The “Muslim Dating” Scene is a Disaster — What Went Wrong?
Dating as a Muslim. What could possibly go right?
Umm… Not a whole lot.
Let’s be honest, whether you’re a brother or a sister, the experience of finding your compatible, upright, and not-too-weird spouse is universally frustrating, aggravating and teeth-grindingly maddening.
Hi, fellow single brother or single sister. Or a married one… (You lucky b*stard!)
Whatever your experience may be, the question still lingers in our heads — what’s really going on here? Why are all my 35-year old friends single? In this article, I shall attempt to explore exactly that.
Riddled with setbacks, heartbreaks, messaged left on read, and the glut of unsavoury men, navigating this war-zone feels no different to learning how to hold your breath submerged a hundred metres underwater. (Sidenote — I’ve heard half of the troublemakers on Muzz are married men too, which transcends the realms of absurdity). All we want is a spouse, a life-partner and travel buddy, right? Without getting swept away into the maelstrom of hook-up culture, premarital sex, and unplanned pregnancies.
But what’s bizarre, is that there’s NO shortage of single people in our age demographic (18–35). This isn’t a problem of supply not meeting demand. Otherwise, the answer to this question would be found in a census, indicating a crooked ratio of males and females in the country. China is already confronting this challenge and is finding no easy solutions).
There are many angles we can approach this. We can talk about the pitfalls in dating apps (Muzz, I’m looking at you). We can delve deeper into the intractable and imprisoning social, economic, or psychological dynamics that plague our modern world. Or the hugely diverse readings of Islamic theology that could push us along different paths, purist or liberal.
But let’s start with the basics.
See, it was never an easy battle in the first place. The cards are stacked against us. Most of our parents did it the easy way. Also known as the “arranged” method. But us millennials and Gen-Z’s, growing up in the “free world”, tend to think a little differently. Even if we’re not sneering and squirming at the prospect of an arranged marriage, many of us like the idea of “control” in our lives. We treasure the power of agency, and in finding our own path towards fulfilment, be it professional, financial or romantic.
Ostensibly, this freedom to choose is what defines the bulk of Western values, too. The culture that shapes the world we live in. Maybe a little too much, when we find ourselves surrounded by fleeting situationships, break-ups, single parents and broken households.
Being a relatively new arrival to non-Muslim lands, however, Muslims are yet to find the right balance between the old ways and the new ways. Traditional institutions and modern approaches are yet to merge into an acceptable equilibrium that fulfils both our spiritual and temporal needs. This process is likely to last multiple generations before a modicum of clarity emerges.
And so, we find ourselves navigating untrodden paths, torn between competing socio-cultural pressures and pull-factors, forced to “get it right” the first time among a sea of endless possibilities.
But let’s dig deeper into this, for a moment.
Because the act of dating itself isn’t precisely defined. Dating can mean dating for the sake of it, until it morphs into a long-term relationship on its own accord. Or, as our own principles would demand, a “process” of getting to know someone in a controlled and limited setting, to gauge whether they are the right fit or not.
If it’s the latter, however, as it is for most of us, we have a big problem. And this problem applies universally, not just to dating within Muslims. See, the biggest mistake we make at this stage, is to look for “compatibility”. It’s to bring a shopping list of requirements to the table, and in mathematical fashion, hope it mirrors the requirements of your counterpart. As if it’s simply a matter of finding the “puzzle section” that fits seamlessly onto yours (metaphorically, of course). And I can understand why we fall into this trap. As is expected, as Muslims, we are not permitted to engage in premarital relationships or “test runs” to ascertain compatibility. (For the better, of course, but we can revisit why later). But, as a result, we place far too much pressure on ourselves to ensure the person we “date” has everything we want, at this very moment, otherwise it’s a no-deal. We approach dating in an ultra-rational fashion, with an imaginary checklist and a red flag radar beaming in our heads. This arises from the natural tendency to mitigate risk, given that the costs of failure are understandably high. We optimise our approach towards maximising the chance of getting it right the first time. And none of this is bad, to speak plainly.
But it misses the point of successful relationships. It misses two points, in fact.
The first, is that humans cannot be defined or recognised by their component parts, like their career, income, hobbies, demographic markers, etc. Instead, they are defined by the totality of their components, which always adds up to be larger than the sum of the individual components. As a human, you are so much more than what you can squeeze on a dating app or “marriage CV”. And it isn’t the components that you’ll be marrying, but the entire self, with all its beauties and blemishes. When we are “optimising” for compatibility, we are making it impossible for ourselves to see the person that lies behind the checklists and yes/no answers. In other words, true connection between humans isn’t sparked by matching hobbies or arbitrary demographic indices.
Second, is that the information needed to deem whether a match is the right one for you, is not the information you’ll find on a dating app profile. Dating apps restrict you in describing yourself by the standardised and surface-level indicators, like personality scores, hobbies, height, or favourite holiday destination. These indicators, however, have little to no correlation with the success of a relationship. (P.S. If your favourite holiday destination is Dubai… that is a BIG red flag!!)
Hypocrisy aside, deep inside, I’m sure you already know this. You have likely met no shortage of couples whose togetherness took you by surprise or raised your eyebrows. The ones that were never “meant to be” together, but somehow are. The couples that would never be together had they simply restricted their search to a fixed age group, professional milieu, or geographical location.
Yet it is probable your future marriage will likely have a similar element of surprise or “incongruence” to it. This isn’t an attempt to justify an un-Islamic path of matrimony, but simply an invitation to ask the question — “Are we making it too hard for ourselves?”
Hopefully the above makes sense. But ever wondered why we end up making this mistake, in the first place?
Let me ask you some calibrated questions, and let’s see what we can uncover.
