage to let you guys know and just a reminder for us alhamdulillah one beautiful thing we have about islam is the prophet salam and we have his example and if he's the greatest man to ever walk on this planet and he has the highest level of jinnah guaranteed for him and he has experience of challenges with his own wife and wives at one point he said I'm going to leave everyone for like 30 days and this greatest man to ever walk on this planet that tells us that this different relationships that Allah has put for us the differences between males and differences between females and you put them together and that that's friction or sometimes conflict that can happen that is natural that if you guys are arguing with your husband or your wife it is normal it's like almost expecting to get to move to an area and having no bad weather ever even the most tropical most beautiful vacation spots they have tornadoes sometimes come hurricane sometimes come and at the time of the hurricane it feels like this is the worst experience ever this weather is not going to stop it's going to happen it's going to go on and go on and go on but the wiser people it's just temporary no matter how bad this feels right now the weather cannot just keep raining forever unless you live in London or Seattle but in general it doesn't like rain forever it's eventually going to take a break so if we make a decision about let's move when it's like going through a thunderstorm maybe we should just hold on a little bit wait till the thunderstorm clears out then make a decision when we are like cooler heads prevail inshallah so all of these different things I've learned is helping me to make better decisions now and that's why I come into like this type of event to share some of these things with you I write somewhere that intelligence is when you learn from your own mistakes but wisdom is when you learn from the mistakes of others let that sink in for a second many of us will go through an experience of divorce and the first thing you learn is now I know what I can't get married to right before that what was it it was so much easier to get married wasn't it before that our idea was these are all the things I want in a husband or these are all the things I want in a wife as long as this person has this I will get married inshallah now it's harder for us not necessarily just because society makes it harder for us but because we sometimes make it harder for us we have trauma or negative experiences from our ex and now we are judging the future person maybe you may have some certain things even though they haven't done anything to us yet we may have these negative emotions towards the opposite gender because we have experienced negative things from the opposite gender even though the person we're speaking to has done none of these negative things to us maybe our ex was stingy or mistreated us or did certain things or whatever and now we have these negative experiences and we have this healing that we haven't done to them which is unfair it would be unjust if someone did that to you and I think one of the struggles that we have to pass through is like giving up some of these things these negative feelings we have and it's hard I'm making it sound easy but it's not easy it's extremely hard that time when I went through the divorce it was one of the most toughest times in my life and I've experienced a lot of negative things in my life but that is something that it's hard to explain to people who haven't been through it it's like my friend he buried his child recently no matter how much I can say I can understand your pain or I can feel your pain I can't until you bury your own child you'll never feel that pain similarly when my friends have children I tell them I said you'll never know how much your parents actually loved you until you have your own child no matter how many times our parents told I love you even though we love our parents we can never love them the way they love us no matter how much I tell my friends we don't have children the way you start loving this being who just entered this world more than sometimes even your own parents why? it's because I'll also build this love inside of you it's hard to express the pain sometimes that we go through our challenges of divorce unless we're talking to people who went through the same thing as us and that's why I think we need people who have been through this to be part of the solution so I started a matrimonial website, Half-Ardine as the sister mentioned in an introduction back in 2010 with my partner Surfaz and when we started this we had different ways to go about this and we learned from certain things mistakes and one of the things sometimes I make decisions which make absolutely no financial sense whatsoever they actually have hit me financially negatively but I think it's the right thing to do and if I didn't go through these negative marriage experiences or divorce I probably would have not made those decisions because I would not know any better I'll give you one of the decisions I made was to remove the divorce status from your profiles you cannot tell who's divorced and who's not just like in this room I have no idea who's divorced and who's not nobody has a label that says oh I'm single I'm divorced I'm widowed unfortunately we have become accustomed to defining ourselves this way just because you went through a divorce doesn't mean you're a bad person but in this society today they say oh you're a divorcee that's your status add that to your profile and what they do the only reason by the way they ask you on the websites if you're divorced or not only one reason is to filter you out not them so give the ability to the other users to filter out I only want people who are single only so therefore you're paying for a website where no one can ever see you you're literally invisible but we don't really think about it from that perspective because we're not we're thinking from the user perspective the person who's using the website but if you think it from the administration perspective this is the reason they ask so I said I don't want people to filter divorcees out because it's not fair the experience doesn't make you a bad person let's say for example I'm on the street down here and I'm standing at a red light out of nowhere me standing at a red light a car hits me on paper I have been in an accident does that make me a bad driver it can make them a bad driver they just hit me from nowhere but we are both in an accident even though it doesn't show who's at fault so if you're in a divorce status nobody knows what your fault was you don't know what your story was a person whose every divorce is different there's times a divorce happens you have absolutely everything you can to make the marriage work but you get the exact same status as your ex how is that fair unfortunately it's not and this is sometimes I don't think the people who are running the show are paying attention to these things so I said I'm going to try to be a difference maker let me try to do things differently I don't want to label people by divorce let's just everyone's the same now does that mean that you know tell people that you went through divorce you do but I want them to get to know you first let them know you first and then if the divorce status is so important then figure that part out next you know what I mean so when we do like a typical matchmaking event and by the way we've done many in this room here when we do a typical matchmaking event typical organizations not us they say this is the range that we are accepting applications you have to be either between the ages of 22 to 40 so you go and apply for this thing and then you're like wait a second 22 to 40 I'm 41 I can't get in well sorry but what can I do nothing we have nothing for you what if you have nothing for me so you tell me there's no one in this world that wants to marry a 41 year old what are who's helping them nobody if you go to Istam, Mass, Ekna all these people look at this there's a hard cap I have a question who decided this hard cap who decided that now that I'm 41 that you're not worth getting married to like can I just meet the other 40 year olds that want to get married and just let us nope we don't even have a space for that you guys sorry so like this really bothers me really really bothered me the second thing is okay we have a divorced only event only divorcee so we only have this only what why so a person who's this before who's never been divorced before will never marry someone who's divorced that's not true my wife was never divorced she married a divorcee so and we've been happily married married for 22 years it doesn't define me again if I was if I have negative characteristics judge me by those things not because of something I experienced so then you go to these single events by the way what happens in all this type of stuff is I always wonder to myself are they really in the business of helping people get married or the business of being in business and that's where I find that even us divorce situation is a business I'll give you guys some examples from a non-muslim world how divorce makes a lot of money a lot of money aside from the stuff that you already probably know which is probably attorneys and other things of nature let's say sister from this side and brother from this side they get married well what happened well one of them will not need to live wherever they're living right now so that rental space will be up for grabs that apartment building or home will now be available to be sold and now they have a vacancy that wasn't there before but now let's multiply this by hundreds hundreds of sisters are married and hundreds of brothers they all get married until now we have hundreds of homes and apartments available for rent what does that do to the price the demand is not as high as the supply the price drops now reverse it everyone in this room imagine we're all married to each other and everyone in this room suddenly gets divorced now all the half of you will now need to find a place to live if all the people are trying to place to live that is going to make the price of rent jump up like skyrocket that's number one and when the price skyrockets gets what goes up also property tax so more property tax the houses are worth more more money out of your pocket your income tax oh you're single now fantastic we are going to tax you like crazy single status versus married status it's a big jump next I can keep going on and on and on but it just keeps adding up and I'm telling you that this entire business of keeping society keeping us divorced and they're not helping us get married I don't think it's just a coincidence there is no incentive and I'm not saying they're evil society I think it's just a financial business side of it there was a statistics that came out from CNN saying by the year 2030 45% of women will never have children and will never get married 45% you know who did that study Merrill Lynch it is not a social study and we're trying to figure out how we can stop no Merrill Lynch is a financial company who's looking for something called the she economy they're saying what can we sell women when they're all going to be divorced and they'll never be married in their life what can we sell them what can we make more money on and what should we invest in antidepressants alcohol makeup botox all those things close all the stuff that typical single people talking about non-muslims do that married people don't do married people are more like to save money married people are more like to be more stable less risky behavior less of this less of that so let's find out if we can get these people divorced let's see how much money we can make off of them and we as Muslims we have to stop listening to all this nonsense and a lot of this nonsense is coming through us through our phones remember I told you guys earlier that how the social media is so different than the movies because a movie you can press it off switch you're not watching movies 24 hours 7 days a week but social media we're on it all the time and when social media feeds you something and tells you for example oh you don't like women oh you're feminist or you're a red pill I'm not going to say you're right or wrong I'm just going to feed you whatever you've been watching I'm going to double down on it triple down quadruple down so all you get on your phone is this feed that's just overemphasizing the nonsense you already believe in if you hate men we'll make sure we show you every single video of every man who's done everything wrong to his wife if you hate women oh we have this pill called red pill for you every single man we'll show you how evil women are they're all here for take your money they're all this they're all evil and what happens is because you're constantly fed this information you forget for a moment that this is just your feed personalized the person who's sitting next to you is not getting this feed they're getting two different fees if you don't believe me make a separate account and start watching different types of videos and watch how your feed every single day changes with this feed here I have two accounts one for Baba Ali and one for half Fardin they're completely different they're feeding me what they want to feed me and this goes back to Fox News and MSNBC there was one time before any of that stuff by the way when the news was just there to inform you now they're like comfort food just feed you the nonsense so you think Muslims are terrorists here's every single video of negative people shouting Allah al-Aqbad and all this crazy stuff which like 99% of Muslims don't even act like this but that's if you're a Fox News watcher you may only see that aspect of it if you're growing up 10 years ago but if you're watching some other channel you don't think that way so now based on what channel you're watching I have to figure out what type of opinion you have about me and what type of social media you have on your feed will also tell you what you think about me but yeah so that was me I want to give you guys some information and hopefully if you found anything beneficial of anything I said keep me in your duos now I'm a much more of a solution oriented person so I'm gonna give you guys some I don't know how much time I have but I'm gonna give you guys some solutions of what you can do actually in your hands I'll just mention it just really quick so I put some notes for myself and I said what are some things because I thought to myself like look will they're gonna tell you oh you're this age nobody wants to marry you or you're divorced as nobody wants to marry you or you're this ethnicity nobody wants to marry you by the way all those negative things I was hearing when I was looking to get married all that stuff and I'm a convert too and I'm Persian nobody I don't know every other ethnicity there is but for whatever reason I don't know what happened to Persians they are not associated with religion whatsoever you see them at the college campus you see them at work they say weird stuff like say hi to God for me but they don't you don't see what the message is so for me to go to the message and look for like a Persian lady no way I don't care about ethnicity I don't see color I just want to find a good sister for marriage that's it my wife is from Kenya by the way she's not from my ethnic background she doesn't speak the same mother language as me we're completely different we don't have the same interests but alhamdulillah things work out so I thought to myself what can I give advice to people that they have actually control over that will make them attractive and as I'm telling you these things I want you to imagine a brother or a sister that you're speaking to for marriage and they have these attributes and tell me they don't suddenly become a little more attractive in your eyes alright here's the things I came up with that I said that makes people attractive 10 traits that make you more attractive number one someone who is content with whatever Allah has given you you're content you're grateful imagine a husband or wife with whatever situation they are in inshallah things will get better but whatever situation they are they're content having a husband or wife in that situation is 10 times easier than someone who's always always disgruntled number two someone who holds themselves accountable for where they are now and they don't blame others they take accountability so instead of just saying my ex, my ex, my ex look I'm not going to talk negative about my ex I'm going to rather look internally and say what could I have done to be a better person what could I do to be better if you have that mindset and you're talking to a brother and he says listen I'm not going to talk negative about my ex may Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala guide her or give her the best husband in the world but I realized that some of the things I would have done better would have been this, this and this and those are the things I've improved on and when he says something like that it's so much more attractive than if you're hearing him let me tell you how bad she was and like okay is he going to be talking about me like this you know so number three someone who is quick to forgive and late to anger being able to hold your tongue in times where there's especially when there's a lot of emotions and conflict going on that has a lot of value if you have a husband or wife a spouse that is able to do that is priceless and that will lead a lot of remove a lot of unnecessary arguments and disputes next, this is from the hadith of the prophet someone who is most beneficial to others there's many hadiths that are very similar one is the best of you who is best to his wives but one is specifically and this is my favorite hadith it's a very long hadith but it's my favorite of all the hadiths of the prophet it's one that's the beginning of it it's one that's the best of you is the one who's most beneficial to others and then if you have a husband or wife that has the mentality of being beneficial and you'll see people by the way in the local community those who are always beneficial to others when those people are missing they are truly missed it's like where is someone so everyone misses these people and you can be that person and again there's nothing that prevents us someone who doesn't compromise their deen even if they put them in an awkward situation all of us have been in that situation it's where being Muslim in this environment is very easy but sometimes being Muslim in a different environment is not so easy especially if you're the only Muslim I can tell you how many times I've been on a flight where I'm praying and people are talking to me I've been at the airport how many times all these random stuff happens and I'm the only Muslim in this area that's like I don't know if there's any Muslims in the airport or whatever but I'm praying so it happens but I don't care and the fact that they don't care that says a lot next one someone who has the life skills that will make him a good husband or wife this is something that's missing from our generation right now by the way a lot of people are like I want this this this this in a spouse okay what do you bring to the table what do you bring what life skills do you have that your spouse will find beneficial as a good husband or as a good wife so what can you do and people don't know so you have to develop these life skills and a lot of them by the way for both male and female learning how to cook will save you a lot of money guys a lot of money and that's a good skill to have our parents had it for some reason we don't have it someone who is humble and number 7 is only 10 of them someone who is humble has a humble personality even with the gifts that Allah has blessed them with if you're humble and you have no gifts that's easy to be humble but if you're humble and you've been gifted with beauty with wealth with social status with something and you're still humble not fake humble oh yeah I don't know how I do it so well it's so hard to be a millionaire no one's like that kind of stuff but truly humble that shows you that it's a very rare attribute to have and people who have it says a lot about their character number 8 someone who treats the least important person in their world with the same respect as those who are above them find the least most important person in your life person who for some reason a male's bathroom there's a person there just giving you a napkin and giving you a cologne and stuff like that no one even pays attention to this person or the janitor who's cleaning the place and no one's paying attention to this person treating that person with kindness and respect the same way you would treat if the president walked through that door a lot of times you'll see people treat people differently based on their status and what I can benefit from you and if you see someone treat even the least significant person with respect and with kindness it says a lot about their personality and by the way you will see all of these things that I'm referring to transform when you are disagreeing and arguing with your spouse because you'll see the level of discipline and kindness and their character because all of us no matter how perfect of a husband or wife you think you'll find you'll find somebody you are going to argue and fight with them in this world of difference we're almost done here number nine is someone who doesn't give up just because something is hard to do all of us will go through those challenges and sometimes things are really hard to do one thing that's hard to do is to get married go to these single events go on using websites go through your family tell your friends talk to people it doesn't work out talk to somebody else it doesn't work out talk to somebody else it doesn't work out man this is hard and that says a lot about you that shows you have resilience finally someone who has a discipline being able to resist things even if it gives them pleasure and what I mean by that is a lot of times it's hard for us to like for brothers is our challenges is lowering the gaze sometimes to see for the sisters their challenge is not as difficult for lowering the gaze but to be seen will be a different challenge Allah SWT has blessed them with beauty and so it's harder for like that challenges for brothers all the respect brothers we are not the beautiful creatures generally men are not like Yusuf's story Yusuf is so unique because there's like one Yusuf most men this is the thing that's interesting about sisters and brothers we didn't have too much time to go over this but maybe next time inshallah we'll see how the minds think so differently with the two genders the majority of sisters do not find the majority of brothers attractive I'm being honest with you guys I'll tell you something sisters that might surprise you the majority of brothers find the majority of sisters attractive it's different sisters if their sister is talking to her friend and their friends none of their friends find you attractive they'll make you a little bit less attractive but if all her friends find you attractive they find you a little bit more attractive for brothers it doesn't work like that whatsoever if all his friends don't find you attractive it will not make a difference if he finds you attractive or not if all his friends say she's very attractive it won't make you attractive if he's not attractive we're our brains think differently and Allah SWT there's wisdom in Allah making us different so we're not trying to force your husband to be like you or your wife to be like you accept the beautiful differences that Allah has made between us and if you do it will give you a lot less struggle with that and I think my time is done I have no idea are we done? okay yes okay so I want to make sure I don't go over my time I'm sorry I should be looking at my watch more often I apologize for any time I went over I'm sorry are your brothers sisters other than youngsters the natural innate features of every human being is that he or she loves to be in a situation that they can follow footsteps of those that they look up to hence younger siblings will look up to older siblings therefore we have children and youngsters that will look up to athletes you have people in every field that will always seek motivation they will seek a pathway through those who have come before them and have already tread the path they were the trailblazers of that path this is natural within us a human being is called insan which comes from the root letters of uns uns which means to seek compassion to seek a sense of love to seek relevance where a human being is seeking this throughout his life from every juncture of his life as a child as he grows