Let's Change Our Mindsets About Marriage Episode 274 GETTING MARRIED (Part 3)

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*Let's Change Our Mindsets About Marriage*

*Episode 274*

*GETTING MARRIED (Part 3)*

We neglect this most vital charge laid upon us at our peril. No human being was intended to live in isolation-either splendid isolation, thinking himself or herself 'better' than the common herd in any way, or in grief-stricken isolation, deprived of life's comforts and the satisfying of natural appetites and needs. God created Man and Woman from a single 

soul, and He intended them to live and work together. 

'O humanity; fear your Lord, Who created you from a single soul, and from it created its spouse, and from the two of them did spread forth a multitude of 

men and women.' (4:1)

 

'We created you from a single pair of male and female.' (49:13; see also 35:11) 

In this is a sure sign. Each is necessary to the other. People may live and work and have faith on their own, but it is only a 'half-life.' 

As any single person, or widow living alone, or abandoned half of a couple will tell you, it is possible to survive and live by yourself, and even to wring some enjoyment 

out of this life-for you are free to be selfish and do the things you want to do without much consideration of the needs and wants of others. But there is a terrible price for this solitary existence. 

It is like a blind person developing extra-sensitive hiring in order to compensate and cope with lack of sight; or a paralysed person in a wheelchair developing extra-large arm muscles to make up for the lack of legs. It can be done-but it is a miserable and 

long process. 

Married life brings its pressures, but it can also wide the kind of relaxation that human beings naturally need. Imam al-Ghazali observes that: 'One of the benefits of marriage is the enjoyment of company and the sight of one's spouse, and by shared amusement, whereby the heart is refreshed and strengthened for worship; for the soul is prone to boredom and is lined to shun duty as something unnatural to it. If forced to persevere in something it dislikes, it shies and backs away, whereas if it is revived from time to time by pleasure it acquires new strength and vigour.' (Ihya ulum al-Din) 

The sign and the design that God intended is that it best for men and women to come together as a team. People work together as all sorts of teams-they Cooperate for the sake of games and sport; they unite to do a task too great for an individual, like building a house; they sort themselves out into managers and workers in order to create businesses and earn a living. But the most fundamental team of all, and the one which is the most important, is that of a man and woman deciding to live together in one space as husband and wife.