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Scenario 1: Ever found yourself in the awkward situation whereby your interlocutor ticks all the boxes, but there’s no “spark” or funny feeling telling you they are the one?
Scenario 2: Or, as is more frequent, that you find yourself falling for someone, overcome by the flames of infatuation, but that they simply do not tick even half of your boxes? The latter, as you’d appreciate, happens mind-numbingly too often! Particularly in our early adulthood, when we are no different to the little toddler-adults littering the high schools and college campuses.
Based on the above, let me ask you another question. Is the solution for scenario two, a reactive lurching to scenario one? Will turning the hunt for a spouse into a mechanised and formulaic school-project, devoid of authenticity, flavour, and emotion, save us from the tears of heartbreak? As Scenario One would have it, you would be dragging yourself into signing your entire life off to someone that hardly enthuses you. To the personification of “beans on toast”, to put it crudely. Unless forced, however, nobody would realistically take this path, as most of us recognise all too well that without a spark, the rest of the equation is redundant.
I think we can agree that neither scenario is desirable. My point, however, is that we are often engaging in scenario one more often than we like to think. By denying the presence of our emotions, as fickle as they may be, and simply adopting the ultra-rationalist approach of optimising and checking boxes, we are doing exactly that. To varying extents, of course, if not entirely.
But where does this leave us, then? Is there a third way, that combines the best of both, and avoids the worst of both?
I’m sure we can invent one. Let’s call it Scenario 1.5, for the lack of a better term.
What would scenario 1.5 look like in the real world?
To put it bluntly — The “comfort with disappointment”.
Yes, you weren’t expecting that, were you? Let me explain what I mean. See, the sad reality of the world is that fleeing from disappointment, fuelled by the embers of fear and anxiety, ironically leads to more disappointment in the long-run. Because, as depressing as it may sound, the objective of life was never to circumvent the pains of existence, but to tap the pains of existence for meaning, purpose and strength in a world gone too far the other way… (perhaps I will explore this deeper in another article).
In practice, this would mean being comfortable with not knowing the answers before you choose. It would mean accepting the inherent imperfection and incompleteness of the information you have. And above all, it would acknowledge that, sometimes, you may not have reasons for why you like or dislike something. The same-old emotions may strike again, but they need not usher you down a path of outlandish and unachievable fantasies.
Still with me? Splendid. Because we’re not done yet.
See, it isn’t just Muslims that struggle here, even if our struggles are somewhat unique.
In an era of dating apps which vastly widen the pool of matches and potentials, you are exposed to people from not just your community or school, but from every corner of the globe. A dating pool of what was once 30–40 people that lived in your town or village, now exceeds the millions. Millions of people only a swipe-right away, in a shiny cuboid that sits in your pocket and rests beside your pillow every day (or night, respectively). The human brain, with all its wonders and wizardry, however, is simply unable to grasp such scale-breakingly large numbers of options. Whether the context is shopping for the right clothes, choosing a food item on the menu or your next YouTube video, we have more choices than we could make in a hundred lifetimes. Decision fatigue isn’t the right word here — it’s best described as “decision-atrophy” — the compete shut down of our decision-making engines in the face of infinite options.
But the damage doesn’t end there. Sure, the larger the range, the harder it is to choose. But why exactly is it harder to choose? Because an abundance of options misleads us into thinking that “the right one” will come if I keep digging deeper. If I meet more people. Look further. Or just widen my search radius a little bit more. The presence of far too many options deceives us into thinking that there is always better than what is currently on the table. Because, surely, if I have over a billion options, then at least one out of a billion must be the “jaw-droppingly eye-poppingly unfailingly PERFECT option, right?
This is where probabilistic thinking becomes dangerous. It’s incredibly subtle, but we make this mistake in a multitude of contexts. Whether it’s the dream job, dream house or dream spouse. That if we sit tighter for a little longer, we will find Mr or Miss Perfect. But this is yet another trap of arithmetic because the probability of finding the right one doesn’t exist as a function of population size.
Maths aside, let’s look at the brutal reality. See, in the real world of real people, Mr or Miss Perfect doesn’t even exist! Simply. Doesn’t. Exist. (Hate to be so blunt, but I think you already knew this, deep inside. Your decision-making matrix just didn’t appreciate this fact enough).
While the perfect marriage, made in heaven and all that, may emerge, it will only do so after you have tied the knot. After all the arguments and quarrels, and the conciliatory cuddles that come thereafter…
Now, combine the problem of decision-atrophy caused by the glut of options, and the problem of looking for the wrong things in a person, and you have the recipe for the collective nightmare we find ourselves in today.
We live in a society whose values clash with the ones we hold dear — I get it, it’s hard.
We date to marry, and don’t want to end up marrying the wrong person — I empathise.
We may have subconsciously mechanised the process into an abstract checkbox exercise, denying our emotions in the process — I get that, too.
On top of this, we face a mind-numbing and dizzying array of options — *Punches the table*
The perils of dating as a Muslim will continue to dominate our fireside chats and late-night rants. We will continue to need, and tap into, scholarly guidance to ensure congruence with our faith. We will similarly continue to hear all manners of advice from friends, neutral observers, counsellors, and intrusive aunts who can’t zip it. The pseudo-influencers and Instagram wannabe-sheikhs will throw their loud opinion in, too.
This article doesn’t mirror any of those voices. Nor is it prescribing any set solutions. Islam will always tell us what it tells us, and our obligations towards our Creator will never disappear. The cultural context will always remain fraught and tricky. For you, however, the journey ahead need not be a maelstrom of frustrations, fears, and follies.
With a spoonful of self-awareness, sprinkled with open and honest discussions, and bolstered by sincere bouts of prayer, you will find yourself shopping for a ring sooner than you think — Insha Allah.