older when he becomes a young adult when he becomes an adult and so on and so forth and in this journey or on this journey following those who he thinks or who she thinks will be able to allow them to be successful in their fields my dear friends the first question that we ask ourselves is who are we supposed to be following and what are the conditions that they must fulfill and they must have within themselves to be worthy of us seeing for worthy of us seeing them to be those that we can follow those that we can emulate those that we can bring into our lives in our children's lives and our family's lives one is to follow someone because they're an athlete so you also want to be an athlete we can accept that another is to follow someone because they are Allah has given them a mastery in a certain field of maybe a specific niche of work if it's management, if it's marketing, if it's IT we will also accept that the other is to implement someone's lifestyle into our life not based upon a niche but because we actually wish to earn into abide to approve those characteristics in our own lives so it's not a niche that we're following we're following that lifestyle we're following that mentality we're following that perspective we're following that pedagogy and methodology of living but your friends the condition that the Prophet gave us that if we wish to follow someone as all human beings need to do this is what Allah SWT speaks about following people and living our lives like other people who have already come before us Allah SWT says that these are people referring to the Prophet and the companions that lived a life in which Allah had guided them so as human beings we always seek to follow people he then says follow these people because they've already made it and for some he creates a template that if we wish to follow someone they must fit this criteria not in the niche of our life not in us being physicians or us being engineers or us being students in a certain skill set but in us being human beings and us being family members and us being husbands and wives and children and parents and us hoping to implement a lifestyle into our life and your friends if we think about it before the coming of the Prophet there was no community that was drowning in the ditches of depression and failure and crisis and chaos more so than the community that was present before the coming of our beloved the norm of that community was equivalent if not worse than the norms that we see today every vice that could have been thought of was not only present was popular in the community disrespecting the elders a lack of chastity a lack of loyalty burying their own daughters alive and when the Romans and the Persians would be told why don't you march upon the people of the Hijaz as you have conquered the rest of the world why ignore these people they would respond by saying these are people not worth ruling they're just not worth it they'll exhaust our resources and give us nothing in return we'd rather just ignore them how is it possible that in the span of 40 to 50 years the same people that the world saw not worthy of being ruled became the rulers of the world what changed it wasn't the literacy levels it wasn't the level of it wasn't the socio-economical abilities in the background it was changing it wasn't the lineage that was changing what changed is that they were given a system and a concept and a construct to follow which brought the best out of them which allowed them to be not only civil but conducive to the growth of the people around them they allowed themselves to be used to benefit people and this is what the problem says if you want to follow someone the person must have this condition if we wish to follow someone's lifestyle an online personality that becomes famous for this or that speaks about this topic speaks about relationships what some says if you want to follow someone not just listen but listening is also interesting the moment you give your ear to someone you've given your heart and brain to them because now they start planting seeds in your mind so even the people that we listen to we have to be wary of it so the problem says become a scholar become a scholar become a student of knowledge and if you are unable to become a student of knowledge become someone who loves the people of knowledge and he says if you cannot become someone who loves the people of knowledge be a person who listens to the people of knowledge meaning just listening is a part of the merit of this individual just listening creates a sense of benefit for this person this is why when the Quran is being recited we are told so even the people that we are listening to the people that we tune into the people that we choose to bring into our homes and our living rooms be it male or female that person is speaking from a lens that they have created because every system in this world every institution in this world every institution they redefine the definitions of words because those definitions benefit their missions those definitions benefit their systems those definitions benefit their vision similar to that was the coming of our Habib in Islam so Allah A.S. that the Prophet redefined the definitions of words what it meant to be a person what it meant to be even honorable and humiliated what it meant to be victorious or what it meant to be in loss that victory is not for a person who is applauded in this world victory is for a person who is applauded by the angels the moment they leave this world that the world may see people to be in a loss but that's not a loss for them because Allah is saying what I say that's a victory for them not for us but for them it's a victory was a victory for the Prophet he redefined the meaning of poverty when he would ask people what does poverty mean that would say that person has no money he would say no poverty is a person or is a person or impoverishes a person who comes on the day of judgment expecting that there is a lot of reward that is held for them but slowly but surely because they back bit they lie they slander all of their good deeds go to someone else similarly he redefined he redefined the meaning of masculinity he redefined the meaning of what relationships should look like prior to coming prior to the coming of our Habib what the relationships were like and after his teachings is a night and day difference it's a night and day difference because they followed the construct that he set in the lifestyle that he set where he was able to become the Qudwa the world model for all of those companions it wasn't some Allah in person who simply has a number of views that speaks about how you should treat your husband or wife but rather we turned towards those who have already left this world because they left with Iman we look at how Allah we look at how their endings work we look at how they lived their lives and for that purpose we have the Prophet we have Sahabas the person may say but they're not as relevant and the answer to that would be being irrelevant is a form of subjectivity of yours that's your subjectivity that they're not relevant because there's no way in the world that the Prophet Sunnah is not relevant today there is no way in the world that the Prophet Sahabas lives are not relevant today if they were not to be relevant they would not have been preserved it's the lens that we wear the lens of the world that have been given to us so the people that dictate how we treat the loved ones around us cannot be people who don't love us those people have to be individuals who also love us we would never take advice from someone on a day to day situation that doesn't know us that doesn't love us so how is it so that we allow people who are simply personalities in different places of this world to dictate how we treat people in al-qaim r.a. he says in order to take advice from someone they must possess at least three qualities three qualities the first one is that they have to be a nausah meaning that they have a sense of love for you they actually have genuine love for this person number two meaning that they don't have an incentive there's no angle for them that if you do this or do that there's no benefit or the construct that they stand for it's inflated no there's no benefit there's no incentive number two this person is they have experience in that field and number three the person has the person could be very well experienced the person may even love us but the fact of the matter is that if this person doesn't have the God consciousness of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala in their life they will give us or they will advise us with solutions that will earn the displeasure of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala so who do we follow? we follow a system which saved our societies 1440 years ago which was the coming of the Prophet what it meant to be a man from both scopes and what masculinity meant from both scopes and I'll share a few narrations to draw an image for us to understand what it meant to be this individual or this personality amongst these beautiful narrations where the Prophet taught us how to live like humans and by extension how to live like males and females and the whole idea of always thinking that our religion is irrelevant and that our concepts are strange because of the times that we live in it's also a push from Shaitan himself because when people start saying things like your systems are strange and what you abide by as a female or a male is strange or what you find to be relevant as a husband or wife is strange and we agree with him that's saying that what our Prophet gave us is strange or what our religion gave us was strange and the simple answer that I would ask for all of us to remember is we can only agree upon the definition of what strange is if we're able to agree upon what the meaning of normal is we live in a time where faster than the involvement of our industries technology everything around us that is evolving and changing faster than that there is a involvement a continuous morphing of concepts and things are normal that which was normal five years ago is not normal today and that which is normal today will not be normal in a few years because of how quickly the world is evolving or depreciating but the fact of the matter doesn't change that if they say that our system is strange we ask them by whose definition of what normal is we can only agree upon the fact that we're strange if we agree to your definition of what normal is in the reality of our time that every single person is a stranger to someone else's definition of what normal is every person is a stranger to this person's concept to this person's ism to this person's theology or methodology that's the reality of our life so if we rather be stranger to their systems and be normal in the systems of Allah SWT and the Prophet SAW so he gave us a system that will be relevant till the end of time because follow that system whosoever follows that system not a system that is only for prayer not a religion that came down to simply teach us how to fast or how to give zakat our religion was 20% of our religion is following the masjid 80% of it is found within the homes and our businesses and we choose to abide by the 20% hardly and the 80% becomes something that we say to the culture that it's a part of our culture to respond to our spouses like this it's a part of our culture to stand up for our parents it's a part of our culture not to make sure that we eat before our father eats that is not a culture thing that is a purely that's a concept that purely comes from our religion that teaches us etiquettes there is no culture that is worth standing for if that culture removes the construct of etiquettes to be kind to our parents or to our spouses or to our whoever our loved ones are because that just looks weird in our culture we say that's not a culture that we want to live by because etiquettes are something which is innate within human beings only our systems of our societies have stripped us of these normal etiquettes but nonetheless the Prophet Sallam taught us the most relevant concepts for the masjid for our homes, for our families the man who ran the kingdom in the domain of the Islamic empire the level of love he had for the people that were close to him we oftentimes find ourselves to be people who are kind to those who are strangers to us because there is a benefit for us when was the last time we were able to cultivate a relationship in which we were not the beneficiary the other person was a beneficiary when was the last time even in today's time even our handshakes are calculated that I will shake someone's hand because I can benefit from them I will meet this person because there is a benefit for me whereas Prophet Sallam taught us that the greatest level of character is when people interact with others to benefit them they are always looking to see how can I benefit this person not how can I take benefit from them in today's time in our relationships there is this seesaw where we are always trying to be equal we always want to make sure the benefit that we are receiving is justified the benefit that we are giving is justified by the benefits that we are receiving and every person husband and wife specifically because of the topic and the theme that we have we are always trying to figure out I am doing too much now but that person is doing too less she is doing too much this concept called ihsan it's called ihsan in the definition of ihsan in English is excellence or you could say the pursuit of perfection to make something as nearly perfect or excellent as you possibly can the definition of ihsan in our tradition for the beautiful hadith of Jibril A.S where he asked the Prophet what does ihsan mean all of you may have heard the hadith of the Prophet responding by saying and it's worship of Allah as if you can see him if you cannot see him then know that he can see you but dear friends, ihsan is the epitome of a person's worship that's the highest they can get they can't get higher than ihsan this definition of ihsan however is confined to areas of worship in ibadah this definition of ihsan has no presence in how we treat and deal with each other this definition of ihsan is how we pray how we recite Quran how we fast how we give charity do all of these deeds with this mentality so the question is what is ihsan when it comes to our responsible relationships our families, our children what is ihsan in that and this Imam Ghazali says ihsan for relationships is that a person that is a muhsan in a relationship will always give more than that which they were asked for they will always be giving more they will always be doing more they will always be doing more than what they're expected to do that's a muhsan they're not taking off boxes they're trying to grow a relationship so they're always doing more Yusuf A.S. in the Quran in Surah Yusuf in seven different areas Allah SWT identifies him to be a muhsan and the reason for that is because he's always doing more than what people ask him to do they ask him about can you tell us what this dream means that these seven cows that were fat were eaten by seven skinny cows he could have simply given them the dream interpretation but he goes ahead and gives them the solution that's a muhsan that a person who always does more than what they're expected to do and a person who always takes less they take less than what they deserve they deserve this much but they're okay with this not in the form of oppression not in the form of our rights being taken from us in the sense of just showing love to one another no relationship will continue progressing and growing if everyone only does what they're supposed to do no institution will grow if the people of that institution only come nine to five clock in and clock out meaning they only do what they're responsible to do that's what the expectation is institutions, corporations, businesses and families will grow because each person is fighting to do more than the other person that's what a muhsan is there's no such thing as muqafa don't be a person who's always trying to be equal who's always trying to just make sure that they're in the same scale as the person across the board from them rather he says be a person that that when someone does wrong to you you go back and do good to them these narrations that come about doing good to people are primarily found in the chapters of hadith that discuss the matters of the family the matters of the home not matters outside the home so bringing it back to how the Prophet dealt with these things this is the mentality the mentality was to be a muhsan the mentality was to always do more the mentality was to always be the hand that benefits not the hand that receives al-yad al-ulyya khirum min yad al-sufla the hand that is above is always going to be better than the hand that is below we live in a capitalistic society and to such an extent that we always want to be a consumer we always want to be a beneficiary so he sets the tone mentality is be a muhsan number two to always want to benefit people always try to benefit people it's the best of our ability and then I'll give a few stories when the Prophet shows this level of softness and in some stories where he shows the level of sternness as the man in his relationships and one narration that comes when the Prophet is in his home and I show the Allah and the Prophet get into a real argument the Prophet got into arguments the Prophet disagreed with his wives and his wives disagreed with him these were moments that took place in the best households and it takes place in all of the households that we see in our families it's a part of the relationship if we are good at what we do afterwards as the Prophet teaches us as the Prophet tells us it's interesting a sign of a person who has strong faith and a level of emotional intelligence and maturity is that their responses are not dictated by their emotions their responses are not dictated by their emotions their responses are dictated by their ethics and principles that regardless of what has happened to me today I come back home from work after a long day and I've been beaten I've been railed by my boss and this and that but when I get home how I respond to my spouse and my children will not be a spectrum that is paradic where the person doesn't even know what your response will look like they just don't know because their responses are always dictated by emotions a person has a good day they respond in a way that is kind, a person has a difficult day they respond in a way that is quite toxic this is a sign of a person who only allows their emotions to dictate their responses the Prophet deals with the most difficult things in his life but the Sahaba say that every time we saw him he was smiling he wasn't smiling because he was happy the Prophet lost he was having children in his own lifetime his smile was not a sign of his happiness his smile was consistently a sign of trying to make others happy trying to bring joy to the world he didn't allow his emotions to control his responses and his relationships there wasn't a spectrum people knew what to expect from him a good employee is an employee that every day when they come to work they expect from him you just know a good player is a player for basketball for example they are going to show up and give you this 2010 and 7 you know what to expect from them a good spouse is also a person that is not sporadic there is not a spectrum because their responses are based upon the values and principles of their deem everyone knows everyone knows the bare minimum of what to expect from them the Prophet is arguing with his wife even though he is the greatest human being the spouse is getting into debates one day a Sahaba was arguing with the spouse and he rushes to the house of Amir al-Mu'minin so he goes to Amir al-Mu'minin's house to complain to him that my wife is really giving me a hard time and as he gets through he is about to knock on the door it is an authentic narration narrated by many books of Hadith and as he is about to knock he hears on one of the Allah's spouse actually yelling at him oh my God I thought I was the one that was struggling this man is really struggling so he just steps back and as he is standing there Amir al-Mu'minin walks out of his home and he says what are you doing and by the way this is the flow of that relationship that he had with this community you can come anytime knock on my door don't try that at home with your Imam that is how it was over there so he says I mean we know nothing is not a big deal I mean like what can I even say it is like look I left my house because of this to come complain to you but I realize you are also struggling with the same struggle brother and Amir al-Mu'minin says no this is the least we could do this is the least to know how to control our thoughts to know how to control our emotions and he says he speaks about how there is always a high and a low meaning there is always moments where one person gets more upset then another person needs to remain silent and they help us in this and we help them in this and we play our different roles that Allah has given us because they said the demons are not the same regardless of what the world says to us their expectations and their responsibilities to some degree will always be a little different though there are many commonalities he says well we have it's okay it's not a big deal and this is there cannot be a more real man if someone came and drew a definition of what it meant to be a male and a man if they could draw someone it would be Amir al-Mu'minin this man no one could compete with him and this is what he's dealing with and where did he learn it from he learned it from our hadeeb why do people turn towards online personalities because we chose to stop reading our history we found it easier to watch a video than to read the lives of sahabas we ask our families and our children how many names of sahabas do we know and compared to how many online personalities do we know don't ask our children ask ourselves and then we say why are we following these people because we've given our mind we've given our body we've given our heart to these people so they suddenly they dictate and they control our decisions in comparison to if we were people learning about the lives of sahabas learning the life of our hadeeb how he dealt with different situations we would instantaneously turn back to his life in their lives and see what they would do the prophet of allah is having his argument in our book of Allah is walking outside the house and he hears it so you know it was a pretty loud argument and he knocks on the door and he walks in because ayah says his daughter there's no mahalam issue and he comes in and he says to his daughter hey you dare speak to my you dare speak to the prophet like this do you know who you're speaking to and he gets very upset like what's wrong with you right in our cultures if my son is wrong or my daughter is wrong no no it can't be it has to be the other person it can't be my daughter because you know maybe berdiya she's my daughter it can't be my son my son wasn't raised like this I mean we're all humans and everyone this is why Allah says be just even if it's against yourself and your family justice doesn't see people it sees the principle the principle of a personality is the concept of justice it doesn't matter who the person is it's about what they did and what they stood for the reason why we see a mirage of justice in this world today especially what's happening with ghaza is because people don't want to stand with the principle they want to stand with personalities they have a hard time standing with the people of ghaza not because of what's happening with them because of the fact that they see the personalities of the others that's what justice is for the people of this world but for us it doesn't matter who you are if what you did was wrong it's wrong and he speaks up to his daughter and as they're doing this she's still kind of having this back and forth the prophet they're having this back and forth it's so upset that he actually raises his hand but to kind of say hey man that's enough and as he raises his hand the person jumps in front of aisha of the Allah I know like he literally takes her and puts her behind her back and they say our prophet used to do certain things to his wives what Seela they read is beyond me what prophet they studied is really not what we can't understand because we've studied the prophet's lives and this is what we learned from his life that he would protect his wife from her father and his best friend this is the prophet's best friend and as he does this he says hey that's enough now you can leave you know what I love you men but you can get involved in my relationship like this you can leave now that's enough I appreciate what you did but that's enough and he leaves the room as he's still pacing he's still really upset he's pacing, he's walking and then he hears the prophet and aisha joking and laughing a few moments later because the prophet knew how to de-escalate a situation which we struggle with right and as he's walking and hears them laughing he knocks on the door and says guys can I come back inside he might allow to come back in and he says can I come back in and join in your laughter in your distress if you allow me to come in when you're upset let me come in in your fah and your happiness and the prophet let him come in and they just sat and enjoyed this was a the greatest man that the ummah has ever seen but at the same time he was a man of principles and rules that one day he brought a companion who was blind, Abdullah ibn Ummah Maktoum of the Allah into his house he was a blind companion he couldn't even see actually Allah is standing there and the prophet sees her and she's not covered her head and he sees her and says hey what are you doing here you shouldn't be standing here you should either move away or you should cover your head and she says ya Rasulullah the man is blind inna hua'ama what are you talking about you can't even see me which we will say what's the point everyone's doing it or there's no point this is happening anyways inna hua'ama the prophet is blind the prophet says well you're not blind you're not blind so that shows us that his personality wasn't subjugated by and his personality did not become an excuse to compromise his deem we allow our personalities to be such that their escape go for us why weren't you able to be more kind to your spouse i'm just naturally rough i'm just naturally very harsh so work on it wasn't Amrullah the Allah someone that was rough he worked on it and then someone asks us why don't you tell your family or your children about doing something in regards to our deen like wake up Rasulullah choose to go to this gathering and not go to that gathering i'm just too soft i can't do it i'm just too soft but you're not soft when you tell your son that he has to go to med school and tell your daughter that she has to go to this university is it your softness or is it your negligence or is it your priorities our personality can never be used as an excuse to compromise the deen of Allah swt as soft as the prophet was to his family members the principles of deen were always something that he made sure everyone knew of that i'm not going to compromise this so when it comes to my personal dealings i'm okay the struggle for us is when it comes to our personal dealings we're never ready to take an L so when it comes to religious matters we don't want to fight that battle anymore because we're always trying to win the battle of who's the bigger person in the house who's the person that has done more or less the prophet sallam is sitting in his house and as he's sitting there and Ashutana was the host and there were guests that came to the house for a da'wah and as these guests came to the house for a da'wah Ashutana was known not to be the best cook which is perfectly fine every person has their own traits and their own characteristics and their own skills that they have mastered so one of the other wives of the prophet sallam who was known to be a very good cook she actually brought food think of this she brought food to Aisha's house for the guests that came to her house now that's like when we were kids if we go to our neighbor's house to stop by and end up eating food there before coming home our mothers get really upset I was like you don't make me look like I'm not feeding you so imagine how she felt so what she did she got a little upset and she pretty much did one of these get this stuff out of my face meaning she hit she kind of tilted she hit the utensils in her hand and she dropped the food this is my house don't bring food into my house without my permission this is my place and when she did this the house is very small the house of the Aisha lana is where the prophet is resting it's a small place not a palace or a mansion and what she does is the prophet hears it and the sahabas are sitting there also hear it imagine if that happened in our home that someone our wife did something to someone or husband did something that wasn't my spouse that must have been the devil that's not my wife that's not my spouse it's not her for sure it's not him, I think it's someone else the balsam is sitting there and in this awkward moment the sahab is like this is pretty strange the balsam simply says the prophet says it's okay your mother Aisha has a lot of self respect she has a lot of self respect he didn't and it's very important for husbands he didn't bash his wife in front of the sahabas he could have said man Aisha I didn't know that you were like that I didn't know that you had that level of you had that challenge with with your co-wife I didn't know that but to protect her honor he started off by saying umukum sahabas you better control your thoughts that's your mother right there he honored her in a moment where she was compromised she was vulnerable and both husbands and wives must do this for each other this is masculinity for men but this is also a sense of honor for women so we should never allow our spouses to be exposed to the public their flaws and false balsams spoke about this in hadith but the greatest flaw of a relationship is when husband or wife this hadith refers to wives but it refers to both by extension speaks about the secrets of their homes to people the flaws of their the flaws of their husbands or wives to people this is what creates a sense of of a toxic relationship and why do people know about it no one needs to know about that and even the happy matters just somewhat be confined because people always have hasid and a'een the prophet says your mother has a lot of self-respect that's just who she is I don't know that's how she is so the point of these two stories is to show the prophet would always stand up for his spouses but that did not mean it meant to compromise the principles of deen our marriages are there to bring more deen into our life not to remove deen from our life they're not there to reduce the level of submission they're there to increase the level of when they say marriage is half of faith it's not the nikah itself it's what can come from this nikah now what can come of this marriage from now no relationship allows the compromise of deen to come into our homes and to come into our families you can compromise your self-dignity and respect your level of honour that's fine but we can't compromise faith and this is how the prophet was with all the people in his family even when Fatima would knock on his door and she would come visit the prophet the prophet wouldn't say you can come the daughter of the prophet would enter the prophet would stand up and he would go to the door open the door for Fatima kiss her between the eyes and the forehead grab her hands and physically take her to Majlisihe and he would make her sit on the spot that he was sitting like how much honour is this you sit where I was sitting you're on the head of the table now the prophet was with his grandchildren that his throughout the tradition of Shamail and Hadith we see how much the prophet loved Hassan Hussein Omaama his granddaughter the way he treated them that now he's on the day of Eid Obaqa Al-Lilana was saying literally playing tag with his kids as grandkids on Eid in one narration a Bedouin man came up of some says and he saw the prophet kissing Hassan Hussein he was kissing their eyes kissing their cheek and he saw the prophet doing this and he says to me I have ten kids O'Allah I've never kissed any of them I've never kissed any of them and the prophet said well it's not my fault that Allah has snatched mercy from your heart your void of mercy you've been stripped of love and mercy this is mercy this is love that Allah has endowed me with so that through it I can show love to my kids and my grandchildren but again they did not come at the cost of my children can simply the commandments one day despite the fact almost the prophet loves them Hassan Hussein from me they're from me and whoever loves them loves me and whoever dislikes them dislikes me and this is who the prophet is speaking about but one day Hassan Hussein was sitting as a six year old kid and he grabs a date from the wealth of Sadaqa from charity and as he grabs his date as he grabs his date the prophet takes his finger and plucks it out of his mouth plucks it out and he says we don't eat from the wealth of charity because Ahle Bait we can't eat from Zakat we can't eat from the wealth of charity he didn't just say let the child eat some candy I know has gelatin but he's only five years old he didn't say I'm just too soft I love my kids too much no the principles of deem we're never up for discussion everything else was that a compromise but Allah's commandments were always given the priority this is what masculinity is this is what it means to have a conducive relationship and these are the people that we should be looking at online to define to us how we should treat our spouses and families in what lifestyle we should choose to embody in our life the lifestyle which allows relationships to grow because of because of ihsan because we don't want to benefit and through the system that the prophet has given us anything else outside of this it's up for discussion it's definitely not something which is objectively clear right or wrong per se but it's up for discussion if it fits within this paradigm we will accept it if it doesn't fit within it then we will reject it we have a reference point we have tried and tested the Quran, the Seerah and the Sahabahs are not a system that we are testing that maybe it will work maybe it won't work we don't test the Quran we don't test the Seerah they have already been tried and tested for us may Allah make us amongst those people they understand that the people that are around us are living through their own systems their own lens and perspectives we live by the lens in the perspective given to us by the prophet who taught us what it meant to be who we are as humans the most honorable creation then what it meant to be a male what it meant to be a female what it meant to be a Muslim outside the masjid which is founded upon a person's good character their ability of being kind their ability of showing goodness to people their ability to always look to benefit people and the first recipients of these qualities of ours the prophet taught us to be our family must be our family one of the things that we see in his life we say in Urdu is that he will often be found expressing his love for his children expressing his love for his children his grandchildren his spouses, his family members this is what a male would do this is what the prophet would do when a man came to him and said when Amr Ibn A'us came to him and asked who is the most beloved to you your Aisha that means his own question so there was an expression there were constant reminders about how much the prophet loved people not only his family, but even the Sahabas because for him that community was all intimate for him there were all people that were close to him and every single person felt like they were the closest may Allah makes amongst those spouses those family members that always look for the other person's benefit that always look to do more and expect it to do and take less than what we deserve by doing so, we're not just taking boxes or formalities we're actually trying to continue growing our relationship and progressing within our relationship may Allah make us amongst those people once again I apologize for not being that person an amazing weather that you have in the day area I was in three cities in the last three days and scheduling kind of just cut me off please forgive us and I wish to be with you also insha'Allah insha'Allah we have our dear respected Isdada Hussain Mujadadi here she is an educator, author, public speaker spiritual counselor and mental health advocate with over 25 years of experience serving the Muslim community she began her Islamic studies at the renowned Zaidunah college where she studied with Sheikh Hamza Yusuf, Sheikh Muhammad Aliya Abu Bi, Imam Zaid Shaker and other visiting scholars she offers year-round classes spiritual and self-development for adults and youth through different local and national organizations for nearly 20 years Isdada Hussain Mujadadi has been actively involved in the Bay Area Muslim community working and volunteering for several organizations including Zaidunah Institute Rahma Foundation, Givelight Foundation and Celebrate Mercy JazakAllah O'Kern, insha'Allah Bismillah Peace be upon you I want to first and foremost thank our dear sister Sanaa for organizing this event and her organization for those of you who are online or maybe here but not familiar this is a really important organization that centers around the experiences of those who have have been divorced and are experiencing the life changes that come from that so it's a support group for that particular demographic but Masha'Allah she's been so thoughtful to put this event together I also want to thank the previous speakers Masha'Allah Sheikh Jaba I'm not sure if he's here and of course Mufti, Abdul Wahhab Masha'Allah for all of their insights and reflections so today I wanted to talk about the tranquil Muslim home and if you know me you know I like presentations just visual learners I like to also bring you along to what I'm speaking about in this way so Bismillah in order to understand what a tranquil home is obviously we need to look no further than the Quran and so Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'a tells us first he defines what tranquility is in many different verses but here's a few of them in Surah Al-Fajr he says Audhu Billahi Minash-Shaytan al-Rajim Ya Ayatuhan nafsa al-Mutma Inna irji'i ila Rabbiki Radiyatan marudiyah that Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'a will say to the believer O tranquil soul return to your Lord well pleased and pleasing to him so making the connection that a person experiences tranquility by prioritizing the pleasure of Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'a and then it's also a reward that Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'a will give us tranquility because we are seeking his pleasure he also says in Surah Al-Rum al-Ladina aamanu wa tatma innu qalubuhum bidhikrillah ala bidhikrillah tatma inna qalub those who believe and whose hearts find tranquility in the remembrance of Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'a for indeed in the remembrance of Allah do hearts find tranquility so these are the definitions Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'a gives us for the tranquil soul now marriage is also connected to this concept of tranquility Mashallah I know many of the other speakers maybe perhaps one or more reference this beautiful verse that really teaches us about the objective of every marriage it's to actually seek and find tranquility in one another and how do we do that through affection and mercy so there's a lot of these concepts, themes that you will hear over and over again that tie this objective of tranquility back to being affectionate being merciful, being compassionate and we'll explore that more in a moment other verses also let us know and indicate for us what we should be seeking just in our relationships but also from Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'a comfort right we specifically should look to our spouses our partners to be a comfort to our eyes we should also in order to do that practice gratitude we should be grateful because Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'a promises that if we're grateful he will increase us and that we continue to proclaim the blessings because once you lose one of your blessings you fall into error and in gratitude which is very dangerous for the soul but also for the relationships that you have so all of these are practices that will again cultivate tranquility in our marriages now those are the ideals and mashallah we've again heard from many esteemed teachers already about the ideals of Islamic marriage but we have to kind of bring it to the modern and the modern issue and so I wanted to just look for a moment at the different types of relationships that we're seeing today and I'm sure there's many iterations and different stories that we can share but in a nutshell I think it's very important that we define and understand what a healthy relationship looks like and today even according to researchers these are pretty standard definitions that a healthy relationship or a healthy household is defined by certain qualities among them are that everyone in that household feels safe so if you think about that for a moment it brings us back to this concept of tranquility right you can't have a tranquil home environment if anybody is feeling unsafe right and this is irrespective of factors like socioeconomics, race, culture education level, number of children or if it's even a single parent home if you want to see if it's a healthy household then that's the quality you're looking for does everyone feel safe and for the Muslim home this is predicated on the goal that the environment must be one in which the pleasure of God is a primary collective objective so that means everybody in the household in order to truly feel safe is seeking Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala and to please Him above everyone else above themselves so that is the again just you know in a nutshell the definition of what a healthy relationship or household looks like so in contrast what does a dysfunctional relationship look like and again I want you to look at the words here and think about why we have this crisis in our community of broken homes, broken families and skyrocketing divorce rates because dysfunctional households are characterized by incompatibility lack of trust this is really important financial instability, abuse, violence lack of communication lack of empathy controlling behavior perfectionism criticism addiction, isolation mental health issues spiritual disconnect this is really important lack of respect undefined boundaries emotional or physical and I'm sure we can add more but if you really think about any relationship that you know that has had any of these you will likely agree that it's contributed to the dysfunctions in that relationship and potentially even the dissolution of the marriage itself so now I want to also address another problem that I think is very much a part of why we're seeing these this is because our expectations of marriage are so flawed you know I as many of you know I give talks on marriage as well as parenting and one of the root issues is that we come to the conversation so late we're not prepared often times we get in relationships without any preparation but that doesn't mean that we don't have expectations and what are those expectations coming from it's usually informed by culture, by media by whatever else we're consuming and so we have to really address our presumptions our expectations and see where the myths lie and what's really what's really real and so the illusion of happiness this is something again when people talk about marriage what is the focus the focus is always on the wedding itself the excitement of marriage is usually very much tied to the celebration of marriage so we think about you know the big wedding halls, the clothing and all these ideals that we've been maybe especially I'm speaking to the women we've been maybe looking at whether it's bridal magazines or Instagram or wherever else we're watching people's lives or experiences or weddings or marriages we kind of start to shape this expectation that that's what we want to you know looking at also families and just believing that it's perfect and everything has to be picture perfect and so when you enter relationships with that again misconception then you're going to set yourself up to fail and so that is where again exploring what are the myths that were commonly taught to have or to expect versus what is reality so the first I would say is that marital bliss dunya is attainable and this is 100% a myth it's not attainable because and the reality which you just you know look to the right here is because bliss as a concept is for the after it's not for dunya it's literally defined as perfect happiness and great joy we are not in the abode of bliss this is not the abode that any single person can experience bliss especially as a state you know you might have a moment of bliss but to expect that something is going to always be blissful is again a myth it's just not real or that a perfect marriage quote unquote is a problem free one as we heard mashallah from mufti abdu wahab and there are many other countless stories not just from the seerah but from previous prophets the prophets of God who were chosen people the elite of humanity they suffered right due to their marriages and in their relationships so that is just again a myth that you should not have problems and it's the moment you have a problem that it's now something that you should just discard and that's why we're again finding unfortunately that the move to divorce comes very quickly for some people because they entered marriage thinking well it should be perfect and I should be completely all my expectations should be met and this person should fulfill every desire and hope I have in the moment that things become difficult and that's just again wrong and then the last one would be that the more righteous you are the more perfect your marriage will be as we again heard from our previous speakers the best of creation sallallahu alayhi wa sallam dealt with marital problems so this there's that correlation just to simply false marriage is meant to test you so when you adjust your expectations recalibrate and you start to think that these are real and Allah has placed us in the dunya to be tested and he even tells us that he will test us through our relationships now I have a more accurate understanding and from here we can begin to build and also just a further proof of you know and I just put this list together but I'm sure I could add on to it if I really gave it more thought the marital problems address are addressed in the Quran look at the different stories of the prophets and just you know and saintly people or other stories that are mentioned in the Quran that actually reveal very serious issues in households in marriages in families so this is just further proof that this idea of perfect relationships is simply is not true in this lifetime actually it's well I guess I was going to test you but there goes that I was going to ask all of you if you could give me a number of what you thought in terms of like you know marital conflict right what the statistic here says which is basically that most of marital conflicts go unresolved and I think this is really a consolation right for anybody who's in a marriage and you've been struggling and I know I work with couples all the time who feel like these are repeat problems my god it's been five years six or seven years this isn't getting resolved that it sometimes starts to wear you down and you just feel hopeless but when you start to again look at what's happening on the ground in households all over the world then you realize these are human issues this is just you know indicative of our states our condition as human beings and also the test that many of us will experience which is that likely not everything is going to get resolved and how you deal with that is really going to make a difference in whether or not you're going to experience some level of again tranquility or peace of mind or if you're just going to be resisting and in a state of constant anger and frustration all the time because letting go and surrendering is a very big part of our faith Allah SWT tells us there are things you will not be able to control outcomes we cannot control you could put so much effort into something whether it's in your marriage or in your children for those of us who have children we know that you can spend so much time investing investing but the outcome is with Allah SWT so learning that that doesn't mean that we don't strive for solutions but I think the reason why this statistic again is important is because it just reminds us that it's part and parcel of the marital experience to deal with struggles and some of those struggles may get resolved but some may not what are you going to do about it how are you going to deal with that running away and just discarding relationships isn't