**Don't Fall in Love. Grow in Love.**

*Part One: Are We Raising Marriage Material?*

 

We have two households, not unlike many others...

 

In the first, there is a daughter who finishes her degree, begins a career, and is told, often and sincerely, how proud her parents are of her.

 

In the second household, we have a son who finishes his studies, takes up a good position, and hears much the same...

 

Now, both households have done something genuinely praiseworthy, but there is some noteworthy feedback! Neither, in most cases, has asked a harder question: have we raised a daughter and a son who know how to be a wife and a husband, upon the way of the Prophet ﷺ, or have we simply raised two capable adults and assumed the rest would follow?

 

The reality is, it will not simply follow, and this is the first input failure worth naming plainly on our series, for this failure does not belong to the individual walking into marriage, but to the households and communities that raised them.

 

Take the daughters first, since it is here that our good intentions most often conceal the gap...

 

There is nothing in our dīn that asks a woman to remain unlettered, and I say this as someone who believes firmly in the education of our daughters. But intellectual formation and marital formation are not the same project, and we have, in far too many households, invested heavily in the first while leaving the second to chance, or to television, or to whatever her friends happen to be saying.

 

We may be able to raise a daughter fluent in her field, and at the same time, entirely unformed in what it means to build a home, to hold a household together in hardship, to be the 'sakan' the Qur'an describes, and we do this not out of neglect, but out of an assumption that this part, unlike her education, does not require deliberate teaching.

 

The reality however argues otherwise and tells us that it does, and they wifehood, upon the prophetic model, is not an only instinct, but also a formation, and a formation that is not given is not simply absent; it is filled, invariably, by something else.

 

Now the sons, and here I would ask the fathers among us, in particular, to sit with this the point I hope to make rather than move past it quickly...

 

We have raised a generation of men who have the education to provide, and perhaps a precious few who have been shown how to be present. But the issue is that we also tend to measure our sons against a single metric, largely: can he earn.

 

We rarely ask whether he has been shown how to speak gently to a wife when he is tired, how to carry frustration without carrying it into his home, how to serve in his own house rather than merely fund it.

 

If we look into the Prophetic model of being a husband, we have the example of the Prophet ﷺ himself, upon whom our sons are meant to be modelled far more than they currently are.

 

ʿĀ'ishah, may Allah be pleased with her, was asked what the Messenger of Allah ﷺ used to do in his house. She said: he used to serve his family, and when the time for prayer came, he would go out to pray

(Bukhārī).

 

The Messenger of Allah ﷺ is the standard for every Muslim husband, and he served in his own household as a matter of course, not as an exception.

 

He also plainly said:

 

"The best of you are the best of you to their families, and I am the best of you to my family"

(Tirmidhī).

 

We have, somewhere along the way, allowed provision to stand in for the whole of masculinity, and left presence, gentleness, and service as optional extras, when the Prophet ﷺ treated them as the very substance of what it means to be a good husband.

 

There is also a further layer to this which I'd. Like to touch on here, particularly among the daughters we are raising into achievement...

 

Success, without the corresponding formation to carry it well, produces its own danger in the form of a young woman equipped to excel, but never taught how to hold that excellence with humility, nor how to honour a husband whose circumstances may, at some point, look less impressive than her own on paper.

 

Now this is not a call to educate our daughters less, but I share an important reason to form them more completely, so that achievement sits alongside character rather than in place of it.

 

The same, again, applies to our sons, raised to expect a certain deference on account of provision, without being correspondingly taught what happens to that expectation when provision falters, as it does, for most men, at some point.

 

The more difficult part for me, especially when I'm dealing with failing marriages, is that none of what I am describing here is a fault that belongs to the individual entering marriage, as a young man or woman cannot be faulted for formation they were never given.

 

The fault, where there is one, sits further upstream, with households and communities who assumed that raising a capable adult was the same task as raising a spouse, when It is not.

 

And unless we begin to treat marital formation as deliberately as we treat academic or professional formation, we will continue to send well-qualified strangers into marriage, rather than people who were actually raised, from the outset, to be marriage material.

 

In the piece that follows this one, we will turn from what our households owe our children, to what each of us, married or not, owes ourselves: the harder, more personal question of whether we actually know who we are, and who we are not, before we ever stand before someone and ask them to walk the rest of the journey with us.

 

**Action points for this week:**

 

- If you have children, however young, name one specific way you are currently forming them for marriage, not merely for achievement; if you cannot name one, decide on it this week.

- If you are married, ask your spouse, honestly, whether service and presence come as naturally to you as provision does, or whether one has quietly substituted for the other.

- Identify one thing the Prophet ﷺ did routinely in his own household, and adopt it, deliberately, in yours this week.