Broken hearts and picture frames

I feel like Professor Snape toiling with an essay on “Being Unbiased”. Not that I’m at a loss for what to write but because- it is complicated. To break love into categories, to stop loving someone when you’re already in it, fall out of love… draft 11 discarded, crumpled and all thoughts brushed aside.

It is simple really. It would be a fallacy to snort at love as a fool’s emotion. I do truly believe that at some point in your life, you will map out a new constellation in the sky. You will meet a person who will make you feel whole again. Who will make your world go bright and starry. The one person you would want to sit with on the patio all winter and drink coffee. When you can talk about anything and everything. Or maybe not talk at all, just being with them gets you through the day. Your outlet for crazy fears, wildest obsessions and nonsensical string of babble. Your impossible plans and initiatives, and this person will dream your dreams. When you actually get to sprinkle water at them to wake them for prayers. And night prayers will be ever more enchanting. You will have a skip in your step and a smile burning inside. Your fiercest loyalties will have a direction, your strongest of feelings, a rhyme and reason. You will feel an odd stillness when they are around. There is no guilt, no competition or even jealousy. Simple moments in life will become more special, and you will not deny yourself the pleasure of saying true things. You will feel emotionally secure. And this love in its raw form is so pure and true that it’s scary. That it will make you want to open up and give unconditionally. And this love doesn’t end at “till death do us part”. It will survive when the worlds collide and be raised again. It is truly magical. It will serve as a testimony and a cause for reunion in the afterlife.

And this is the Love that Allah has promised all those who keep themselves chaste and enter the covenant of marriage.

“And it is among His signs that He has created for you wives from among yourselves, so that you may find tranquility in them, and He has created love and kindness between you. Surely in this there are signs for a people who reflect.” (Ar-Rum : 21)

If you read the preceding verses before the quoted one, you will see that amongst His signs of creation, resurrection, and executing everything to ultimate perfection, Allah (swt) has actually included marriage and matrimonial love as one of His signs too. Now you can only go as far as imagining the sheer magnitude and beauty of it. It must be truly Divine for He creates that love and instills it between the couples joined in matrimony. And anyone who spends a considerable amount of time reflecting on life’s finer points is expected to understand this. That the only wise time to invest yourself emotionally in someone is after marrying him/her. Anything done before its due time is premature and dies prematurely too. More like a tale of mind games and hollow promises of “staying together forever” sealed with a false sense of security. Jumping on the relationship bandwagon is akin to courting pain and heartbreak, for neither end is obligated to try or work things out when the going gets tough. Only marriage brings that kind of certainty with it.

And it is awful really. Watching people write their own stories of unrequited love. Because loving is more painful when it is one sided; when you secretly harbour feelings for a person and fall in love with the idea of being in love. Or really get into a relationship that leaves broken hearts and scars in its wake. Horrible, is it not? To place your heart in someone’s hands so they can mess it up and toy with it and walk out whenever. So the choice is ours to make. Build sandcastles in the air, watch fantasies fall like house of cards or save all that emotional energy and channel it the halal way, which is guaranteed to be rewarding in more ways than one. The question was never to suppress or shut your emotions. It is to tame them. It is to wait for the right time and right people. Emotional wisdom, I like to call it.

I also truly believe that at some point in your not-recommended relationship (hypothetical or real), you are left with a philosophically messed up state of mind that makes you post gloomy, abstract statuses and turns you into a sad poet or worse- a stalker. There is unquestionable wisdom behind all the dont’s in Islam. They save you from ruining yourself, yourself. Makes sense? Crossing the red line may be fun for forbidden fruits are tempting but the ride always comes with a price.