always the answer it might sound easy but that opens up a slew of other problems that if you're not really thinking through your decisions it may come back to hurt you even greater than the relationship you were in and I know plenty of those stories as well so may Allah just give us again proper and accurate expectations now as with anything right when we look to try to look towards solutions we don't look at symptoms especially in a marital situation you don't look at the symptoms you look at the systems where are the systems flawed what is it in that relationship that could be corrected in our marriages it's likely because we haven't really understood the rights and responsibilities and that's what I was saying before is that we don't prepare people properly they just enter the marriage because they're all caught up in emotions and feelings to far ahead instead of really doing the necessary work to say wait a second do I even understand what I'm getting into have I even understood the what's demanded of me before I start to draw up all the things that I want right because that's where we should be starting we should be starting from the place of responsibilities like what does Allah subhan that expect from me as a wife what does Allah subhan expect from me as a husband and when you start from that place and you start to build your understanding eventually you'll learn about the rights that you're owed but your priorities are very clear that you're more worried about what pleasing Allah subhanu wa ta'ala and so this beautiful hadith is one that's used often to help us to find the proper structure of a Muslim home but also just leadership in general where the Prophet says each one of you is a shepherd and is responsible for his or her flock and then he goes on to detail what that means so here very clearly a man is the guardian of his family and he's responsible for them so he's putting the emphasis and the focus on the responsibility of the husband that you have to step into the role of being the guardian of your family and you're fully responsible for their safety for their protection for providing for them all of that that's on the man and then for the woman as well he the focus is on what she is responsible for the husband's home and his children and so these things are very clearly laid out for us and if we really again start from the place of understanding our responsibilities then we begin to build a more accurate understanding and here is further further elaboration about this point about shepherding and how it leads to effective leadership and that's why the analogy is so powerful because if you think of the shepherd they have to be ahead they're in a caretaking position and so you must first learn what effective leadership is and again fulfill your responsibilities before demanding your rights and so when we take apart prophetic leadership what do we learn? we see that the Paul Veslai said him in his own life in his own spirit in a prophet whatever he was doing these are the qualities that he possessed he was focused he's teaching us to be focused to be responsible to be knowledgeable about what we're doing to be attentive to those in our care to be in control of oneself so this is where we have to learn how to do that you can't just be this person that flies off the handle to learn restraint so learning how to control yourself being resilient life is going to come at us hard there's a lot of challenges you might have financial issues you might have in-law troubles you might have issues with your children can you stay the course and just work through those issues and we'll talk about how we can do that but to have that resiliency to be compassionate as well you can't just expect a person that expects everything to go your way without also realizing that sometimes they can't always come through and just to have some mercy and compassion in general being patient, respectful, vigilant, consistent, humble all of these are prophetic qualities that were taught in terms of leadership but obviously they apply to a marital situation for both the men and the women we all have to try our best to try to strive for these virtues and then how to prepare for leadership like those are ideals and they'll sound really great they're obviously prophetic qualities but how can we do that well this goes back to a term that you've heard me say many times we heard Mashallah Sheikh or Mufti Abdul Rahab mention it which is emotional intelligence it's really important because it's a prophetic quality and what does it mean it just means you're able to identify manage your own emotions and the emotions of other people if we don't cultivate this quality then our men and our women will continue to see our relationships suffer and so how do you become more emotionally intelligent well first of all you start with yourself you have to know your own limitations your own weaknesses your own shortcomings and obviously work towards that just again as our teachers were saying before you can't be the type of person that says I am what I am that's it like there's no fixing this that's not the mindset of a Muslim the Muslim is always in the mindset of I am a work in progress I have a lot of room for improvement and that's something that should be you know that comes intrinsically from both again the husband and the wife that you yourself want to be a better version of yourself always so understanding yourself while understanding your own needs and then you look to those in your care and what their needs are and you also are vigilant like a lot of marriages unfortunately in my experience have also you know fallen because there wasn't a vigilance and if you think of the shepherd why is that analogy important because the shepherd has to know the threats the imminent threats towards his or her flock so you have to be aware of is this something that I have to protect my marriage from this could be other people it could be many things but you have to be at least willing to observe what are the potential threats and dangers for your particular relationship and not just going with the motions because that's when a lot of people have unfortunately things that they were blindsided by because they weren't paying attention and then prepare with preventative measures so this is where education is important this is where experience is important I was recently speaking to someone about the importance of young people especially for any single people listening or watching it's very important that before you think of marriage or before you find someone that's not the time to start to learn about marriage it's really important that you start investing in that part of your life way ahead of time and how do you do that yes you can take courses and workshops like this or attend lectures but I think a much better strategy is to seek out really healthy couples that are maybe a little bit older than you and to start to try to your orbit somehow or just learn from them, watch them, observe them look at how they're interacting with each other and that can be a really great education so that's how we try to invest in preventative ways to protect ourselves in the long run because we're looking to good models of marriage and if your parents weren't that that's okay they're human beings but there are healthy examples in our community seeking counsel is also really important we have to know when to turn and I can't tell you how many people I have worked with over the years they were their own barrier to help either one or both refused to seek help because the ego the ego is our greatest enemy and within a marriage it's very destructive to have someone who's so defiant seeing their relationship fall apart having maybe daily conflicts but still not feel something compelling them to seek help that's pure nuffs and obviously shaitan because he loves nothing more than to destroy the muslim home so we have to put our faith into practice and a dina nasiha the provisional sought out advice so who are you if you think you're better than the provisional I said I'm fear god he literally sought advice out in his relationships so if that's something that is a barrier for you then just realize you are destroying your own home by your own hands and god will hold you to account and then of course we have to rely on allah subhanahu wa ta'ala be humble and submit to his will so these are how we prepare for leadership and then of course there's continuous ways that we can self-improve the provisional reminded us and I love this hadith because it really speaks to something that we experienced today it's relevant today because we're in the age of social media where it's all about pretense it's all about optics so people walk around and they as again one of the speakers mentioned like on social media it's all the highlight reel of their life because it's image based but this is a clear warning the best of what a believing man can be given is good character and the worst of what a man can be given is an evil heart with a beautiful appearance so if you're ugly inside your home behind closed doors you're an ugly monster but then you're outside and you're just like everybody's favorite person you're the social butterfly people flock to you that's an effect I don't know what else to call it that's what the provisional is warning us about don't fall into that be a person who's more concerned with what as we mentioned in the beginning pleasing allah subhanahu wa ta'ala that's your priority and then this is another really important hadith what it reminds us of is that there will be times where you're going to be pushed to your limits but rise above rise above don't fall into argumentation don't be a person that gives into what our teachers call the default setting the default setting of the human being is low character because we're nafs at the end of the day and that's why when you study the new fruits we have the nafs al amar abisoo is the is the bottom base nafs that most of us start with right we're just completely in our appetites me me me it's all about me and then we have to overcome that nafs and when we overcome it and we start resisting we get into what? nafs al lawama right which is the it's the nafs that's challenging it's struggling it's against itself and then as we keep going in that direction inshallah we rise to the nafs al mudma inna the default is to be low to be argumentative but al waspah that gives us so much reward when we abandon those qualities for his pleasure and so developing beautiful character being upright honest conciliatory peaceful compassionate these are the things that will bring us ease right in our relationships beautification inward and outward it's important that we mention that because you know if you're as they say letting yourself go whether it's inwardly or outwardly it will cause resentment in the relationship and that and because life is hard and marriage can be sometimes difficult that's not an excuse to just forget that we are in a conditional relationship when we're married it's it's based on conditions you enter the relationship in order to have fulfillment of certain things and vice versa so once you start slipping and letting go of those things not taking care of yourself whether physically or inwardly then you are taking the rights of the person you married and so we shouldn't do that obviously we should do the opposite continuously beautifying our inward and outward states staying focused on bettering yourself instead of putting the focus on your partner and over managing sometimes and that's very easy to do right we're so quick to criticize others and completely forget that we ourselves have a lot of improvement and I can tell you again from having conversations with many different couples it's usually a battling it's a fight between you know where both sides are trying to convince me the person between them of why the other person is wrong and very rarely do you see a moment where one or the other or both will actually be completely honest and say you know what I actually do this this or that it's just always finger pointing and blaming and shifting the blame and deflection so we have to be more concerned with bettering ourselves and then abandoning the ego they need to be right as we just read from this beautiful Hadith learning to pick your battles you're not going to win every battle it's just not going to happen there's going to be times where you are going to be forced to swallow your pride and to do something for the sake of the marriage for the sake of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala that will be something that displeases you but guess what Allah is so generous that every time you do that for his pleasure you are being rewarded so is it a loss no but your nefs will tell you it's a loss because your pride is involved your ego will tell you you know oh you had to do this for him and then Shaytan of course is going to pour on fuel on that and make it seem like you're a victim and you are forced to do something how about rising above that and saying you know what I have my own mind and I want to I choose to do X, Y and Z because I know it's for the sake of Allah and that way you overcome your ego but being a person who really just is able to see that it's not always going to go your way but you're still not at a loss when you're doing it for the sake of Allah and then again being humble and remember Allah is all-knowing and will hold us all accountable if we don't behave responsibly in all of our relationships so there's no escaping his judgment at the end of the day you can get things out of people in this life and maybe you think you've won something if you by force or whatever but if you are taking away anybody else's rights we'll face Allah's judgment and that should be something that we keep in mind all the time so now let's shift gears to goals because whether you're married or again single and looking the objective again going back to the theme of tranquility is to create those safe and soulful spaces spaces where truly we feel we want to be home if you're running away from your home because there are problems there that you don't want to deal with there could be many reasons why but you should wish to change course you should wish to try to transform your home back into a space that you feel safe to go to and you want to go to and so how do we do that well we need to realize is when both the couple see that this is a shared path that we want to walk together with it's not one going ahead of the other it's together in unison we're walking on a path together that's what marriage is supposed to be so the team attitude is really important we're complimentary to one another that the Quran says right we're not adversaries so the power grabs that we see nowadays as a result of you know third fourth fifth wave feminism and the incel movement and all these other movements that ramp up men and women against each other to make us you know hate one another is not part of our faith it's literally toxic you know ideas, ideologies and whatever else political movements that have unfortunately infiltrated some of our community but we have to see it it's antithetical to our faith our faith teaches us to see one another in a complimentary way and never to give into this idea that you know we have to take power or else we will be powerless all of that you know those sentiments and those notions are just not part of our tradition and then how do we do that while we respect individual roles and responsibilities as we looked at the hadith of shepherding that's a very you know kind of general hadith but when you look at the examples of the Prophet's wife and his wives and all the other great men and women of our community their lives are examples of what it means to what the individual roles are right of between men and women as we said men are the maintainers this is in the Quran you cannot reject that to maintain their women what does that mean? it's responsibility it's amana and sometimes the translations and don't listen to the poor translations if they bother you they might frame it in a different way but it's not about it's more about responsibility than it is about power so if you're reading into that and it looks like oh that seems so unfair that's the wrong lens because nothing that Allah swt teaches or has taught us is ever unfair right Allah is the most just so it's about you know putting men in that's what you know which we'll get to in a moment but you know having an understanding of putting things in their proper place so the man's proper place in an ideal Muslim home is as the one who maintains the household and he's the one that we defer to for that responsibility and for the woman it's to again bring that beautiful warmth that love and inculcate a culture and a home where love is just flowing between everybody we can't do that if we're absent we can't do that if we're not at home if we're away from our homes all day long we're going to have a very difficult time managing the flow of love in our homes and that's what we see unfortunately and of course there are some women who just simply have no choice and I'm not this isn't about women who work versus being at home because there are certainly working women who can do this but it's about attentiveness it's about really focusing on your responsibility honoring innate differences you know we're living in a time where the gender binary is called into question which is insanity it's real it's true our Lord has revealed that it's true so what does that mean? Well there are true gender differences that we have to know men and women operate differently and part of the education that I think a lot of men need are on the differences of women and men in terms of the biological physiological factors women are under immense pressure physiologically from the start of their menstrual cycle all the way until death and I don't think some women even understand the effect of the constant bombardment of hormones and the fluctuations and how it affects mood how it affects ability, cognition memory, there's so much impact and if you as a man don't understand that you're not going to have empathy towards your wife but if you take some time to study and say wait a second her brain is being flooded by these very powerful hormones that impact her in so many different ways maybe I need to scale back and not expect her to create, you know, to cook a feast for my guests and then get mad at her and punish her so just practicing that empathy but that comes from knowledge and education and vice versa for women as well we need to also practice empathy for our men because the pressures that our men go through I mean I would never and I don't say this to insult men but I truly would never trade spaces with the men because the immense amount that they have not only to maintain their homes and marriages but also their parents, sometimes uncles, aunts, extended family members the responsibilities often fall on our men and then on top of that they have you know, kifaya for the community the men are going to be asked about certain things that we don't have to worry about as women so they're under immense pressure when it's time for battle nobody's looking to the women you know that's I mean depending on where you are maybe nowadays but the battle is usually it's the men that are called and so we have to appreciate that they are also under immense stress so when they come home and they just want ease to be you know, not to receive them with that ease is really important so these are how we are mutually considerate of each other's differences and really respecting the innate differences that we're created with and not trivializing them, dismissing them or erasing them this is not our tradition we don't erase what Allah SWT has created and what He has also made very real for us right and then admiring one another's individual strengths traits and skills is very important to reflect beauty back on to one another so when you see the strength of your partner that you're willing to compliment them to validate them to magnify those strengths instead of seeing them as some you know, some again source of threat to you that's just your nefs if you feel threatened by your spouses for example if you have a spouse who makes more income than you would you not see that as a great honor that Allah has given you someone what about Khadija our mother she was a woman of immense wealth and prestige and status did the Prophet SWT look to her with jealousy for her success or was he proud to be her husband and obviously he's the prophet of God so Alhamdulillah it's a two way thing but the point is to not be threatened by these things and then desiring one another's success always seeking mutual benefit this is really important so how do we do that well here's some again I know there's a lot of content here you feel free to take a picture if you want but just some very simple things that both husbands and wives can do and everything presented here is mutual it's not one sided I try to be very fair because at the end of the day it's it takes to right to either make or break a relationship so this isn't you know in any way a gendered conversation it's actually all across the board so mutual respect very important that we respect one another in the way that we speak that we don't demean we don't talk down to there isn't this whole top down sort of relationship model that we create no it should be just as the Prophet SWT in his own marriage he marriages he spoke to his wives as his partners not as you know as as their boss or they are his subordinates he never spoke to people that way trust honesty compromise and again you know we may not have time to go through all of these things but you know just really important another one is individuality this is really important because I see this happen where people enter a marriage and they lose their identity and we're also you know falsely kind of you know we're taught to look at marriage as this this notion that you come as a half a person and you look for your other half and no shade to brother Adi who has half our dean because that's a very different but I'm talking about just this idea that your partner has to complete you that's very dangerous why are you an incomplete person and why are you seeking another person to complete you or have you know agency of your own to try to strive for sense of wholeness in yourself and then you look to your partner to be your support in that but not the burden shouldn't follow a fall on them to do that for you right so don't lose your individuality have a strong sense of who you are and even in your marriage you know your individual identity is very important if you only become your you know your you know the wife of so and so or the husband of so and so and now you're you know in their in their shadow that's going to breed problems but you have to remember Allah has created us all independently right and and even though these roles are very important to be a wife and a husband and a mother and a father these are very essential roles at the end of the day our essential identity is what we are Ibad Allah all of us across the board and that means that all of us have to have some individual identity that we aspire to which is to try to again be the best versions of ourselves that which places Allah Allah good communication we know that at the end of the day that really is what can make all the difference is that we know how to talk to one another with respect listening before we jump in and interrupt and shut down conversations slam doors Allah be la where is this coming from this hostility this anger that's uncontrolled it's because we're not again doing that spiritual work and holding ourselves accountable and also we don't we're not learning how to communicate in healthy ways sometimes not every conversation has to be verbal I say this all the time if you're if you feel intimidated because your temperament gets flustered and I know this because I've seen it happen where some people their emotions override them so they have a lot of legitimate grievances but they cannot get them out then don't put yourself in that position where you undermine yourself and I'm not putting blame I'm just saying find a better way and the better way may be to collect thoughts jot them down write them down or find maybe someone else who can be your advocate and that's you know again where we're turning to people for counsel maybe a better option for you then fighting it then trying to advocate for yourself but it goes nowhere falls on deaf ears you never get any progress so these are the ways that we can learn how to communicate more effectively and then controlling our anger is very important if you've not done any spiritual work or haven't really studied the diseases of the