My husband
This entry is related to the post from Is There Food On My Niqaab about fiances being non-mahrams (it was re-posted on Beautiful Muslimah as well).
I was thinking back on my relationship and how I met my husband and it struck me how quickly he tried to turn our "relationship" into an engagement. I was just a regular Quebecker student and had some knowledge about Islam, but not much, and I wasn't thinking of converting but I was learning bit by bit. We started chatting and Islam was something that got us to meet just because I was attempting to learn about Islam by speaking with Muslims. The first night we chatted, we stayed up until 5 a.m. my time (it was noon in Egypt!) chatting about a lot of different thing, but a lot about Islam.
The thing that made me message him in the first place was this weird thing in his profile saying that he was looking for a Western woman with white skin for a serious relationship. It was super-weird and I wanted to talk with Muslims to better understand them so I tried him. He showed me before we even spoke that there was something I didn't understand! I learned that the Western part was something he had in mind because he figured the woman would convert, so he'd have helped in that, and making her children born Muslims, therefore adding Muslims to the world who would have otherwise been Christian. And the white skin thing was a weird personal thing. I think it's a pretty wide-spread thing in Egypt that white skin is prettier. So weird.
Anyway, we chatted and he gave himself a lot of excuses to be with me. We chatted about inappropriate topics, topics that were fine for me to chat about but that he probably felt uncomfortable with at the beginning. And we spent too much time chatting about the same topics over and over (had nothing else to talk about after so much time) and it made us delve deeper into dumb topics. But he gave himself excuses that if he chatted with me less or wasn't there, I'd go somewhere else. Or that we were in a serious relationship, practically engaged, so it was OK. Looking back, I can see that he didn't find some of it OK. He wanted to meet me as soon as possible, wanted to have me engaged as soon as possible and married as soon as possible. But it was done so quick really, that we were married and it took about a year before I actually admitted it to anyone including myself. We signed papers December 31, 2005, but in my mind, he wasn't my husband until quite a while later.
All this because he knew it wasn't something he, as a Muslim should be doing. He knew I was his non-mahram until that last day of 2005.
It's weird to think about these things backwards from now because I've gained so much knowledge about Islam and I've changed a lot in the way I view things. And it's weird to think that I did things so differently than I would do them now if I had to.