Love Before Marriage or After?

We are often told by our families and other married Muslim friends that love is not really essential before marriage and that it grows with time as the marriage grows.

Along with that advice, we’re usually told to look for compatibility in a partner instead of love.

Our first reaction is usually like, “Seriously!?” or at least that was my first reaction the first time I heard it when I was younger.

The older we grow and the wiser we get through experience and knowledge, the more we come to see that there is some truth to what we’re told.

We have all heard stories about lovebirds who managed to get married, but somehow their marriage slowly turned into a war zone that ended in divorce.

We come to ask ourselves, “What happened? Why did such a beautiful love story end so miserably?”

The answer to many of these stories is simple: They lacked compatibility.

Is it true that compatibility is the number one ingredient after deen (faith) for a healthy and successful marriage? But what about love?

Does this mean we should consider settling down with someone we’re genuinely interested in, attracted to, and compatible with, even if love is not there yet?

Love and marriage are completely different. But when they’re combined, they create a lifelong, lasting marriage filled with eternal happiness in this dunya (life).

Islam is an advocate against romantic love before marriage for many valid reasons that we should definitely consider.

Romantic love before marriage carries a high risk of committing sin.

Not only that. It can cloud our minds with strong and intense emotions that will most likely encourage us to make many irrational decisions and blind us from seeing true compatibility.

The process of choosing our future significant other requires the mind and the heart to work together in harmony.

It requires logic to drive our emotions to ensure compatibility, not the other way around. Logic without emotions is robotic, and emotions without logic are craziness!

The lesson to be learned from the older, wiser, and more experienced married couples is that real, true love comes after living and sharing our lives with our spouse.

Falling in love before marriage is not a sin in Islam as long as we obey the Islamic guidelines. And if we happen to fall in love before marriage, that is fine. It’s not too late to make the right move.

As our most beloved prophet Muhammad (pbuh) said:

“There is nothing like marriage, for two who love one another.” Vol. 3, Book 9, Hadith 1847

Our circumstances don’t and will never determine our outcomes.

We must take responsibility and work together as a community. We should break the cycles and educate the young and the elderly on what true Islam really is.

We must break the patterns that are not serving us well. And we must stand for what we believe is right.

Last but not least, I would like to end this by sharing a beautiful quote my cousin Ahmad recently shared on his wedding day:

“We are all here today, not because of our perfection, but because of our imperfection, and we are here because of our commitment to not give up on the challenges we face but to work on things until they get better.”

From the archives, first published on muslimdamsel.com.