Perfection in Spouses & Marriage - NikahExplorer
To look for perfection in anything, and I mean ANYTHING in this world is to look for a lost cause. And to look for perfection in your spouse and your marriage is to downright and gradually destroy your marriage bit by bit. This is because, hard it may be to accept, perfection is an attribute that does not belong to us. Perfection is something that is the attribute of ONLY Allah. What we need to understand first and foremost before the start of any relationship in the boundaries of our religion of Islam, is that we will never be perfect as long as we live in this word because this world itself is not perfect.
Our ideas of fairy tale romances and living happily ever after that have evolved from us watching movies and cartoons, do not even touch the surface of what life actually is after marriage. We dream of a perfect wedding followed by a perfect spouse in a perfect marriage but this is far from the truth. Allah has mentioned in the Quran that our life is a roller coaster of good and bad, and that “with hardship comes ease”. So we must be prepared that neither we, nor our spouses are going to be exactly as we want them to be for the rest of the lives that we live with them. If you are going to believe that your spouse is your soul mate and nothing can make you disagree, compromise with him, then you are going to be disappointed very quickly in your marriage.
We should accept that our life partners are people who, number 1, are different from us and number 2, NOT perfect. So expecting them to always be the way you want them to be will be injurious to your relationship. Remember that this is not fiction, not a movie, not a story book. This is your real life, and it is up to you to make it the love story of a lifetime.
Often, we make a mistake in our daily dealings, we get too harsh with ourselves for doing so. The same is true if our spouse makes a mistake. We show impatience and irritation. We must not do that. Allah and the Holy Prophet (PBUH) has taught us tolerance in our dealings and tolerant we must be. We must learn to accept the limitations of our spouses and know that if we dislike one thing about them there may be a hundred that we actually LOVE about them. So next time you get impatient with your spouse’s habits or doings, remember that they, just like you are NOT perfect. Remembering that can actually lead your marriage to be the sort that Allah has decreed; filled with love, mercy, compromises and accepting each other’s faults. So learn to adjust yourself to your spouse’s bad points and limit the set of expectations you have from them. Let your marriage be excellent and strive for that, not for perfection.