I Broke the Unwritten Rule and I Would Do It Again
My mum wanted Bangladeshi. She got the whole of Europe and North Africa instead.
What I Grew Up Watching
Before I talk about my marriage, I need to talk about what I grew up seeing. Because you cannot understand why I made the choices I did without understanding what shaped me first.
I grew up witnessing a lot of injustice. Not stemming from religion but from cultural expectations. And for a long time, as a child, I did not know how to tell the difference between the two. When you grow up inside a culture, you absorb its norms before you are old enough to question them. What is repeated enough becomes the standard. What is the standard, stops feeling wrong.
But something in me always felt that it was.
I watched women spend hours in the kitchen during gatherings while the men sat unbothered in another room, waiting to be served. I watched those same women eat afterwards, plates in hand, standing or sitting on the sofa, feeding children at the same time, long after the men had finished. I watched daughter in laws be expected to run entire households, give up careers they had worked hard for, and live under the same roof as their in-laws without question, because to want your own space was shameful. The whole community would have something to say about it.
I watched families brag about their daughter in law’s education and then expect her to set it aside after the wedding. I was told about women who received gold as a wedding gift only for it to be taken by the mother in law and distributed among the wider family as though it belonged to her. I watched husbands stay silent while their wives were disrespected, over and over again, in the name of keeping the peace. I heard about mother-in laws walking into the rooms of married couples without knocking, as though the concept of privacy did not apply to them.
And I watched this happen not just in families who were distant from the deen, but in families who appeared outwardly practising. That was perhaps the thing that unsettled me most.
I want to be clear. I know not every family is this way. I know there are beautiful, healthy, respectful dynamics within South Asian homes and I have seen those too. But we cannot improve what we refuse to acknowledge. This is a real pattern within our community and it has broken real women and real marriages. Saying so is not a betrayal. It is honesty.
Growing up surrounded by this, I entered the conversation about marriage already carrying a weight of anxiety that had nothing to do with the person I might marry and everything to do with the institution I had watched swallow women whole.
Growing Up Between Two Worlds
I also grew up not quite fitting anywhere.
At school, most of my friends were not Asian. Being Asian was not considered cool at the time. Having a mixed relationship was barely on the radar, and most Muslims, whatever their reason, kept within their own. I did not fully understand my own culture or feel proud of it yet, and I did not fully belong in the world my friends moved through either. I was somewhere in the middle, not quite one thing and not quite the other.
When hijab came into the picture it added another layer of complexity. I was coming of age and it was made clear I should cover and dress modestly. The expected dress was salwar kameez, and at a time when my friends were wearing jeans and going about their lives freely, I was embarrassed to be seen in it outside the house. What I could get away with was being a tomboy. Baggy clothes, tracksuits, keeping it low key. It was not a style. It was a negotiation.
My friends liked me but they did not fully know me. Some of their jokes stung in ways I did not always have the words for. I was not going to call it racism outright, but there were moments where I felt I had to perform a version of myself that was less me, just to belong.
This period planted something in me though. A quiet but persistent resistance to being told who I was allowed to be, and who I was allowed to marry.
The Shift
Things started to shift during college.
I had a new kind of freedom I had not experienced before, and I used some of it to start learning more about Islam properly, not just the cultural version of it I had grown up with, but the deen itself. My relationship with Allah began to grow in a way that felt personal and real rather than inherited and obligatory.
And somewhere in that learning, I came across something that changed how I thought about marriage entirely.
Islam does not restrict us from marrying outside our culture. It never did. Culture had added that restriction and dressed it up as religion, and so many of us had never thought to pull the two apart. Learning this did not feel like a loophole. It felt like a relief. It felt like permission to think differently about what I actually wanted rather than what was expected.
Around this time I also became fascinated by people who had come to Islam from completely different backgrounds. Reverts, people whose stories of finding the deen moved me deeply. The idea began to form quietly in the back of my mind that the person I married did not have to look like what everyone around me assumed he would.
I did not tell many people this. It was an internal dialogue I held privately for a long time.
The Exhausting Business of Looking
When my mum began to signal that marriage should be on my radar, I did genuinely try to approach it with an open mind. I considered people from within my own culture. I told my mum about some of them. I went through the process in good faith and then lowered my standards to try to make it work, because I was aware of my own requirements and did not want to seem unreasonable.
It did not work. Not because they were bad people, but because the same patterns kept appearing. Boys in men’s bodies. Red flags that people around me told me to overlook. Lack of seriousness, lack of reliability, lack of accountability. And each time it went nowhere, the pressure around me quietly increased.
The bio data process was its own kind of stress. Being assessed from a photograph and a few lines of information, and assessing others in the same way, felt deeply uncomfortable. My anxieties about living with in laws, about cultural expectations, about what kind of household I would be walking into, were all very much alive. When I raised concerns or said no, I was pushed to reconsider. That made me shut down further.
Eventually I let it go entirely. I focused on my work, began teaching English as a foreign language, and started thinking seriously about moving abroad. Marriage stopped being the thing I was chasing.
And then, without any of that effort, the right person appeared.
How He Came Into the Picture
I knew of my husband through mutual friends before I ever really knew him. We ended up at the same university, which some people later chose to read into, but the truth is straightforward. I didn’t speak to him and was not friends with him during this time. Someone from college knew him and spoke well of him. And when he made his interest known through a mishap of my own, what stood out immediately was that he was not interested in just talking or getting to know each other indefinitely. He wanted to do things properly and he made that clear from the start.
I spoke to my brother straight away. That was always going to be the first step for me. He met my brother and then my family soon after. It all happened within a few months.
He is Dutch born, with a mother who is French and Czech, and a father who is Egyptian and Italian. So when people ask where he is from, the answer takes a little while. What I knew was that he was Muslim, he was serious, and he was ready. At nearly 26, after everything I had been through in the search, that was what mattered.
The Resistance
I will not pretend it was easy.
The main resistance came from my mum, and to be fair to her I understand where it came from. It was not that he was not Muslim. It was not that he was not a good person. It was a preference. She had imagined a Bangladeshi son in law, someone who shared our customs and our way of life, someone whose family would understand ours. I think there was also, though she would not have said it this way, a quiet fear about what people would say. About her. About our family.
In my younger years I might have called that racism. I do not anymore. Having a preference is human. What I took issue with, and still do, is when preference becomes a barrier to what Allah has made permissible. In a world where so much has broken down, where so many people are struggling to find a practising spouse who treats them well, making it harder for your child to marry someone good because of where their parents are from is not protection. It is an obstacle dressed up as one.
We have to realise we are living in a different time. These restrictions will only push children away further. Would we rather have them marry a muslim of the opposite gender or ….something far from that?
Extended family had their opinions. Some were vocal, some simply stayed at a distance. The wedding felt different from what I imagined it might have been. The gifting was different from what it would have been had I married into a Bangladeshi family, and while I am not someone who counts these things, it told me something about how people really felt. Some stayed away because they did not want their own children getting ideas. (There were, however many of my loved ones who supported me in whatever ways they were able to and I am forever grateful for that)
That stung. I will not pretend otherwise.
But my aunt, my father’s sister, was the unexpected voice that helped. She spoke to my dad and encouraged him to accept it (which at first he did but later backtracked because the societal pressure dawned on him). She did later make clear she would not allow the same for her own daughters, which is its own kind of irony, but in that moment she did something kind and I have not forgotten it.
A Question I Will Never Be Able to Answer
There is something I have thought about since and feel I should say out loud, even though it is uncomfortable.
My husband is mixed in a way that reads as relatively light skinned. Egyptian, Italian, French, Czech.
I have wondered, genuinely, whether the resistance would have been different if he were darker. If his background were from a different part of Africa, or if he looked different to how he does. I will never fully know the answer to that. But the question sits with me because colourism is real in our community and pretending otherwise does not make it less so. I did not choose him based on any of that, but I am aware that others may have extended a grace they would not have extended to someone else. That is worth naming.
Nearly Nine Years On
My husband is, in many ways, more Bengali than I am now.
He has adapted to our family with a naturalness that surprised even the people who doubted him most. My mum has a genuine relationship with him. She has travelled with us, stayed with us, and we look out for each other the way family should. We want our children to grow up with Arabic, encouraged to learn Bangla, with a father who takes the deen seriously and a family that spans more than one culture and continent. They are not confused by this. They are richer for it.
The cultural differences people warned me about have never been the source of our difficulties. No marriage is without its struggles, and ours is no different. But when we have had hard times, culture has never been the thing at the centre of it.
What has always mattered to me, from the very beginning, was whether this person feared Allah. Whether he was accountable, sincere, and serious. Those were the things I could not find in the search, and those were the things I found when I stopped searching.
I do not know what my life would look like had I listened to every voice that told me no. I have some idea, and it frightens me more than any amount of community disapproval ever did.
If I had to do it again, I would.
Without hesitation.
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