heart this is a central knowledge before anybody gets into a marriage and I would say before you become a parent please take the time to learn Tuskegee learn the diseases of the heart there's 25 of them and start to purify yourself because otherwise they're only going to get worse marriage is is primed to test us so if you enter it with a disease heart full of diseases then it will only become more more more diseased whereas if you try at least to cleanse then inshallah anger is a big part of that and you know the many hadith where the prophet talks about you know not becoming angry right that don't become angry what he's saying is that sometimes mistranslated is not don't become angry because like literally obviously anger is a human emotion but what he's really saying is don't become anger right don't let the anger lord over you where all you are is anger because you can feel angry about something you may experience situations that put you in a state of anger but if you lose comportment and now you're just this walking ticking time bomb you know bursting at the seams unleashing anger on wife, husband, children in-laws if in-laws are in the home all the bilal that means you're not doing the work that you need to do in order to maintain yourself let alone your relationship fighting fair be a person who you know is sticking to the facts of the matter because there's a lot of gaslighting that happens in arguments and fights where it's like I just want to win it's not even about the truth it's not even about justice I want to put you in your place because I'm offended by you and I don't like you right now and that's not fighting fair I was a witness to all of that so we have to hold ourselves accountable to have some ground rules that when we argue or when we have disputation that we're going to remain respectful and our objective is to get to the truth not to win for personal victory what victory is it to win an argument with your spouse when you go to bed angry with each other the rules are upset the household is upset how is that a victory to anyone it's not problem solving spouses can learn to solve problems and identify new solutions by breaking a problem into small parts sometimes you don't need to tackle everything all at once so choose wisely empathy obviously self confidence being a role model and then the last one is also important we don't talk about this enough in these types of spaces but it is important because I've seen again a lot of abuse around that particular part of marriage and it is very important that we honor the rights especially as it pertains to the intimate rights of a relationship across the board and so taking the time to learn what those are what are the boundaries what's permissible what's not permissible and not ever falling into what we see today very common the weaponization of it right or the abuse of it this is not permissible it is a huge right in the relationship so if you withhold because you're angry at someone you're upset with them and that's your form of punishing them you will be held accountable the reason why we marry is for protection there's too much fitness so your partner is your protection from the evils and dangers out in the world and if you now become the reason why your partner is at risk for falling into something sinful you will be held accountable so that's a very important point and I'll lastly leave you with something I like to do play on words or acronyms something that I hope will stick with you because I know there's information overload happens whenever we come to these events but this is where you know learning that with time with patience with hard work we can create metal and this isn't metal as we understand M-E-T-A-L but metal as a quality because at the end of the day real talk marriage is difficult it's beautiful it has moments of joy it has moments of bliss moments it has experiences that are wonderful but at the end of the day it is meant to test us and to draw us near to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala so we have to be in the long game we have to look for the long game and the way that you do that is you see there's certain qualities and traits that if you spend time inculcating it'll help you to achieve a quality called metal which helps you through difficulties and facing any demanding situations in a spirited and resilient way that's what we want we want our couples our husbands our wives to be resilient to be again looking toward success and so how do you do that here are the ways mercy right inculcating mercy etiquette manners adab this is very important adab again the definition of it is to know to put things in their proper place so we speak with adab we deal with one another with with respect with mutual consideration watch your tone you know if you're snarky if you're you know understanding patronizing you are out of line no matter what you're saying because you're veering away from prophetic character right if you let your arrogance manifest in the way that you speak this is again the fault is on you you could be saying something legitimate but the moment you adopt character that is out of prophetic character you're in the fault that's it it's like you you undermine yourself so just be a person who's like you know what my ground I'll state my things but I also am going to be very mindful of the way that I relay those things and that's where etiquette comes into place and then trust you know it's very important that we have trust within our relationship so secrecy I mean suspicion is directly mentioned in the Quran not to be a suspicious person right it's haram this we know but there's also something to be said about creating a relationship where trust is clear you know if you are behaving suspiciously if your phone you never part from it your all your passwords are locked you can never your spouse can never even go near your phone I'm sorry that's highly suspect behavior and we shouldn't do that so building trust means open communication means having you know this feeling like I know that this person I can count on them I don't you know I don't worry about them there's honesty there's trust and then of course equality that's what we all want that's a byproduct of having good etiquette and building trust is you just feel very safe you're going to feel safe in a relationship where those things are happening and then on the other side of it mercy if I am compassionate towards my spouse then that brings them ease and when they are in ease guess what they're going to be more loving and it's this beautiful cycle that it's just you know all sides are all every all parties are satisfied and so this these are the aims right if we just put this into motion this wheel of metal then inshallah it'll give us the tools and the skills to continue the course again marriages is a path it's a path and it's a beautiful path it comes with hardship like any path does right it's very difficult to travel in any meaningful way without coming upon some challenges but when you get to your destination and you can stop along the way to those vista points and you see really beautiful things hey it makes the journey all worthwhile and that's how you want to look at marriage our destination is to Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala it's a gift to be married and it really is and we should we should want marriage and we should seek marriage and nobody should feel like oh because I've been married before I'm it's not marriage is not for me or I'm too old marriage is not for me leave that door open to always and if Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala I've seen beautiful relationships come with people for people who are who kind of maybe never thought it was possible for them but we just surrender to what Allah plans for us we don't plan you know especially for the future what do we know right so we surrender but inshallah may Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala protect all of our marriages inshallah and I really again want to thank all of you Jazakumul Al Khayran Alright, Ms. Mermin, inshallah we have Sister Hina Khan Mukhtar here and she's a married mother of three young brilliant men and one of the founders of the homeschooling cooperative known as Ilm Tree in Lafayette, California which now serves over 35 homeschooling families in the East Bay in addition to having caught language arts elementary, middle school and high school students she's also involved in interfaith dialogue Hina was a monthly contributor to the Muslim observers raising our umma column and also writes for seeker's guidance where she shares parenting advice and ideas for nurturing spiritual traditions in childhood. Jazakumul Al Khayran, Ms. Mermin Assalamu alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuhu So in 2018 I was blessed my husband and I were blessed in that we got to celebrate 25 years of marriage and as of this past August we got to celebrate 25 years now masha'Allah at the time seeker's guidance Sherfa Razirani asked me if I would be willing to write an article in which I detailed the tips and pieces of advice and the do's and don'ts of what I had learned over the past two and a half decades in married life and so I sat down and wrote this piece called 25 years worth of marriage advice article then developed into a talk and this talk is one that I give at various Lua parties so that article then developed into a talk that I've been giving at various they're called now Lua parties we didn't have them back when I got married in 1993 but masha'Allah it's a beautiful tradition that many families have started now where along with the bridal shower and the mehendi and the dolki and the little dance parties that young women have before their wedding celebrations they'll also have an event called a Lua party where they'll have somebody come and speak and give marriage advice and the elders will give advice to the young bride and her friends and so this talk developed from that and so primarily most of the advice in this article is geared towards women and for today's talk I've tweaked it a little bit so that it addresses men as well as women but what I want people to resist doing is I want women the sisters to resist thinking when they hear the advice in this discussion today well what about the men what about him why are you just talking to us and for the brothers I'd like to encourage that you refrain from hearing some of this advice and thinking aha are you listening to the wives and to any other women in their lives so this whatever you feel benefits you take from it inshallah whatever you feel doesn't apply to you feel free to ignore I will say however that everything I listed in this article has worked for me and has worked in the lives of women that I respect and admire whom I've been blessed to be able to observe and so I'm only sharing that which I feel actually benefits inshallah but I do want you to keep in mind that everything I am sharing is it is for those people who are in healthy marriages and by healthy marriages I mean that both spouses are God fearing they're not emotionally or physically abusive they know how to give their partners their rights they don't have any debilitating addictions vices personality disorders or mental health struggles so I wanted to say that from the get go because a lot of these tips only work if you're in the right frame of mind inshallah so the first big overarching umbrella piece of advice that my mother shared with us and many women, senior women in our community shared is make Allah suponathala your number one love and a scholar once told us that we should be looking at our orders of priorities in our lives like a pyramid so you look at it like a pyramid and you and your partner on the bottom and Allah suponathala is at the top and the understanding is that as you and your partner grow closer to Allah suponathala you also grow closer to each other and one of the other scholars said to us that you want to marry somebody who's going to drag you to jannah and upon first hearing that the reaction is drag you to jannah that doesn't sound very nice like sounds kind of violent and forceful what does that mean but what it actually is indicating is that getting to jannah isn't easy and there's going to be times that you're going to feel discouraged there's going to be times you're going to want to give up there's going to be times when you're going to be lazy and you're going to want a partner who's going to encourage you and motivate you until you know we can do this we're going to do this together inshallah so each partner wants to be that for the other somebody who's going to drag the other to jannah and so we want to look at our lives we're in our mid where we and our partner are down here on the bottom and alas panathala is at the top and we also want to look at our circles of concern and our in the core of our circles of concern in the core is alas panathala always making sure that his rights are met and then after alas panathala we women we look at our husbands and men we look at men look at their wives and their parents who are also their responsibility we look at our children after that our teachers and our scholars and our neighbors and after that the greater community and what happens sometimes is that people get the order of priorities mixed up and that's when you see the barakah leaving the marriage where maybe we end up spending all our time giving it to the community and we're not looking at what our children need or maybe we're giving all our time to our best friends and we're not looking at what our husband needs it's important to make sure that we look at our circles of concern and we make sure that alas panathala is the one who is in the center of it all we want to pray together and for one another supplicating every step of the way so anytime there's any major decisions to be made in the marriage praying salat al-staghada anytime you have a major need praying salat al-hadja salat al-hadja is the prayer of need is the prayer of guidance I know somebody who before they even buy a refrigerator they will first, even if they've decided this is the refrigerator we want to get they'll still pray istaghada in order to put barakah in the decision so again showing alas panathala is the top priority first and foremost like hasai said earlier that you want to make your marriage a means of drawing closer to alas panathala so your marriage is just you look at it as how much is he doing for me versus how much am I doing for him you look at it more as what am I doing that's going to be pleasing to alas panathala you want to have big intentions and you're not when you make big intentions and have big intentions you're not keeping score when you keep score that is what brings bitterness and resentment into the marriage so seeking alas panathala's pleasure and his approval is what's going to get inshallah all of us on the right track okay so the first section was make alas panathala your number one love the second section is work on increasing your love and affection men should know that women need affection it's a primary need for women and so we want to follow the example of the prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam the reason that he encouraged spouses to hold hands and to feed one another from the same plate just like any other blessing marriage can start to feel stale it can start to feel old you can start to take it for granted but these types of intimate gestures help reinvigorate the marriage you want to take note of the five languages of love there's a book out there that you can find that discusses the five languages of love is that there's five ways that men and women show love to one another five ways all human beings show love to one another and the way people show love is by providing service by giving your time by giving verbal praise and affirmation by giving physical affection and by giving gifts these are the five languages of love and you want to see which language your spouse is utilizing on you if you have a different language of love your spouse may not notice your language of love because they can't hear it because you're speaking a different language and I'll give you a case in point my love language is verbal affirmation big surprise I'm big about talking and telling people how much I appreciate them writing about how much I appreciate them and love them my husband's language of love is service he doesn't talk much about how much he loves you he's just quietly doing what needs to be done and the times that my husband and I butt heads or we have a conflict it's usually when we're speaking different languages of love and we're not hearing each other so I made an effort to look nice and you didn't say anything about how pretty I look or you didn't say anything about how delicious my food is that I made for you today and an example of a time when he was frustrated with me I was in his car and I came back and the gas tank was on empty because that's something he would never do he would never leave me with an empty tank of gas and so to him it was a sign of inconsideration for me to overlook the fact that I was leaving him with an empty gas tank because he's all about service so for me in order to make sure that my husband feels loved I have to get out of my comfort zone and do what I know my husband would do to show his love to me he gets out of his comfort zone inshallah and tries to make more of an effort of talking about things that I might want to hear from him another big need for women is the need for intimate conversation they say that men fall in love with their eyes and women fall in love with their ears and there's truth to that that there's a reason women love poetry and there's a reason women love deep and intimate conversations and why they like to get on the phone with their friends and talk to them for a long time whereas husbands are just fine hearing the basic details of what's going on the basic points and not going into too many details so that's something for men to keep in mind that women need intimate conversation and they need undivided attention when you are talking to them so you want to establish a routine or a tradition that nobody else is allowed to get in the way of work not your parents not your children for some couples it might be Sunday morning brunch for others it might be after dinner tea others may choose to go on an evening walk or read aloud to one another when they're in bed there are many who've established a designated date night in their weekly schedule the point is you want to have something special just for you two and then you want to jealously guard it it should be something that you both will miss if it ever gets taken away by the way something I actually meant to bring up in the beginning which I forgot to the title of my talk is actually about failing marriages and I'm actually an optimist and I'm somebody who tends to look at the glasses half full and so I wanted to flip the script instead of talking about failing marriages inshallah I'd rather talk about what makes a marriage successful and then people can look at that and see what is it that I need to be doing more of and what is it that I need to inshallah maybe stop so date nights and special time for one another is something very important to bring into your schedule you want to hold on to your passions and your interests you may not be into each other's pet projects and that's okay but you should be each other's biggest cheerleaders you want to ask sincere questions about whatever hobby the other person is into I am not into football I don't understand the game I don't get why my sons and my husband are so excited about football but I try to support them when they have their Super Bowl parties I try to occasionally ask questions about what's going on but I don't poo poo it I don't put it down I don't make fun of them I don't dismiss it as if it's something you know dumb my husband jokes that he's a coffee and donut guy married to a tea and scone girl we're very different about the things we like and that we enjoy but we do try to take a healthy interest in what the other person enjoys and without being condescending about it men need recreational companions they need somebody they need their spouses to be interested in what they're doing and to make time to accompany them for things that are of interest to them I was very touched recently over Thanksgiving break my husband went out of his way to take me to visit the birthplace of William Shakespeare in England and he is not into English literature he has no curiosity about curiosity about William Shakespeare but he followed me around while I went around you know checking out the room that William Shakespeare was born in and the classroom that he studied in he was a good sport about it the truth is if he made me go to a football game I don't think I'd last but alhamdulillah it was a sign of him you know taking an interest in that which I'm interested in Khidma or service the Arabic word for service wins hearts so filling his gas tank that you realize is almost unempty helping him complete the dreaded tax warms sewing on his button that you noticed came loose are all signs that you care about him and are looking out for him for some spouses actions speak louder than words so there should be a difference ladies between you being present in his life and you being absent as I touched on this in her talk and I'm just going to quickly skim over it but it's a very important point among the most important duties of husbands and wives in the Islamic context is the fulfillment of one another's sexual needs this is not something to be taken lightly spouses who insist on rejecting their partners advances cannot be surprised to then witness the relationship disintegrate there are situations when a husband is forbidden to approach his wife for intercourse during her menstrual cycle during her postpartum bleeding and during the fasts in Ramadan but outside of these cases it is imperative for both spouses to do their utmost to make sure that they are partners in every way not least of which physically always always pray to Allah Allah is great and glorified as he that he maintains the love in your heart for your spouse and that he preserves the love in your partner's heart for you Allah is the one who put the love in our hearts for one another and he's the one who can take it out just like that just like that if tomorrow your spouse decides that they no longer love you and no longer want to be with you there is nothing you can do about it is completely a gift from Allah that out of the billions of people in the world there's one person who's choosing to love you and you are choosing to love that person so you have to recognize it as a blessing and you need to be doing salat al shukr prayer of gratitude for that blessing okay the next section your grandmothers were right all men want respect ladies men need admiration they need to feel appreciated and they need to feel that their women are proud of them the wife may be the one to instigate most of the major changes in life she might be the one who brings home the thicker paycheck in some cases she may even be older however the husband should be given the respect of having the clear role of being amir or the leader of the family he should be honored by the wife and the children as the guardian of the household and he in turn should recognize that Allah is the guardian of his and his wife's household now of course acknowledging that your husband is the amir doesn't mean that you aren't vocal in sharing your opinions one grandmother joked the husband is the head of the family and the wife is the neck that turns the head you don't want to contradict or correct your husband in public same with husbands you want to give each other the dignity that your partner deserves you don't want to ever demean your spouse to your children if you don't honor your children's parent your children will not honor their parent either and remember it's still riba or backbiting that he or she wouldn't like even if you're only discussing your partner with people who will always love him or her you don't want to let down your guard when it comes to your partner's rights ladies if your husband ever buys you a gift that you don't love love it anyway try to see the heart of the gift giver behind the gift there are always gentle of honestly communicating your preferences at a later time and this is an important one for young people these days regardless of whether you had a social media presence before your marriage or not once you're married be aware of your partner's views on how much you post about yourself and your life with your partner you want to respect each other's limits put your cell phone and yes even your prayer beads away when your partner is