Planning to marry a Muslim
OP - July 08, 2014, 11:06 AM
Hey, long-time lurker of the forum, I contributed a few posts maybe a year ago I think, but didn't really bother after that and stuck to lurking. However, I feel as an ex-Muslim, and with the problem I have having to do directly with me being an ex-Muslim can be well discussed and hopefully solved here.
Basically, I started uni 2 years ago, moving into my third year now, I met a Muslim girl at the beginning of the year, it was cute, I had to pick a name out of the register as group leader to lead a small project within our course, and I picked her name from a list of other names. Fast forward a few months later, we start to date. She was informed about my apostasy pretty much the first week I met her, and she was very intrigued and fascinated by it, and also quite terrified as she likes to think of herself as a devout Muslim.
Anyhoo, as she believes in herself being a devout Muslim, her intention to date any guy would result in marriage, she would not date a guy if she doesn't believe that marriage isn't viable further down the road. After a few months of dating, she finally accepted that she would be willing to marry me, as I would also.
It should be noted we both are British Pakistanis with heavy influence from my parents to settle and marry, so I hate to think that I'm settling straight away, because I really don't want to spend too much time and effort looking for the 'one', but I guess it could be said that I haven't really dipped my foot into the pond.
Now, she layed down a few conditions early on that if we were to marry, and then have children, she would need to raise them as Muslims, and normally I would disagree but I realise that I'd still be in close contact with my family as she will with hers, and it's best to keep up appearances. I even agreed to carry on pretending to be a Muslim in front of the children. This was like a year ago, when I was pretty deeply invested into her.
It should also be noted that she is the perfect girl to bring home to my parents, she'll please my mum because they want a fair and pretty girl which she is, and my father who just wants a devout Muslim, which she can easily be whenever it suits her! So in that sense, I'm extremely lucky to have found a girl who is on one hand a Muslim and on the other hand she respects my apostasy. I really can't think I'll be able to find another girl who'd be the same, but I don't know maybe I'm being naive.
This may sound like I'm sacrificing my own happiness for the sake of her and my family, and I've always lived by the saying the only way to truly be happy is to develop the capacity to enjoy less, but I'm starting to have doubts.
I feel like I can do better than her, she's great in the sense that she'll be an awesome wife to me, in terms of taking care of all the little things I really don't like to do, and she does give me her full attention at all times, at times she's completely crazy about me, and I feel like I won't get that with another girl. On the other hand, she doesn't share one interest or hobby with me really, her obsession with romance and me can sometimes be overwhelming. and most importantly, I feel like her faith and my lack of faith will clash someitme in the future, most notably when we have children.
Sorry for such a long ramble, that isn't exactly written very well. TL;DR, Planning to marry a Muslim, who would like me to keep up appearances and also raise our future children as Muslims. First I was on-board with this, now having doubts.
Should have stayed in. Read a book instead.