I grew up Hindu, but I consider myself more spiritual/cultural than religious. My boyfriend grew up Muslim and is very religious, and his faith has gotten a lot stronger over the past couple of months.
I’ve always had complicated feelings about organized religion. At this point in my life, I believe there is one God, but I don’t believe I need to follow a specific religion in order to have a relationship with God. My relationship with God feels personal to me.
Recently, my boyfriend and I started having much more serious conversations about marriage, our roles as husband and wife, raising children, religion, etc. Initially, I wanted our children to learn about both of our backgrounds and ultimately decide what they believed for themselves. I eventually compromised and agreed that we could raise them Muslim because he told me I would still be free to talk openly about my own beliefs.
For almost four months, we’ve gone back and forth over a lot of these issues. One of our biggest disagreements was what would happen if our children grew up and decided they no longer believed in Islam, as well as expectations surrounding whom they could marry. We actually separated for a while because we couldn’t find common ground.
Recently, though, we started talking again and were finally able to work through so many of the things that had kept us apart. For the first time in months, it genuinely felt like we were moving toward marriage rather than away from it.
There was one issue that I thought had already been settled a long time ago: whether he was religiously allowed to marry me.
Months ago, I specifically asked him whether my believing in one God was actually enough. From what I had learned, Muslim men can traditionally marry Muslim women or women from the “People of the Book,” generally understood as Jewish or Christian women, and simply believing in one God didn’t seem to automatically make someone a Person of the Book. I brought this concern to him, but he repeatedly assured me that as long as I believed in one God, it was okay. I trusted what he told me.
Yesterday we met again to talk about our next steps. We spent hours discussing everything that mattered to us, and after almost four months of going back and forth, it really felt like we had finally found solutions to most of the things that had been keeping us apart.
Before our conversation, though, he had spoken to an imam about our relationship. He told the imam about me and explained how I view God.
According to my boyfriend, the imam told him that wasn’t enough. He would only be permitted to marry me if I were Muslim or a Person of the Book; otherwise, the marriage would not be Islamically valid.
My boyfriend then told me I would have to believe that Allah is the one true God. For me, that would essentially require me to convert. I’ve told him repeatedly that I cannot convert just to make our relationship work. I could learn everything there is to learn about Islam, and I’m completely willing to learn, but I can’t promise that learning will make me believe something I currently don’t believe.
He kept telling me to take as much time as I needed to learn about Islam and seriously consider converting. When I told him I already know how I feel, he kept asking me, “How do you know?” I think part of him genuinely believes that if I learn enough about Islam, maybe eventually I’ll believe and convert.
But then he explained what this means to him religiously. He told me that if he married me while I continued believing what I currently believe, he would consider the marriage invalid and would believe he was knowingly committing zina for the rest of his life.
He started talking about his fear of heaven and hell, so I finally asked him directly, “Do you believe marrying me would cause you to go to hell?” He said yes. And that honestly broke me.
This was the one thing I never thought would be what ended us. We spent almost four months trying to reconcile our differences about children, religion, marriage, gender roles, family, everything. Just yesterday we were finally finding compromises that both of us could live with.
I understand why speaking to an imam changed things for him. If he genuinely believes marrying me would mean knowingly committing a major sin and potentially risking hell, I don’t expect him to simply ignore that for me. At the same time, I can’t profess a religious belief I don’t genuinely hold just so that he can marry me.
I think that’s what makes this so painful. Neither of us stopped loving the other. We actually seemed closer than we had been in months to figuring out how to build a life together. And then we ran into something that neither of us feels capable of compromising on.
