There is a misconception or lie we have repeatedly told ourselves, and have come to believe; that everyone must marry out of love. This is not true, and even many who claim to marry for love today don’t have the faintest idea what love is. For many it is the curiosity of what lay beyond the clothes, pleasures of the loins fueling and driving the claims of love. For others it is just flowing with the tide. If you have decided to marry someone then you must love her, so I love her. Then they begin to send volleys of “I love you” to one another till the first few years of marriage make mockery of all the facade of love.
So, what if after marriage, may be after years of marriage, you find yourself deeply emotionally attracted to someone else, like your every being wants him/her? If you have not established connection it may not be love just yet, but you are likely at the doorsill. If there is a continous communication, then it may be inevitable that you will fall in love, while still married to someone else!
The very first question will be, how did you get so close to fall? Some souls seem to synchronise with ease. So you meet someone for the first time and you suddenly feel so at ease around them, like there is an untold understanding between you for long. You feel like you can just trust them with your all. This doesn’t happen often, so it will be misleading to use it as a generality, but it does happen, and I know because I have felt both this kind of connection and the complete opposite with someone whom I was once match made with (I told her on the very first day we met there was no chemistry and there was no need to continue). Even where such deep first time emotions form in the heart, it is still insufficient to call it love, though the embers may have been stoked. To fan the embers into full blown love, you need to see them often, talk with them often, align priorities, make the person the center of your attention, direct a huge chunk of your emotions towards that person. Oh I saved the best for the last- make love to the person, which is the pinnacle of soul synchronisation. So you see that it takes time, effort, and some form of continous proximity (real or even virtual) to fall deeply in love.
In case you got lost in the last paragraph, the summary is that love is in stages, like walking into an ocean from the beach shore. There is a first step when the fleeting waves caress your feet that stands on shallow water, and every step takes you in deeper and deeper till you drown, all of you, into the ocean of love, and because it is so sweet, you let it sail you to wherever it wants. Please, you can now snap out of your day dreaming, so we can return to the topic of the post.
Islam sets strict rules for male female interractions to prevent indiscriminate and half hearted emotional attachments between people who may, by circumstance, never be able to build something legal and tangible out of it. You may stand at the shores of love with someone within legal limits (because we don’t have control over who our hearts become attracted to) but if you say you have fallen deeply in love with someone and this is true to what love really is, then a sincere retrospection will reveal you must have flouted one or more rules of engagement with the opposite sex as defined by Islám. Alláh wants you to fall in love, but not with every Tom Dick and Harry, but with someone with whom you can build a future. It shouldn’t be such that when you eventually get married, you have pieces of your heart strewn across time in the hands of different men/women.
You may therefore understand that in ideal settings it will be uncommon for married persons to fall deeply in love again. If it were just the shores, you could easily shake it off, but to have yourself deeply emotionally attuned to someone other than your spouse implies there must have been a compromise, however little. You let yourself spend too much time with that person, placed too much emphasy on them in your imaginations, perhaps crossed even bigger red lines….. it will be uncommon for such to happen in ideal settings where everyone lowered their gaze and refrained from indiscriminate male-female relationships. But I seldom write about ideal scenarios. I write more about the realities of our society, and we know that there are too many unideals in our time that creates the perfect environment for you to fall in love with someone else while still married, even if not the whole stretch, even if you aren’t fully drowned in love yet, but perhaps in waist-deep waters, which is still dangerous and difficult to shake off.
What do you do then?
I have witnessed so much anomalies going on at work places that it is has reached scary levels, and one can not appreciate enough the wisdom behind Islam’s strict stance on ikhtilaat (free mixing of sexes). At the moment, both genders are complicit. Responsibly married persons seemingly forgetting to respect the sanctity of marriage in the name of joking with their colleagues at work to the point of physical contact! Some of you may be surprised that we are taken aback, I mean there are those who don’t mind someone hugging and giving their wife a peck (wa iyaazu billāh), but then we haven’t all lost our sense of protective jealousy. Well, this post is not even about the abnormal relationships at work place or other places in the environment.
What if you find yourself inexplicably attracted to someone other than your spouse in a circumstance where you have to see and work with this person more often?
This of course is possible, especially in our current society. Some people will be quick to shout ‘marry her’ as an absolute sution forgetting that there are two problems with that:
- People who are quick to prescribe polygyny to men who find themselves attracted to a woman other than his wife forget that polygyny is not a replacement for self discipline! Even as a bachelor reading this, you have to teach yourself the discipline to take your mind off what you can’t have however hard you want it, otherwise if you rush into marriage thinking that will solve your seeming insatiable hunger for a woman, you may find that marriage was never the solution to your problem but discipline. How many who truly want the polygyny can afford it today, beyond all the mouth making on social media?