trying to talk to you about their day give your undivided attention and teach your children who are old enough to understand that they are not to interrupt their parents time together laugh with your partner but never at your partner never laugh at your partner's expense okay the next section make your home a haven and ladies make yourself his hoodie and men make yourself her hero now I realize that there are many women today who are uncomfortable with the word hoodie but hoodies are real creations of Allah and they are described in the holy Quran as the companions in paradise and I believe that it's time that we reclaim this word and own it for what it is there's no reason why we cannot be little pieces of paradise inshallah and there's no reason why we cannot be heavenly companions for our husbands within our own homes so when you see your beloved for the first time after he returns home or after she returns home make sure to greet your partner and kiss him or her or hug him or her practicing muslim men and women who have taqwa god consciousness with men and women who are not their blood relatives and many of them are surrounded at work by other men and women who make a real effort to look attractive and to smell good you are the reward your husband gets at the end of a long dry day and you want to be soft and affectionate and fragrant men especially need to be physically attracted to their wives and men want domestic bliss what does domestic bliss look like everybody wants domestic bliss so this is an umbrella definition of domestic bliss but men especially are looking forward to escaping the world and finding that domestic bliss and support in their home what it looks like is peace and quiet and no nagging and it's a world that smells good clean and organized and it's not chaotic and where a person feels welcome and a person feels supported and so we want to make a real effort to make sure that our homes are the eye of the storm the whole world is in turmoil right now there's a big storm raging around us but every storm that Allah has created has an eye of the storm where everything is peaceful and quiet and things are not whirling around our homes can be the eye of the storm inshallah if both husband and wife work at it when you know that life has been stressful and busy this goes for the men as well as the women wait until your partner has had a chance to relax before asking them to do anything or breaking any bad news to them everything about you from your clothes to your hair to your skin to your breath should smell clean and fresh for yourself yes but especially so for your partner you want to be kind and welcoming to one another's friends but you don't ever want to be in solitude with the opposite gender and that includes not being alone with a person of the opposite gender on social media either it's very easy to think that you're safe because there isn't any physical contact but it's very easy to start emotionally attached to somebody else if they're showing you kindness and friendliness even if it's just through texting or on social media the next section is called conflict is inevitable learn how to manage it in a healthy manner so the first two years of marriage often end up being the most exciting as well as the most challenging even if you were to go on a fun best friends trip you know the men with their buddies and the women with their girlfriends if you were to go on a trip you're bound to rub each other the long way after being in each other's space for periods of time and traveling together so of course that's going to happen even with your spouse especially with your spouse and so in the first couple of years you're learning how to live your partner is also having to do the same but what it comes down to is that marriage isn't so much about struggling against another nuffs another ego as much as it is about struggling against your own nuffs against your own ego so expect to be challenged intend to grow it's perfectly okay to have different personalities and to have different interests variety is a spice of life but what you want to make sure is that both of you have the same goals for your marriage and for your future family and that you're both on the same page about how you're going to achieve those goals inshallah so one of my cousins caused a bit of consternation in our family when we were having a group discussion about marriage we were giving advice to a cousin of mine who was getting married and he said I don't believe in the word compromise when it comes to marriage my mother she was like what are you saying marriage is compromise but then he went on to explain if you think of everything as a compromise you're going to keep score and you're eventually going to become bitter once you decide to do something try to embrace it fully and believe in it don't think of it as a compromise anymore and we all agreed that there was wisdom in that you want to self reflect and be too proud to apologize the relief on your partner's face and the peace that comes in the home after suffering the sting of stepping on your own nuffs on your own ego in order to say I'm sorry I was wrong is so so worth it it's worth it it's a given that all of us are going to get angry at some point or another but it's when tempers are flared that people's true natures are revealed you want to be mindful of who you always want to be try even if it's a struggle to maintain your adab your manners, your etiquettes when you're upset being angry is never an excuse to break or throw things to scream, to curse to use foul language to slam doors, to pull hair to spit, to raise an arm or to throw punches these are all things that happen in dysfunctional marriages there's no excuse for them ever don't casually toss around the D word divorce every time you feel overwhelmed in regards to our interpersonal conduct when we're feeling frustrated it's important to always remember Allah subhanahtala is watching don't ever be disrespectful to your partner what does disrespect look like what is disrespect very simple rule of thumb if your partner thinks you're being disrespectful you are that's it if your partner says I feel disrespected you're being disrespectful this is a really big one that my mom always told us it's a golden rule when your spouse is angry or visibly agitated stay quiet in the heat of the moment you can always make your point at a later time there's always time later it doesn't have to be said right then and there when addressing your disagreements avoid using absolutes like always and never it's not fair to forget the positives in your spouse by saying you always do this bad thing or you never do that good thing it's rare that issues are black and white there are always shades of gray I just said always most of the time there are shades of gray so we shouldn't be so quick to condemn one another don't expect your partner to be a mind reader if something is bothering you discuss it set yourself up for success by beginning your conversation with an I statement instead of a you statement for example again, that was so thoughtless of you instead try to turn it around and say I feel frustrated when I find clothes all over the bedroom at the end of a long day try to avoid getting personal and don't assume that your partner knows exactly how their actions are affecting you give your partner the benefit of the doubt you want to learn to distinguish between a criticism and a complaint a complaint is an expression of a problem that you'd like to solve for example it's really frustrating for me to find a messy bedroom at the end of a long day that's a complaint a criticism adds disrespect to the complaint it is so frustrating for me to know that you're a slob why are you such a slob how are you raised don't go to sleep angry stay up and fight instead no I'm just kidding I'm kidding contrary to the age old advice to resolve all conflicts before going to bed sometimes it actually helps to sleep on a problem but first you have to calm yourself down by reminding yourself to have the what go or trust in Allah once you've had a full night's rest you can tackle your problems with a fresh attitude the next day what you want to make sure to avoid is sleeping in separate beds you'll be surprised how many problems can eventually get solved just by snuggling under the covers together it's shaitan who wants to separate you too always remember that avoid arguing in front of your children but if they ever do witness a loud disagreement between you and your spouse make sure to make up and apologize in front of your children as well show them that marital conflict is not the end of the world and that there are healthy ways to resolve issues let them witness you apologizing and hugging it out holding grudges breeds toxicity and dysfunction once issues are resolved don't keep up bringing past mistakes learn to forgive and then forgive every single day have a sense of humor about each other's flaws and foibles for example I am always losing my eyeglasses always I have I think 10 pairs lying around the house more my husband is always collecting them and putting them in a safe place for me but I'm still always losing them I wish eyeglasses had the feature that the iPhone did where you say Siri where are you then your eyeglasses say here I am but they don't but my husband never gets mad at me about it he's alhamdulillah always got a sense of humor about me being annoying honestly I'm being very annoying by always searching for my glasses as I'm going up the door but alhamdulillah just have to have a sense of humor about each other's flaws go with the flow and for other words just let it go just let it go alright the next section is called be a uniter and not a divider when you get to know you're in laws you're going to see that not every family does everything the way your family does and that's not necessarily a bad thing you want to take the good that you see in your new family and adopt it and you want to ignore the bad and you want to resolve with your husband however not to allow either of your families poor habits and poor choices to continue in the next generation that you're hoping to raise together inshallah you don't want to complain about or criticize your spouse to your own family you're eventually going to get over whatever was bothering you but it's going to be difficult for your parents and your siblings to forgive and forget so easily you want them to respect your partner so you want to be a veil for your husband brothers you want to be a veil for your wife physical abuse however is a non-negotiable deal breaker god forbid if that line is ever crossed you want to sound the alarm and you want to get help immediately if you want your partner to respect your family you want to have to show respect for your family first your partner will follow your lead if your partner sees that your family is always causing you to feel stressed out and annoyed then they're eventually going to start to resent your family for bringing stress into their own household so you want to protect and nurture that special yet fragile relationship between your spouse and their in-laws even if it's not a priority for your spouse you want to take the time to buy your partner's parents and siblings presence remember their significant days just because the prophet said give gifts to each other and you will love one another so go ahead and buy your in-laws love if your husband or your wife is ever upset with their own siblings or extended family don't jump in and encourage your partner in their negative opinions you want to defend your in-laws and make excuses for them and encourage your partner to see the good in them be their advocate if you have nothing nice to say just stay silent your partner may not admit it then but he or she will be grateful for your attitude later and will thank you even if only in their hearts because the truth is nobody wants to hear anybody else bad-mouthing their own family so remember when we talked earlier about the service being one of the five languages of love well here is an opportunity for one of the highest forms of service you want to be someone who helps mend hearts and helps bring relations together don't be a cause for discord in the family this next section is called don't try to keep up with the joneses you want to avoid debt like the plague a large fancy expensive house may do nothing towards making you happy however a small clean cozy simple peaceful home in a safe neighborhood filled with people who are hopefully trying to please Allah swt can very well feel like a palace in heaven inshallah responsibly managing the family budget will avoid a lot of stress in your marriage paying ribba or usury brings about all kinds of problems in one's life and it destroys the barakah or the blessing in the home don't ever pay interest even if it means you never get to own your own home or your own car in this life keep your akhira on make do with what you have and only complain to Allah for your wants and needs make your husband feel like a hero make your wife feel like a hoodie having said that don't hesitate to schedule time to have honest conversations with your spouse about anything that needs to be improved the key is not to become an irritating nag who is constantly whining and complaining and issuing orders you want to talk to your spouse when he or she is in the headspace to listen be grateful be grateful Allah swt says in the holy Quran if you are grateful I will surely increase you and Allah swt always keeps his promises remember not in this life at least so don't compare your life to others and at the same time you might not want to brag to the world about how happy you are or how perfect your life is ayin the evil eye and hasad malicious jealousy are two realities that Allah swt has allowed to exist in this world so you want to protect your marriage from them besides who wants to be the cause for pain or sadness in the lives of those who are struggling with their own love lives there are going to be little things that are going to irritate you about your spouse and sometimes those causes for irritation might start to feel like big things even when they are not at those times you want to remind yourself that perfection is only for Allah swt and you want to try to think about what your life would be like without your partner and you want to be grateful for a spouse who is choosing to somehow still accept you despite your shortcomings and if somebody else's husband or wife seems perfect to you remember that everyone has flaws and good spouses hide their spouse's shortcomings so you are probably not getting the full picture nor should you expect to this is a big one and I heard Babali touch on this earlier instead of chasing happiness try aiming for contentment instead aim for ridah for contentment don't take one another for granted your spouse is a duniawi or worldly blessing that can be taken away at any moment somewhere out there is somebody who would be more than happy to trade places with you so appreciate what and whom Allah swt has given to you the next section is called have a mentor in marriage avoid getting marital advice from people who you know are having their own relationship problems similarly stay away from getting advice from newbies who are still learning the ropes themselves I tell this to young people all the time don't get advice from your best friend who got married last year look to someone who has a long term successful marriage of his or her own to find out how to make it work try to find one wise discreet person to consult don't tell everybody your problems if somebody you respect says that you need therapy you probably do don't be ashamed to do whatever it takes to save your marriage give it your all if you do pay for marital therapy only seek out trained professionals who understand and respect the parameters and priorities of your religion you'll be surprised at how often well meaning but spiritually clueless therapists will prescribe the haram or divinely prohibited as medicine for a troubled marriage I know of a young couple who were having bedroom issues and their non-muslim marital therapist told them to watch pornography together that was what they were advised so we're very grateful for organizations like wasila and muslim marital therapists in our community who we can turn to inshallah ok and the last section is called set yourself up to soar spiritually your spouse may be your best friend or maybe he or she is not your best friend that's ok either way you don't want to neglect your good friends that you do have in your life you want to take time to nurture those bonds that help you be a better person there's going to come a day the women you're going to need the support of your sisters and there's going to be a time when brothers are going to need the support of your brothers but don't let falling in love make you fall out of friendship with your tribe you want to consider connection with your friends as part of your self care but remember that your spouse and your spouse's needs always take precedence if after being married people routinely mistake you for being single you're definitely doing something wrong you want to attend religious classes together religious workshops together either in person or online the point is to keep growing together spiritually you may not grow at the same pace and that's ok you're two separate souls after all but at least you'll respect the same teachers and you'll understand each other's motivations and goals instead of listening to those people who advise don't let marriage change you amend their words to marriage should only change you for the better take an occasional break and travel even if you can only afford to do so locally we're very fortunate here in Northern California lots of beautiful places to explore so get out there get out of your neighborhood and explore together but like Hussai said earlier make Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala your ultimate destination that's it thank you sister Hebel Haddad received her undergraduate degree from UC Irvine in psychology of social science later earned her master's degree in clinical psychology and has completed her PhD in clinical psychology at California Southern University Hebel is an affiliate of the Sanford Muslim Mental Health Lab focused on providing resources for clinicians, researchers and community leaders working with the Muslim population believing that prevention is superior to intervention she has worked on promoting awareness on many topics through seminars workshops and lectures through her previous role as a mental health instructor at Kaiser Permanente and currently as a closed center practitioner Hebel is a part of a group of clinicians and scholars who contributed to the publishing of the new text of the National Islamic Integrated Psychotherapy Model titled Applying Islamic Principles to Clinical Mental Health Care for Muslim Practitioners Nationwide so just to contextualize divorce from metaphysical perspective very briefly because my talk is not just purely metaphysical it's mostly scientific relating to psychology but I really wanted to contextualize what divorce is from our tradition, from our perspective because I think it's very often misunderstood and the way that it's contextualized in a non-Muslim setting is very different so I think we know that divorce or talaq is one of the most hated things in the sight of Allah's power to Allah that is the general ruling right however there are situations that I have witnessed directly in which there is harm being caused to one or both spouses in which that dispensation shifts to being a morally neutral event or something that takes place and it's no longer in that situation despised by Allah's talaq because harm is being caused now what do we mean by harm right what we mean in cases of abuse and there are many different forms of abuse that we witness amongst couples all the way from in-laws to the couple themselves to the children to relatives you name it, it happens and divorce is really part of your toolbox so for marriage we have a whole host of awesome advices and tools just like Hina and Hosea mentioned and I think Jaiba mentioned earlier as well given his topic but sometimes Allah decrees for something different to happen as an outcome of that relationship and I think in the past we have often viewed the success of the marriage based on the longevity of the marriage so if you've been married for 30 years 35 years, 40 years in some cases and that towards the end of life or as you get older I see a lot of couples who split up they often view that this whole marriage was meaningless if this is how it ended up if we are divorced or even if you marry young and it just doesn't work out and you have to move on you view that that whole relationship was a failure and that couldn't be farther from the truth and I'll tell you why so when I sit with individuals I'm able to assess and gauge how much growth takes place for an individual and I think one of the greatest tools for teaching is relationships so metaphysically the purpose of marriage is for us to be a divine locus of control in which Allah's Panawata's attributes are filtered out through the prism of your heart to the person that you share space with intimately now if I underdeveloped immature don't have enough experience didn't grow up seeing a healthy model of what a healthy marriage looks like then I'm not really going to know how to be as a person within an intimate space so everybody can do theatrics everybody can perform you know everybody does that we have to do that to a certain degree if you're arguing with your spouse you're not going to go out into public space and start yelling at each other or demeaning one another there has to be civil comportment and behavior but in private you may be clueless as to how you should engage with this individual because of a healthy sense of self you don't have a healthy relationship with yourself and you don't know how to carry yourself and you don't know how to connect with other human beings not alone someone who's so close to you in proximity that you have to share space with within a very small home environment from morning until night for the rest of your life so this can become a very challenging thing now I have seen as an impetus for growth sometimes short lived marriages can lead individuals to learning life lessons that they would never have learned otherwise and sometimes as a result of that their second marriages are much better because they have learned so much from their first experience and they have vowed they have promised Allah SWT that they will not replicate those same mistakes that they have made in the first relationship and so they view the second relationship as sort of a gift Allah SWT has given me this second opportunity in order to be a better version of myself in that past relationship and I don't want to ever repeat those mistakes again so sometimes this is what we see so that's why we say we determine the success of a relationship purely on the longevity of that relationship because sometimes short term relationships of course you never go into a marriage intending for it to be short short term you always marry for life and again if Allah's decree is something different for you at that point you understand that that doesn't mean that that relationship failed there are many things that I could have taken from that relationship and it helps improve me and grow me as a person so that the next individual that inshallah is blessed to have you in their lives does not have a similar experience and has a much more harmonious experience with the both of you and the dynamic now conflict resolution is what divorce is viewed as last resort it is not one of the first tools that we ever go to especially as muslim providers right we don't want divorce for our couples that we work with and so you want that to be a very last resort and there are a lot of things that have to be in place in order for islah or improvement or betterment for the marriage to take place and one of those very vital things is that both individuals have to have a keen interest on making the relationship work if one and usually this is what we see is one is really desperate to make the marriage successful and the other individual is not as invested right or they're very good at covering up how they really feel and they're very disassociated and they just show up and say I'm here because she's making me come and sometimes in other occasions the husband is the one who brings in the wife and the wife is very resistant and so both have to have an interest in making this relationship work and a lot of things depend on that interest so it's about the minimization of harm this is really why the dispensation moves to a morally neutral position