QUESTION:
Salaam, I have a question regarding this ‘optimal spouse’ thing. Can an optimal spouse be one that brings you closer to Allah through the difficulties you have to deal with due to them? As a reult of there behaviour/character? Or is it only if you are content with them and everything more or less ‘clicks’? What is the interpretation of an ‘optimal spouse’?
ANSWER:
For context, the sister asking this question has been married for decades and has a good number of children – some fully grown and some still young.
In other words – it’s a round about way of asking “My husband’s been treating me badly for years… wait a minute – did I marry the wrong guy?”
More context:
I talk a lot about asking Allah, the Most Loving, to marry you to your “Optimal Spouse” – not just any random geeza (which is what people pray for when they start slipping into desperation energy).
The Optimal Spouse Prayer is for many reasons, not least of which is that you don’t end up in this lady’s position, where you’re decades into a marriage, a life filled with kids and family responsibilities, only to wake up and realise that your ‘partner’ isn’t very good at partnering with you.
There are 2 ways to look at it:
- The person you marry is the most important decision you’ll ever make in your life and has the potential to make your life WAY easier… or much, much harder and rife with difficulties.
- The person you marry is no big deal, because if you don’t like them, you can quit and get divorced.
Almost no-one is realistic about option 2 – except from some notable Islamic scholars who literally see it this way. (That’s why they go all old-school and say just marry anyone who comes along and wants to marry you. It’s with full awareness that if it goes bad, you immediately leave).
However, because most people aren’t as ‘modern’ as these old-school traditionally trained scholars, we tend to go for the healthier, generally safer, option 1: to marry one person and do your best to make sure it will work out.
If that’s the case, you need to have extremely good “Red Flag Game” – the ability to spot warning signs and indications of poor character and morality as far in advance as possible.
And you ought to have the ability to end relationships with ‘potentials’ freely and confidently, without getting all insecure, weak and sad about it every single time it happens.
If you want to know what the whole roadmap – from finding, meeting, attracting, filtering and sorting through potential spouses, and eventually marrying the right one – actually looks like in reality, you’ll likely benefit from this free training I created called:
The Roadmap: The 10-Step Plan to go from ‘Salam’ to Soulmate
It was recorded primarily with women in mind – but every single Muslim will benefit from it tremendously.
Check it out here:
