title: Love and Marriage

What is Love anyway?

There are endless amounts of philosophical and poetic definitions of Love, but for the sake of clarity lets define it by the book.

From Dictionary.com the first of 28 definitions and uses for the word Love:

love (noun) a profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person.

From Wikipedia:

The word love can refer to a variety of different feelings, states, and attitudes, ranging from generic pleasure to intense interpersonal attraction. The word love is both a verb and a noun. Love is not a single feeling but an emotion built from two or more feelings. Anything vital to us creates more than one feeling, and we also have feelings about our feelings (and thoughts about our feelings). This diversity of uses and meanings, combined with the complexity of the feelings involved, makes love unusually difficult to consistently define, even compared to other emotional states.

Loosely defined, Love is a feeling and an Emotion. Feelings and emotions by nature are moving, changing and often fragile parts of our character which are affected by our environment. Books, music, art, movies, conversations and mental and physical health or illness all affect our emotions.

What’s your point?

Such an unstable part of our character should not be used as a foundation for a life long partnership. You wouldn’t choose a business partner based on such a loose concept, much less a life partner.

Hadith Al-Bukhari – Narrated Abu Huraira:
The Prophet said, “A woman is married for four things, i.e., her wealth, her family status, her beauty and her religion. So you should marry the religious woman (otherwise) you will be a loser.

(I think it’s safe to say the same criteria arises when talking about men)

I’m not going to pretend i’m a scholar and attempt to explain this hadith, but suffice to say a persons commitment to their deen (religion) plays a big part in defining their character. Of course there is more to compatibility, but love is not one of the criteria.

Where’s the love?

What makes us love someone? Their character. Their values, behavior, beliefs and how that compliments your own. So if we choose a partner based on that, we will quickly begin to love them. If love is built gradually and based on character and personality it will be more enduring and more of a solid state rather than a fragile changing emotion.

And remember the most important love, is love for the sake of Allah.