because now I have an out if all the doors are closing in my face and I've tried and I've went and I've sought counsel and I've read books and I've worked on myself I've faced my inner demons and this is still not working out then it becomes harmful for you to actually remain in such a marriage because again if the other person is not invested in making this work then you are harming yourself because with each passing day you are going to feel like your self-worth is declining and your sense of self you're losing your sense of self I don't even know who I am because I'm acting now from a place of fear and desperation in trying to make this relationship work and every time you approach someone from a place of fear and desperation they run in the opposite direction that is not an attractive thing to an individual to see first and foremost it comes off as very needy and generally individuals don't like to be approached from that place they want to be approached from a place of love and that love is placed in the hearts of people and there are certain things that we as human beings, as flawed human beings do, to grow that love and nurture it and try to protect it as much as possible now when do you think about divorce? when you no longer can see the divine attributes of Allah's panohatata being reflected from your spouse where you don't see them in your spouse and I'm not saying at all that as soon as you don't see them you're out, no again, there's protocols that you have to follow there are steps and this is the very last tool in the toolbox as a dispensation for when it's needed but when you don't see the divine attributes for example you every time your spouse wants something and you know what your spouse loves I think all of us have an idea I know what my husband loves and my husband knows after 20 plus years what I love now if they are intentionally over and over doing that which you hate and it seems and it becomes actually very apparent that they're doing it intentionally out of spite, out of resentment sometimes out of hatred and hate comes from love it's because you once cared so much that you no longer care anymore but the beginning phase of that feeling was love and that's where hate also comes from so whenever I see extreme hate sometimes it's a good indication to me that this person still cares because why are they so wild up and so agitated by their spouse's actions if they didn't care and there's an underlying caring or concern that is a good sign for me that gives me some fuel to work with and to build upon that and to unlearn and relearn things and build and grow from there but if they are intentionally doing this because they just don't care anymore it's a state of apathy they're disinterested they don't care they don't have any desire to make this work actually in their mind thinking about other options while they're still in a relationship with you now this is when, for example we know that Allah's Panathana one of His 99 names is Ajama right this is when your spouse's behavior starts to reflect Allah's divine names in a very distorted way and they become al-Farq right or a manna arriving you but not in a good way for example, as when a wife is on her menstrual cycle and her husband wants to be intimate with her and she can't that's a manna but that's within the bounds of our faith that's not a bad thing so the example that I was giving was how Allah's divine names are manifested in a very distorted and corrupt way you know when a woman is on her cycle and her husband approaches her and she refuses because she cannot in that situation she's manifesting a manna but within bounds of our faith now when it is manifested in a way that is outside of the bounds right for example, she wants to spend time with him and he deprives her of his company and he comes up with a million excuses and the excuses just become more and more creative with each passing day so in that situation he is manifesting a manna but in a corrupt way because he's not helping to join the hearts and invest in the marriage he's clearly not interested in investing in the marriage and has other priorities so in that situation our teachers always say that when you are distracted consistently consistently is the key word here from your purpose of why you are here in the short time allotted to us in this life you are consistently distracted consistently putting out fires consistently feeling attacked or deprived or neglected even or abused because neglect is also a form of abuse you're not nurturing something it's not worth your time so in that type of situation in those types of scenarios that is when I cannot ascend in my relationship with Allah SWT because I'm constantly being pulled to the lower levels in which my needs as a human being are not being met so when my needs as a human being are not being met I cannot ascend spiritually or try to gain proximity to Allah SWT because I'm too busy trying to be loved trying to feel safe with someone emotionally trying to being in a caring, nurturing relationship and that's not happening I'm constantly fighting for that so that is a situation in which after you've sought counsel, after you've sought help in this individual whether it's the female or the male are not holding up their end of the deal then that is when divorce becomes an option that you consider now interestingly enough I think we have this backwards we often say that divorce rates are becoming like exponentially growing and I think something to keep in mind is at the time of the Prophet Adam SAW divorce were very simple and they were not complicated processes because you did not view your spouse as the end all be all they were not your soul mate it was you married for practical reasons for economic reasons for spiritual reasons there weren't as many expectations placed on marriage now in 2023 going on to 2024 I haven't seen a process that is more complicated than divorce and marriage both and I think our expectations one time I heard a quote that said expectations are resentments on lay way we have as the world has become more post-modern our expectations have also grown of this individual and this individual is now viewed as your entire village so and the reasons for why people are marrying have changed drastically drastically now it's become all about romance and love and I'm not saying any of those things are bad or not significant they absolutely matter you absolutely have to be with somebody that you are attracted to you absolutely have to be with someone who you enjoy their company not every time you're sitting and spending time with them you feel like your well of a body is being poisoned that is really problematic and that is not so cool that is not tranquility that is not harmony you cannot have a loving who is always the antagonist someone who is always antagonizing you or someone who is always irritating you or someone who is always just getting on your nerves because you just don't really appreciate talking to them, you don't appreciate their sense of humor you don't appreciate their outlooks on life or maybe you just don't have shared goals so incompatibility can poison the well and it can make you detest your life being at home or despised being at home and this is a really significant problem and so in the Judeo-Christian traditions and faiths divorce wasn't really welcomed it wasn't really something that was viewed as an option up until 50 years ago but Islam has always had that dispensation marriage and divorce always took place so my teacher always says that divorce rates in the western world have now caught up to the Muslim world because for us it was always something that's permissible but only as a last resort and especially in the Christian faith it wasn't something that was even permitted it wasn't even something that was viewed as an option until 50 plus years ago now ideal time for a divorce is you don't want to wait until you hate each other and cannot stand one another to think about divorce because you're not going to be able to work out arrangements and the finances and all of this you can't even communicate with one another and now you need a mediator who is the third party who is trying to talk to both parties because you can't even talk to one another anymore that's when you know that you've waited too long and you don't actually have to wait until there's hatred between the two hearts it's something that poisons the souls and it also impacts especially if children are involved in-laws are involved all of your friends that you had as a couple it will start to impact those relationships as well all of that shifts with divorce now very briefly divorce statistics I'm not going to get into this because there isn't that much time but the average length of a marriage prior to the consideration of divorce is approximately 8 years there is something that we call in therapy the 7 year itch in which you start to really think about did I make the right decision is this the right person for me maybe there's someone better out there and especially as you are exposed to the lives of other people increasingly more so with the advent of technology and social media etc you start to actually believe that there may be better out there I'm not saying that's not the case but it's detrimental to your marriage when you are constantly exposed to the lives of other people thinking because you're not seeing other than their highlight real so you're thinking wow he's always always taking her and traveling and her husband's always treating her so well and they eat out so often and look at the status of their life look at the quality of their life it's infinitely better than mine and you start to despise your own life and you can't have that riddle you cannot have that contentment if you're constantly eyeing what the other has right you can't cultivate gratitude for your own life and now divorce rates are declining interestingly enough but I think that's because not as many individuals are getting married a lot of people are living together outside of the institution of marriage so therefore if you split up there is no divorce that's required right it's very simple we can just go our separate ways third marriages have the highest divorce rates of 73% right because usually if the first and second time did not work out well for you usually not always but usually there is a more significant problem that is not being addressed and you keep hopping from one relationship to the next thinking that I can get away from this problem if I just change the partner but what you're not realizing is the problems inside of you and this is why it's being manifested in every single intimate relationship you try to have now common causes of divorce are as all of us know and I'm going to get a little bit deeper into this beyond the superficial surface level of what we may often hear is lack of commitment especially in this day and age again where there is an over exposure to other people and their lives there is a lack of commitment many couples who divorce say that I just wasn't able to commit I just couldn't commit and I couldn't fulfill all the requirements and expectations that my spouse had of me and so the easy way out is just to call it quits and move on a lot of people did not know what marriage entails and I think this is a slightly problematic issue within our cultures is we're not very forthcoming about everything that the marriage entails the good, the bad and the ugly because every relationship has the good and bad and ugly very much so minimize the ugly and we try to enhance and increase the beauty in the relationship if someone treats you well if someone's caring and nurturing and someone's genuinely concerned about your well-being as much as their own that is the divine attribute of Allah being manifested and who wouldn't want that someone who genuinely cares for you at the end of a long day that you can go in and share your day with the good and the bad 60% of divorced couples cited infidelity as a reason this is not really surprising and much of the infidelity takes place on social media and on apps there are infinite ways of hiding relationships today that is very scary because it invites you to that which creates darkness in your life and something to keep in mind is that all of our actions either produce light or produce darkness there is a semi-permanence to our actions and the only way they are not permanent is through toba is when I ask for Allah's affl when I ask for Allah to completely overlook the bad that I've done but every action and every word that I utter produces either light or darkness now a really good way to assess the beauty, the health or the dysfunction of your relationships is to look at what actions you produce because every human being is a producer of action and a receiver of experiences all you receive from other people are experiences what type of experiences if you want to be a self-aware person and someone who is close to Allah's panohatana you have to face yourself in this very real way what types of experiences do people have when they are in company with me and this is where a lot of people are very blind to this area they have a huge blind spot and they have created an illusion of how everybody loves them they seem as their praises but unfortunately people are unable today more than ever they lack courage to be real and honest with one another and to say a lot of people actually do not have a positive experience with you because if I really love somebody we make a lot of claims as human beings and we tell one another I love you and you're the best thing ever and you're so amazing but yet I don't share any feedback with them because it's not possible that everything they do is perfect so how is my claim of love for this person real so I think assessing what kind of experiences other people receive from me and what type of actions and what type of energy am I putting out there is it light or is it producing a lot of darkness because I'm just having more and more conflicts in my life and I'm having a lot of obstacles and a lot of issues that's when you have to take a step back and say hey what's going on here because I don't think everybody else is always to blame there must be something that I'm doing that's off that's misaligned with what Allah would like for me or the manner in which Allah would like for me to live my life and I'm just going to continue I'm sorry so reasons couple struggle and please understand that these are very simplified relationships especially marriages are very complex they have many layers that we peel with each session and it takes sometimes a while to unpeel or to peel back all the layers that are necessary and not all the layers matter very significant layers there's a lot of couples there are a lot of couples today who are together but not really together you look like you're together you have children you attend events together but yet your home life is void of mercy love intimacy and when I say intimacy I'm referring to generally there are several dimensions of intimacy that we look at there's spiritual intimacy do you do any acts of because I sincerely and genuinely believe that couples who worship together will in sha Allah stay together there's some magic to that but there's spiritual intimacy there is intellectual intimacy this is actually really important for those who value academia or more of the spiritual side of the world and if you are with someone who doesn't necessarily share that that's fine as long as there are other dimensions of intimacy that you connect on right and there's physical intimacy and emotional intimacy all of these are huge all of these really matter and so you have to be connecting on some dimensions of intimacy but some lack of emotional maturity is a really big one because I cannot be in a relationship with someone if I struggle with holding myself accountable I'm never wrong I can never apologize it's always somebody else who is causing something and it's impacting me but I'm never able to say say I did that and I know that it really hurt you and I can visibly see the hurt on you and I'm sorry for that action this is our prophetic model our beloved Annihilator has exemplified this beautifully for us so why do we struggle so much in being able to embody this and act it out in our own relationships if I cannot be emotionally mature if I cannot receive feedback without lashing out if I cannot hear someone say anything about me and I immediately shut down or I cannot I can no longer engage then I cannot be connected to other people there will be a lot of disconnect because what keeps happening is every time things don't go your way you retreat and so if you retreat inwards I am no longer in a state of connection with anybody else right? I'm not even really connected with my own self I'm in a state of just disassociation trying to protect myself I go into self-preservation to minimize the hurt it really hurts my ego it really hurts my nefs so I'm unable to be in an intimate relationship with somebody else because we have to configure what works for the relationship and what doesn't so it's not necessarily that you're a bad person or you're doing anything bad or harmful but I'm just doing something that's just not working and that's just a personality thing it's not a character thing now when it requires a discussion is when it is a character thing you know hey I've noticed we're not praying together anymore or I've noticed we delay prayer a lot or I keep praying by myself or I notice that you're always yelling at the kids or I notice that you're always coming home late what's up with that right? is it something that you're trying to avoid is there something that you're running away from and being able to face your spouse in that manner because that invites them to be real as well and to open up as well because if you're constantly in a state of people pleasing that is a form of emotional unavailability your partner will never really get to know who you are because you're not ever safe you don't feel safe expressing who you actually are and I look at the women because my sister is all of us struggled with this all of us have been conditioned to believe that our needs don't really matter and that you can't really have dreams your role as a wife is to only support the dreams of your spouse and your dreams don't really matter your dreams are just to raise the children and that's if Allah decides to bless you to grant you that hibah in your life because children are a hibah so it's thinking about that it's thinking about am I emotionally mature can I be in a relationship with someone else or do I have to still kind of face myself and grow myself in order to achieve that desired aim to be in a loving connected relationship with someone else lack of transparency I touched upon this earlier certain things are very off limit and of course you are your own individual there shouldn't be someone babysitting you there should not be someone checking after you making sure that you're not texting other people making sure that you're not misbehaving that is not really an equal marriage that's more of a parent to child dynamic if you feel like you're parenting your spouse this is a really big problem because they won't feel respected they won't feel like we're not really on equal footing here and it doesn't feel good and I don't feel like I'm in a loving connected marriage this is kind of reminding me of how my parents used to treat me in our household and so you don't want to replicate that feeling you don't want to re-enact that feeling in our lives lack of courage and a lot of process to ask the difficult questions and I cover this a lot with college age students who are embarking on the journey of marriage and they don't know what questions to ask and sometimes when we go over questions now we have a way within our tradition in which we embody and incorporate Edeb in asking questions we do not believe questions or even enforcing boundaries in this very cold and harsh manner that does not suit our cultures or it's not befitting to enforce boundaries with your parents in that manner it comes from a very westernized lens of psychotherapy and it doesn't work for us right so if somebody is encroaching upon your space you can't say hey I don't really appreciate the fact that you're not giving me space you can't really talk to your parents like that or you can't really talk to your spouse like that you're not going to get a good outcome so you have to be able to or somebody that you're considering for marriage you can't really ask them very crude or too open of questions but there are very you know sensitive ways that we come up with in our collaboration by which they can get the answers that they want to get and we just want to get the answers we don't want to get necessarily the answer that we want to hear but I need to be able to hear the answer that's true for this person because I'm not marrying someone based on a lie and you can't sustain it and then it all comes crumbling down six months a year three years later because it will no one can sustain a lie for a long time before Allah decides to reveal it now again I've touched upon this over exposure to others private lives lack of familiarity with your own emotional territory I would say this is a massive one in our cultures because we don't emphasize communication we really emphasize which is a beautiful thing so you know that somebody cares about you and loves you because they do things for you they serve you, they think about you they're considerate but we also have to advance a little bit in the realm of communication because we really don't know how we feel or why we feel the way that we feel about things we can't trace it back to a place of origin you know I'm so demanding as a person because as a child I was really deprived I wasn't paid much attention to I come from a very large family and it was not possible for my parents to tend to all of us and give us quality time because they are human they're wonderful human beings but they're human and they have limitations so I grew up to be a very demanding person in my relationships and this is what you would call friends who are high maintenance are they really high maintenance or is it coming from a place that we need to have a little bit more compassion for now in the marriage you get to decide can I live with this can I fulfill this person's needs or will it be too much considering my own capacity that is a question that you have to ask yourself and be honest with yourself in because not everybody can meet someone's needs if they have slightly higher needs but perhaps your needs kind of match one another and that can work out really well because you understand one another and you understand where that comes from so that can work out in that manner now just a little snippet of many situations but this is a very small one that reflects the breakdown of marriage and why marriage is with time breakdown so Amina says why don't you ever talk to me this is a very common complaint I hear from females about their husbands he comes home and he doesn't talk to me I ask about his day, he gives me the same response every single day and so I don't really know what's happening with him and she feels shut out she feels uncared for and she feels like she's not really a part of his life because if you think about it, if you're out of the home 8 to 9 to 10 hours every day and you're only home on Saturday and Sunday and if even that if you're not socializing or hobbying or whatever it is that you're doing then how is she supposed to know that you care about her how is she supposed to know who you are how is she supposed to know what triggers you throughout the day how is she supposed to know what upset you what made you feel amazing what made you feel appreciated and accomplished if you're not sitting with her and sharing these things with her so Yusuf responds and he says and these are made up names of course Yusuf responds and he says I do have a problem tuning into my feelings I'm not sure what I'm feeling so I stay silent but if I look inside right now all I'm seeing is irritation on your face and it just triggers me and it doesn't feel good at all when I see that look my body tenses up and I brace myself my mind says here we go again you're messing up you can't even talk to your wife in the way that she wants you to at that point I just want to leave and I just want out of this I see this big load of rejection coming towards me so it's easier for me to just duck and run Amina exclaims I didn't know that she legitimately did not know that this is how he felt because he had never verbalized it put words to it in this way and this is a huge breakthrough so this whole time I thought you just didn't have any feelings which is impossible whether people let you in