‘Falling in love was a leap of faith’
As a British Muslim woman of Pakistani background, Huma Qureshi knew she was destined to marry a ‘suitable boy’, but love had other plans
When I met the man who would become my husband, in an Islington cafe on a spring day in 2011, the first thing that struck me was the colour of his eyes. They were grey-blue, calm like a glass of water or a clear, cloudless sky. They turned up at the corners when he smiled, and when he looked at me, I felt dizzy, like I needed to put my hand out to steady myself. Like so many modern love stories, we started speaking online, but we’d emailed each other for weeks before we agreed to meet in person. I liked how he took his time to write to me; how sharing our hopes, dreams and fears felt easy, like talking to an old friend. I was working as a freelance journalist, and he was in tech; I sent him articles I’d written, and he sent me playlists. When we met for the first time, I felt both the thrill of the unknown, and a strange sense of certainty I had never experienced before. Yet I already knew that this blue-eyed man was not husband material. When we said goodbye, I told myself nothing would ever come of it. Because although it felt right,
I knew it was all wrong.
I had grown up knowing I would marry a Pakistani Muslim boy whose family’s cultural, social and religious background matched mine. It was what everyone around me (cousins, family friends) had done, and what I assumed I would do, too. But this man was none of those things. His name was Richard. He was white; he was certainly not Muslim, nor Pakistani. He was not what my mother would call a ‘suitable boy’.
My parents had been searching for suitable boys for me to marry since my early 20s, but I was nearly 30 and nothing had materialised. I wanted to know what it felt like to fall in love, but I had always been told love came after marriage. ‘No boyfriends’, my mother would remind me in my teens, as I rolled my eyes. After I graduated from university and moved to London, she’d send me phone numbers of suitable boys she wanted me to call, their details procured through distant family friends. I even tried a ‘halal’ matchmaking site for young Muslims, but each marriage-introduction left my heart, which longed for romance, feeling deflated, finding we had little in common besides our shared inherited cultures.
The older I got, the harder it was. Prospective Pakistani mother-in-laws could be cruel in their criticisms. One potential suitor’s mother told mine that she would never consider a girl like me for her son, listing everything she thought was wrong with me, from my living arrangements to my height. That was the final straw. I told my mother I’d had enough; I didn’t want to talk about marriage any more.
Instead, I decided to put myself first. I started yoga, flamenco and creative writing, bought my first flat, focused on my friendships and, without the pressure of marriage on my shoulders, I started to feel whole again. Feeling more confident in myself and my choices, I saw an advert on the Tube for a new dating site, and thought, ‘Why not?’ I knew it wasn’t specifically for Muslims, but my curiosity ran away with me.
Though I knew I shouldn’t, I continued seeing Richard after that first date. I couldn’t help it. He made me feel free, like, just for a moment, I could forget everyone’s expectations of me. Over
dinners and walks on Hampstead Heath, I felt my self-doubt disappear. When we weren’t together, my head was full of him. One night, as we washed the dishes after dinner, I thought how lovely, how strangely familiar, it all felt.
If my mother called while I was with him, I told her I was with a friend. But I hated lying to her and I hated lying about him; it made me feel awful and neither of them deserved it. Though Richard and I talked freely, I wasn’t sure how far he’d understand the Pakistani, Muslim side of my life. I avoided talking to him about my religion, breezily changing the subject if he asked, because I thought that once I did, the love I could feel growing between us would evaporate. We had only known each other for a month; I couldn’t see a world in which I could tell a white man that in order to be with me, he had to embrace a new life.
I expected the worst when, on our fifth date, he asked me what it would mean for my family, for us to be together. I was wary; in the past, talking about my faith and my heritage invited criticism. I told him, in a small voice, that we couldn’t be together in their eyes at all, unless he converted and we married, which I knew was impossible. I thought he would make his excuses and leave, back away with his hands in the air as if he was afraid. But he didn’t. ‘I could convert!’ he said. I didn’t think he was serious, until we met again and he told me he’d been researching Islam.
‘It’s not like I didn’t know you were Muslim,’ he said.
‘It was on your profile. But it didn’t put me off wanting to write to you. Look, I don’t think it’s worth giving up, just because it might be too difficult.’ We talked about it for hours, which turned into days. I told him his conversion couldn’t just be for me, that he had to understand what he was doing. Later, he looked up beginners’ classes on Islam, bought piles of books to study. He told his family about me, and his plans to convert. He explained the similarities with Christianity, and, understanding how much it meant to him, they gave their full support. When he met my mother for the first time, he greeted her in Arabic and told her that he would embrace our religion, while I looked at him, overcome, thinking, ‘I can’t believe he’s really doing this. I can’t believe this is happening.’
They say love is a leap of faith. For us, it truly was, in more ways than one. Our relationship moved quickly because it had to, but I wouldn’t change anything. He proposed in his parents’ cottage, soon after he’d converted and our parents had met, and three months after our first date. It didn’t feel rushed; more like we were swept up in something that was always meant to happen. Confronting the big questions of life – marriage, family, culture, religion – early on in our relationship, at a time when most new couples would be tentatively meeting each other’s friends, meant that we had to ask ourselves what we really wanted, which was to explore the potential of the life we could create together.
This year, Richard and I will have been married for 10 years, and I still feel steadied, anchored by his presence. We have three sons, aged seven, five and three, who we are raising to feel proud of their half-english, half-pakistani Muslim identity. We celebrate Christmas, Eid and Ramadan; we are close with both my family and my in-laws. We never want our children to have to choose to be one thing over the other, but to find a way to be both.
I tried so hard to meet someone who fulfilled my parents’ expectations. I tried to do things properly, the way they had always been done, because I didn’t know that there could be another way; the love stories of women like me don’t always get heard. But I have learned that often what looks like the ‘wrong’ kind of love is actually more right than anything else. I’ve learned it’s the choices two people make that bring them together, and keep them together. Love is not an accident. It’s in those small moments of magic that demand little fireworks, like the cup of coffee when you need it most, or the arm wrapped around you at the end of a long day.
These days, I notice the crinkles around his calm, grey-blue eyes and the silver strands that appear like surprises in my dark hair, and it strikes me that we are growing older together. Sometimes I worry that I’m tempting fate; in Pakistani culture, we call it ‘nazar’, the evil eye. In quiet moments, I remind myself of how far we’ve come, and I whisper the small prayers of gratitude and protection I was taught as a little girl. Though in many ways our life is ordinary, it still feels extraordinary to me.
‘I knew I shouldn’t keep seeing him but I couldn’t help it’