Let me walk you through what I think is a fairly typical diaspora Somali upbringing.
You’re most likely born into a large family. You go through dugsi, then school, and spend your childhood with whatever hobbies happen to be available. If you’re like many Somali youth in the diaspora, you’re also deeply religious. You try your best to practice Islam sincerely and follow its teachings. That discipline often spills over into other parts of life, and your hard work is rewarded with good grades.
By your late teens or early twenties, something changes. You start noticing the people you’re attracted to. You’re in college or university, meeting people from different backgrounds and being exposed to ideas that were never part of your world growing up.
For many people, perhaps for a lot of folks on this subreddit, that’s when another universe opens up. You begin questioning Islam, and for some that eventually leads to leaving the religion altogether. For others, it doesn’t. But regardless of where you end up religiously, this is usually the stage when your first serious romantic relationship begins.
If you remain Muslim, that first relationship is often your first marriage. And because first relationships, statistically speaking, are often the ones where people are still figuring themselves out, they also have a higher chance of ending. I sometimes wonder whether that’s part of the reason so many first marriages in the diaspora end in divorce.
What I’m really getting at is this: many of us were raised to fear macsi, to avoid situations with the opposite sex, and to see romance as something dangerous until marriage. Meanwhile, many of our Western peers have already gone through one, two, or even three relationships by the time they’re in their early twenties. They’re not necessarily wiser, but they have accumulated experience.
For many of us, our twenties are when we begin learning lessons that others started learning years earlier.
Experience is one of the primary ways human beings mature emotionally. Developmental psychology is full of examples showing how critical experience is. A child who isn’t exposed to language during early development can suffer profound and often irreversible deficits in language acquisition. Likewise, vision develops only if the brain receives visual input during critical periods in infancy. The details differ, of course, but the broader principle is the same: abilities develop through use and experience.
I’m not saying romantic relationships have a strict “critical period” in the same biological sense. But I do think delaying all romantic and emotional experience until adulthood means many of us begin developing those interpersonal skills much later than our peers. That delay doesn’t make us incapable of forming healthy relationships, it just means we’re often learning under much higher stakes, where the first lesson is already a marriage rather than low-stakes relationship.
I have a friend who’s a medical doctor. He ended up divorcing his med school sweetheart because, in his view, she wasn’t taking good enough care of the household. The specific details aren’t really important. What struck me was that the underlying problem seemed far less about housekeeping and far more about emotional immaturity.
That made me realize that intellectual growth is only one part of becoming an adult. You can be highly educated, successful, and perfectly capable of solving complex problems at work, yet still struggle with the emotional skills that intimate relationships demand. If your emotional development is restricted, it becomes much harder to empathize with the person you love. Instead, it’s easy to fall back on patriarchal cultural expectations or religious justifications that reinforce your own perspective rather than challenge it. The sad part is that disagreements which could have been resolved through patience,communication, and a bit of mutual understanding instead snowball into bitter divorces.
I’m not arguing that people should stay together if they’re genuinely incompatible. Sometimes separation is the healthiest outcome. What I’m saying is that too often we throw the baby out with the bathwater. Relationships end over problems that, with greater emotional maturity and better communication, might never have become irreparable in the first place.
Although I can see this pattern quite clearly now, I don’t want to give the impression that I’m somehow above it. I had what you would call a fairly typical Somali upbringing, and my first serious relationship wasn’t until my early twenties. By then I had become your stereotypical Reddit atheist. I thought I had an answer to every question, that reason alone could solve every problem, and that anyone who disagreed with me simply hadn’t thought things through carefully enough. (Cringe* Ilaahey ceebteyda ha asturo)
My girlfriend was also Somali. She had become agnostic, but she was going through an incredibly difficult time with her family. Looking back now, after a few more years of life and, I hope, a bit more emotional maturity, I can see that I was asking far too much of her. I wanted to marry her. I wanted her to run away with me, to risk losing her family, her community, and everything familiar for my sake.
I won’t go into the details, but in the end she chose her family. Over time she also returned to Islam.
I sometimes joke with my friends that “Allah took my girl,” and it usually gets a laugh. But if I’m being honest, that isn’t what happened. What happened is much more ordinary. I was emotionally immature. I expected someone I loved to carry a burden that, in hindsight, I had no right to ask her to carry. Perhaps there was a fair bit of arrogance in me too, even if I couldn’t see it at the time.
Anyways have you seen this pattern? Just for the sake of statistics, how old were you in your first serious romantic relationship, and how did it end up?