- We are talking about a problem that cuts across both genders in our society that is far from the ideal preached on paper. If it is a woman that finds herself attracted to another man will you advise her to consider polyandry? One inherent flaw in the way we preach polygyny sometimes is that we make it seem like sexual restrain and discipline is something solely for women to learn, while men always have the liberty to marry another wife if he as much as feels attracted to any woman. I can be attracted to a woman but not want her as a wife. How do I deal with that? This lack of discipline has resulted in married men keeping mistresses, because he only wants to enjoy some aspects of her but not as a wife. It has also made us live in denial that women, wives that is, are just as prone to developing affection for someone other than their husband just as men can, if exposed to the same conditions like men!
So what should you do if you are already at that point?
1. Admit the mistakes or unideal environment that put you there. Like I earlier pointed out, to develop deep emotions for someone there has to be direct or indirect constant interaction or in the least meeting. Indirect in the sense that it may not be deliberate, it may be work related. Admitting it will open your eyes to what needs to be done to salvage the situation. For many instances, cutting off the source will slowly starve the emotions so developed.
2. Respect that you are married!
So many marital anomalies come up today because people no longer respect the sanctity of marriage. Respecting marriage is entirely different from respecting your spouse. Whether or not you are happy and comfortable with your spouse, you are duty bound to respect the fact that you are married. Draw a line round yourself and never let anyone cross that line on certain issues no matter what! Our parents respected marriage. Even if some of the men in their generation still had indiscretions, one could say that majority of the women respected their marital status! Today you will find that there is little difference between some married women and their single counterparts! A friend who is single narrated how he initiated a chat on facebook with a sister, and he thought he had found his missing rib, because things were getting cozy between them and a deep relationship was forming only to discover that she was married! When he accosted her she said she wasn’t happy in her marriage as her husband didn’t give her attention. From the whispers of shaitaan to you is to make you justify your disrespect for your marital status by the actions of your spouse! Married women carried themselves with honour and dignity and you had to think twice before having the guts to approach them. Today with social media those barriers have been broken and you will find some married women are even easier to access than singles. It is reassuring that i know more responsible married women than the ‘other’ ones. As for men, the cancer isn’t recent. It will require a separate post to address.
3. Discipline.
Discipline should be one of the first thing we learn as soon as puberty sets in. Learn to put your desires in check. Learn to be in control rather than be controled by it. I have written a post on self discipline which I will share later. Marriage doesn’t magically manufacture discipline for us. If you don’t have restrain for your emotions and sexual desires before marriage, it is unlikely you will change afterwards. That’s why you see cases of even polygynous men being randy. It is natural to want what you can’t have, what makes you human is to learn to keep your mind focused on what you can have and shake off what is out of your reach. To be unable to do that is to live like an animal, or worse.
4. For men, consider polygyny.
Polygyny is way better than keeping mistresses and concubines. Sadly even some wives prefer their husbands keeping mistresses than take another wife. If you have the means and find yourself interested in a woman by all means marry her the right way, with emphasy on ‘right way’. Many people today hide under the guise of intending polygyny to commit abominable attrocities!
5. For women, divorce is still way better than having an illicit relationship with another man who isn’t your husband. It is ridiculous to see a married woman with male friends and confidants! May Allāh protect us from the fitnah of our time.
6. Let us be more serious about our duties in our marriages. Let us not create room for shaitan to take abode in our houses. As much as we say there is no justification for disrespecting marriage, we still should not open the doors to it. Men should learn to give their wives as much attention as they can offer. The prohibition on illicit relationships goes to both genders. It is ironical to find men who keeps and chats with all sorts of women letting hell let loose if his wife as much as has a cordial relationship with another men. You will almost think the term ‘non-mahram’ applies solely to women. Let us all change our ways and make our marriages our priority on worldly affairs.
7. Fear Allāh
Allāh could as well test you with the love or attraction to what is not yours, to check whether you will let it go for the sake of Allāh. Some of you are in a relationship at the moment. You know it is leading nowhere, but you love the person so much and find it difficult to let go. Ask yourself, is there any creature worth displeasing the Creator for? Imagine if you let go just to find the pleasure of Allāh. The one who gains the pleasure of this world and its people at the expense of Allāh’s pleasure has lost everything. But the one who gains Allāh’s pleasure has gained everything.
You will not be questioned about your desires and emotional attractions, but you will be questioned about what you let them make you do. Think of Allāh, put your marriage first! May Allāh rectify our affairs.
