What would you tell to your children about how you met your spouse? Was the love strong enough to fight against all odds? Did it start as a friendship, or you were introduced by your relatives, or met through a matrimonial agency, or maybe you met online?
This is the main topic of Huma Qureshi inspired memoir How We Met. It is her story of falling in love with her husband, Richard. Her love story is not dramatic, does not end with her, a Muslim, running out of her home and marrying her non-Muslim husband. Her brothers did not follow her to London for revenge. And she did not denied her religion. None of the dear topics of the books dealing with the meeting between two cultures and religions that should be exclusivistic and ending up with the complete denial of his/her own roots in order to start a new, religion-free life.
Instead, Huma´s story is how she grow out of the pressures of her environment, achieving a career as a journalist - and not as a lawyer or a doctor - finding the man of her life after painful dating episodes and after living under the pressure of delivering the best of herself, but only what other people were expecting from her.
Her meeting with Richard brought her out of her cultural and religious comfort zone, but in fact, for the first time she was talking with someone with whom she could share her ideas and life and stories. Their different backgrounds were part of their identities, but their meeting did not diminish or altered what they were. Instead, it solved the conflict between displaying what she was versus of who she really was, a tension Huma experienced during her dating adventures. At the very end of her 20s, she was feeling like a leftover, under the pressure of a religious community intolerant towards single people, especially single women.
Her decision of moving to London, shortly after the death of her father, was a challenge that did her good. On her own, she focused rather on her professional aims instead of making marriage her sole reason to exist. She learned to be kind to herself which is not as easy at it sounds because it requires a lot of perseverance and acknowledgement of one´s aims.
Now, happily married with three energetic children, she is looking back to recreate a journey not as a rebelious person but of a person learning how to negotiate her boundaries within her own community. A happy meaningful marriage means more than sharing the same childhood stories. Her life she settled for involved a lot of negotiation and compromise, but also a lot of kindness and love. This is how she succeeded to make space for a life of her own, which keeps authentic every day.
The memoir is relatively short and it goes back and forth alongside the past and present timelines. I related at large with the writing, simple and direct, with a story that I´ve actually finished in one sitting.
Rating: 4.5 stars
Disclaimer: Book offered by the publisher in exchange for an honest review
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