on their feelings it's a different issue but everybody has feelings and I just thought that you didn't care about what I say that sounds really tough and the last thing I want is for you to feel rejected like a screw up I just need to know what's going on with you I appreciate you staying with me instead of leaving as usual and helping me understand and what he's helping her understand is his emotional inner and what that looks like for him and feels like for him now avoiding we all have emotions and we have slightly tougher emotions and then we have the softer emotions of sadness, shame, guilt that we don't readily let people in on right these are very intimate feelings that you only share it usually comes out in the therapy space but you only share with individuals or loved ones hopefully your spouses if you are married at this time or future spouses this is definitely something that has to be shared with a spouse now avoiding your softer emotions and not expressing them is a huge problem because this is what contributes to creating a divide in your marriage and you're no longer understanding the inner world of each other so research shows in emotion-focused therapy in particular and I really like this intervention with couples because it addresses any traumas that exist within the marriage from childhood and so it's focused and based on attachment and your attachments as a child and growing up and without taking into consideration these attachments I cannot actually see a couple sustain success in their marriage long term so we can sustain change for the short term but it will all come again crashing down and they will end up back in therapy again so research shows that the more you can pinpoint and put words to your emotional experiences the more you're able to cope with them so being able to tell your spouse about you being and visiting your family that's not the issue but when I'm in that space with all of those people and they're very high energy that's an amazing thing but I'm not very high energy and so being in that space makes me feel very anxious and I feel like I'm unable to keep up with everyone and I feel like I'm failing and I feel like I'm not speaking enough I'm not contributing enough and what are they going to be thinking of me I'm putting words to my experience so my spouse is not in the dark because your mind is designed to fill in the blanks so whatever I'm not being told directly my mind is going to be filling in the gaps because my left to sheath on is going to be activated and it's not going to be filling in the gaps with very nice things it's going to be filling in the gaps with the worst of things because your sense of self and your self esteem are on the line in a marriage so being in a romantic relationship makes you vulnerable by default you're in a state of automatic vulnerability when you love someone or when you care about someone and this sparks your deepest darkest fears so you're down out of fear of conflict or self preservation really a fear of conflicts is really self preservation I fear pain maybe I've experienced so much pain in my past and so the more pain that you experience neural pathways in the brain the more sensitive to pain you become and this is a biological fact so if you've gone through a very difficult past you have to consider a lot more things because I don't want to be living in more pain because now I'm very sensitive to any pain and I can't really handle a lot of pain now there are ways to build resilience from that place I'm not saying it's like a final destination that you constantly have to honour you can grow from that place and you can gain resilience back but it's going to take time and a lot of safety am I talking about safety I'm not just talking about physical safety I'm talking about emotional safety do I feel safe opening up to this person without a fear that they're going to judge me or put me down or use it against me am I comfortable enough telling this person how I feel about my experience the truth of my experience without them lashing out and shutting me out do I fear being yelled at do I fear being called names do I fear being hit there is no emotional safety in any of these scenarios emotional safety sounds like someone was quiet someone was able to listen without constantly interrupting and interjecting with their opinions and you can agree that this is a very heated topic and I know that both of us are going to want to interrupt each other and correct your version of the experience that's not who I am I can't bear to be that person right but you're able to listen to the other person and then say that once we've heard one another out we'll each have equal times 15 minutes each to be able to share our version of the experience and how we saw things because the key thing in relationships is not communication as you're always told understanding what's the point of communication if I can't understand what the other person's experience is or what they're telling me so understanding is the vital core ingredient and sometimes I cannot touch upon earlier is we speak totally different languages and if that continues to be an issue and no one's budging we can't continue to share our life together I have to be able to take there has to be a little push and a little you know a little bit of pushing, a little receiving and each one of us is budging a little bit we're making some sacrifices but if I'm super stuck on my perspective is the only perspective and this is the only way that our children will be raised and I'm raising you as well as my husband and you have to do things according to how I want there to be done there's no more shout out there's no give and take this is more tyrannical and we can't run a marriage like that so when you shut out people or loved ones, family even your spouse you're going into the mode of self-preservation you're avoiding pain you're not avoiding that person but you're avoiding the pain that you anticipate will come out of that interaction in conflict it feels like when you shut someone out the brain recognizes that this is a danger to you I'm losing that person they don't love me anymore this marriage is falling apart these are all the types of thoughts that come flooding in and so it feels like you're talking to yourself it doesn't feel like you're talking to the other person because they're not hearing you they're there but they're not really there they're not engaging they're not even looking at you or making eye contact a lot of the time habitually shutting your spouse out in difficult conversations predicts problem escalation stress the breakdown of the marriage and very likely divorce stonewalling as John Gottman calls it he's one of also the top researchers on marriage and he does retreats with his wife I believe Julie Gottman he talks about stonewalling which is when I put up a wall in front of me and I don't respond I'm not expressing, I'm not reacting I'm not doing anything, just stonewalling you and stonewalling according to bonding science turns on the panic mode in your spouse's nervous system because again the flight of thoughts that come streaming in is that she doesn't love me anymore he doesn't care about me he would rather be somewhere else than here right and so all of those are threats they elicit a fear response from you and not a response that can help you remain calm in order to be able to really listen to the other person this stonewalling triggers desperation so have you ever seen or been in situations where you're arguing and you start to stonewall and the other person becomes even more desperate we're not going to bed until we figure this out or they go and they block the door I hear this a lot from spouses she just goes and stands in the doorway and doesn't let me get out and that's desperation that's panic, that's anxiety that's fear so if you recognize what you're doing to your spouse by shutting them out and stonewalling you don't want them to be in a state of fear hey let's talk about this as too mature adults I don't need to push you into this state repeatedly because we're never going to get anywhere and 70% of communication is nonverbal by the way only 30% of our communication with other human beings is verbal so if you look completely you have no expression on your face you don't even look concerned or you look agitated or you look angry that is the first thing that your brain will register is someone's expression not their words their words are all secondary or tertiary even but the immediate thing that will register in my mind is someone's expression and sometimes as a child looking at your parents face after a gathering you knew if you were in trouble or not immediately just by looking at their face you could tell if you're going to get a whooping after hopefully not or if you're safe you're okay everything went well because they smile they're giving you safety signals or they just look like you better run because it's not going to be good and that is the first thing that you register is Panama now we understand the emphasis of our beloved Jesus when he encouraged us to smile and that is smile as charity and when we talk to someone we face them with our entire being because I don't want to send the signal to anybody even a stranger that they don't matter to me or that they're just nothing they're insignificant and I have better things to be doing with my time so there's a lot of things when you understand the science everything reaffirms what we are taught in the Seerah and in the Quran and in our tradition injuries to the marital bond what is an example of an injury a very common injury are affairs research shows that 65% of couples who suffer injuries such as affairs this destroys the trust and safety but yet contrary to popular belief a lot of people are able to come back from that a lot of people are able to overcome that but it's how you dealt with the affair avoiding discussion of it is not going to make it go away unfortunately you have to face it as ugly as it is how well the couple open up to one another and explore contributing factors how did we get here there are reasons believe it or not and especially if your spouse and this never justifies that's not what I'm saying especially if your spouse has been communicating to you their pain for a long period of time and you have done nothing to take it seriously or do anything about it understanding where that affair came from when the injured spouse can speak of their pain and you hold space for them without getting defensive without reacting just quietly holding space for them showing that you are concerned and that you care in a very long way contempt is a top predictor of divorce that's when you get sarcastics, snarky you just you put them down in a very direct way you're not trying to be nice or courteous anymore and this is very much against our prophetic example but where human beings and human beings fall into this often and this is one thing you want to absolutely try to avoid which is being respectful even when you disagree if I can't be respectful this is not the right time for us to be having this conversation you need to give yourself some space to regulate not knowing the right questions to ask within your marital bond we always encourage asking one another evocative questions which help you piece together your spouse's internal experience day today so when she says you know I went out with my friends and they were all talking about a trip that they went on and I didn't know anything about this trip to you usually a husband's response would be like oh well I'm sure they didn't mean to exclude you and they just move along you're not really understanding her internal experience so asking an evocative question would be when they were all talking about it how did that make you feel that invites her to get more intimate and that is also very rewarding on a physical aspect because if she can be more intimate with you your physical intimate life will be great that's just how it works but if she doesn't feel like you invite her to open up and share her internal experiences your physical intimate life is going to suffer because she doesn't really feel genuinely care and are concerned for her and her well-being and her experiences not having a healthy attachment figure in your earlier years if you have one figure in your life as a child and alhamdulillah it's only one and many people can have this it's not asking for many but if you have one person in your childhood that was somewhat stable that you could go to and they didn't lash out at you or overreact and they held space for you this is a healthy attachment figure that you had in your life even if they weren't perfect they lost their temper sometimes they hurt you sometimes that's normal all human beings are going to hurt one another we can't be delusional about that aspect however they just had to have been there for you 70 to 80% of the time this is the attachment figure in your life it predicts the success of your future relationships as an adult alhamdulillah it plays a huge role if you didn't have this it's not the end of the world it does not mean by any way shape or form that you cannot have a healthy marriage you can but this is a time when you would have to seek therapy preferably a Muslim therapist and if not attachment work doesn't necessarily require someone to be spiritually oriented devaluing your spouse or marriage I spoke about this earlier so what I mean by that is whenever your spouse tries to make a repair attempt they may not be able to apologize but they feel bad about what they've done so you're in the kitchen doing dishes and she or he come and just stand around the kitchen they're not really doing anything right but they're just kind of lurking around you know that they feel bad right so in that situation try to help them don't try to use against them see you can't even apologize why are you even here right so you don't want to be like that because that's not really helping your partner overcome their own childhood traumas or their own woundings or their own insecurities or their own difficulties you want to be able to meet them halfway so turning towards them John Gottman says in those situations predict the success of a marriage as opposed to you know that they're there but I completely ignore them and I finish dishes and I walk right out of the kitchen and I don't turn towards them to try for that to facilitate that repair I ignore that repair attempt because that was an attempt using power and control to exert oneself over your spouse you're like a pharaoh at home a tyrant who expects everything to go his or her way and this is in other words this is like narcissism where you're a hollow shell inside of this shell I don't really have a strong sense of self I don't really know who I am and so I demand things right and I expect things to go my way and I have to be considered first this is narcissistic behavior someone who talks about themselves a lot in a very positive light you know I saw so and so and so and so and they were like praising me and complimenting me but they speak like this a lot in the quran do not speak highly of yourselves if I'm truly a good person inshallah ta'ala inshallah we all are and just being here you seek change you seek improvement that's an indication of goodness but you don't want to be that person who's singing your own praises this is very problematic it feeds that seed everybody has a seed of narcissism within them everybody can be a pharaoh when we're told these stories in the quran they're not just stories from the past they're very relevant to our lives and many situations that unfold in our lives and if you don't have a narcissistic partner you might have a narcissistic supervisor and if it's not a narcissistic supervisor you might have a narcissistic friend and if it's not that friend it might be a cousin and you don't want to go around labelling people but it helps you understand what is going on with this person so someone who struggles with narcissism doesn't really have a strong sense of self doesn't feel good about themselves they don't like themselves very much so they overcompensate by constantly talking about how everybody loves them because inside they don't really feel loved because if they did I wouldn't have to speak about it I wouldn't have to tell anybody about it it's something that I genuinely feel right so using power and control and then spiritual misalignment on our wonderful speakers mentioned and touched upon this earlier now sometimes if there's a significant decline in spiritual practice I had a couple once in which husband and wife got married wife is a hijabi they're both praying a few years later there were several traumas that they both experienced in the marriage and as we know if a trauma is not processed well and in a healthy way it can take you in another direction and so it can take you away from Allah swt closer to Allah swt and this is where a big part of our job comes in is helping people dissect these traumas reconstructing them and then making meaning out of them and sometimes the meaning that people draw from their negative or traumatic experiences confirms somehow in their mind that Islam is no longer for them and so a number of years later our hijab started doing smoking and drugs and drinking and toxic and things like that and there are situations in which there is a big spiritual misalignment in which one of the spouses stops praying and this is becoming more and more common unfortunately and you cannot force someone into spiritual practice I can inspire out of place of love through my own spiritual practices and see how transformative it is in my life how amazing it makes me feel how better of a person it helps me become but I cannot force somebody to be more spiritual if it doesn't come from within and as I mentioned this earlier 69% of conflicts are perpetual not resolvable and there are two types of conflicts resolvable, perpetual every single couple will have perpetual conflicts that they cannot resolve because it's based on personality differences temperament differences but can we agree to disagree respectfully without putting the other person down that is the skill that you will have to acquire in order to move past these respectfully and not constantly bombard this person with how they're not doing this or how they're not doing that or how they're not helping you etc etc quickly, three key factors relationship, having an A-R-E relationship this is the foundation of every marriage in addition to all the spiritual aspects that were mentioned earlier in the talks earlier if you do not have this foundation within a marriage your marriage will not succeed this is why marriages break down are you accessible to me when I need you in my greatest time of need in my darkest times in my most turbulent times are you there for me as my senate as my pillar or are you nowhere to be found will you respond to my needs without fearing them without running in the opposite direction when I show you what my needs are are you a safe person for me to show you what my needs are will you emotionally engage your attention and stay close or are you avoidant or anxiously attached and proximity scares you it's not the partner that scares you but being close to someone intimately scares you and you go in the opposite direction and this is the case for many people and again this is something that's resolvable now it's very interesting because Sue Johnson is the founder of Emotion Focus Therapy she talks about how sometimes she has couples who come in and sometimes she mentions sometimes it's the husband that has this issue my wife is not being intimate with me enough so she asks him well what are you asking of her three times a day every single day and it's really funny because Sue responds and says that's not actually what you need you think that's what you need but all you need is to be held but you can never say that to your wife so you mask it it's masked as physical intimacy and you think that's what you need but all you need is that very childlike need that every adult has of being held and of being seen doing this no they may be capable but they're unable they haven't lured that skill they haven't faced themselves they haven't overcome their own traumas of living love is an ancient survival code that is designed to keep those we depend on close by if I love people in the right way they should want to be close to me you know loving people in the right way when you're driving people away and don't be quick to blame them look at yourself first and ask the difficult question is there something that I am doing that contributes to driving people away and remember that we are wired for connection and the last slide and I know Sarah's gonna she's had it so I'm so sorry I'm wrapping up but loving someone the right way is about health and well-being you cannot be healthy when you are not connected to other people in an intimate way right it absolutely has everything to do with your health and your well-being this is why there's the dispensation of talaq because if you are not being loved in a way that you understand or in a way that you need and it's persistent and it's consistent and nothing, no interventions are working then you really have to ask the question am I gonna wait until disease manifests in my body because my needs are not being met just to put up appearances and it takes a lot of courage to do this but breaking away from those relationships amicably compassionately as much as possible that dispensation is there for a reason do you feel emotionally safe reaching out or reaching for those you love research shows that having one secure connection in life leads to having a stronger immune system lower blood pressure because the opposite when you're home and your partner is always aggravating you your blood pressure goes up immune system goes down you get sick a lot so you can't actually thrive in your life because you're barely your core basic needs are not being met so again you're always putting out fires either the fires of inflammation within you because you're always unhappy or the fires outside of you that are being caused as a result of you being unable to go higher and higher spiritually, emotionally, physically etc less likely to have a heart attack and a stroke and when you do have a heart attack and stroke you recover much quicker when you have that one secure loving connection it serves as a buffer your recovery rate is higher when you fall ill if you undergo traumatic experiences which inevitably in life we will we are all being traumatized by watching what's happening right now and if you're not then you have to ask yourself why but when you undergo traumatic experiences you're less likely to develop PTSD because you have a protector that love is protecting you from those impacts you feel more confident you reach career goals quicker when you have that loving connection as opposed to constantly stagnating in your life because again you don't feel that intimate love in connection with someone in a romantic way you feel like love not yelling not arguing not demanding but loving people and the survival of the fittest it's no longer understood as the survival of the fittest as Charles Darwin had mentioned but it's the survival of the most nurtured those are the ones who survived it wasn't the fittest who survived and with that I thank you all so much for staying behind I pray this was beneficial and thank you for having me I said I want to watch the live record Thank you everyone I know this was a very long day I know this was a lot of information do apologize first of all on behalf of Wasila and MCC that we were unable to host a Q&A but if you have questions and I'm sure a lot of you do please do email us at admin at WasilaConnect so W-A-S-I-L-A-H-C-O-N-N-E-C-T dot org and we will be able to answer your questions as they do come lastly you know we hope that this conference was beneficial to you one of the the reasons why we've been named our organization Wasila Connections is that Wasila means a means to Allah and we hope that we were able to foster a opening to that connection again back to Allah I know the challenges that we go through do shake the foundations of ourselves and our situations but when we start on that journey again to go back to Allah and trust him we inevitably trust ourselves and we give opportunity to new life to grow within us so Insha'Allah may Allah grant you all ease to be out of all of your hardships peace be upon you also we are looking for donors so please do visit our website all of the things that we do are usually low cost to our customers that do come to us customers clients that come to us so please do consider donating and please please make dua because everything that we do is from the dua's of everyone peace be upon you