Fig & Olive

Maybe because I often buy into a “rugged individualism” approach to life I’ve found it hard to completely comprehend what people mean when they say it’s hard to get married. I know that our culture doesn’t make it easy to get married but it is, after all, our culture and everyone born into it knows that there will likely be no helping hand in facilitating marriages. Most of the people I can think of who are married met on their own (college, work, etc.) or through friends. And often not for the primary purpose of marriage but rather marriage ‘comes up’ after getting to know each other within the same spaces.

Nevertheless, just because this is the culture (and cultural expectation) doesn’t mean it’s good or worth continuing. As our generation —the infamous millennials, go on to marry and have kids (divorce, slowly fade out of the marriage market, or continue having difficulties getting married). We can begin to consider how to make things better for the next generation. 

In dealing with the ‘how to get married’ issue it’s important to address that a part of people’s difficulties in getting married is the lack of marriageable men/women. A lot of unmarried millennials are unhappy with their options and the inability of the opposite sex –in their perception, to fulfill their role of husband/wife. It’s much harder to say what a path forward for dealing with that issue in regard to millennials would look like but if we think of the younger generation there is an opportunity to purposefully engage in teaching the skills that would make one a good spouse.

Imam Hamzah Abdul Malik points out in a recent Facebook post some of what “went wrong” with our generation concerning shifts in priorities and the resultant marriage crisis:

…youth in my generation were… sold… “Muslim entertainment”… and Muslim entertainers were increasingly viewed… [as] models for the youth for how to be a real Muslim Americans. Concerts, poetry slams, and fashion shows were introduced to Muslim conferences to “cater to youth”. MSAs across the country began shifting to the same trend, leaving their traditional models of dawah/activism and Islamic education in exchange for entertainment and interfaith apologetics… the downside of adolescent entertainment culture is that it doesn’t breed emotional maturity, foster examples of healthy intimate relationships, nor encourage moral responsibility [Italics added]. So it is no surprise that the Millennial Muslims are so emotionally insecure, Islamically uneducated, chronically single…

What happened to our community, which Imam Hamzah details here, is what happened within the larger American culture; the infantilization of young adults. If you spend your young adulthood relishing in independence, entertainment, and bearing little responsibility, it’s a near-impossible shift to become a suitable potential spouse.

A part of aiding the coming generation is giving them the tools to not simply find a spouse (which we should play a more active role in) but also to be a spouse. That means, in part, utilizing teen and young adult years not for “fun” but for adulthood training. Conferences may want to consider having marriage preparation workshops for Muslim youth as opposed to music concerts. The first solution to alleviating the difficulty of getting married is increasing the number of suitable men and women and this has to start *before* either party enters the marriage market. The marriage crisis in our communities didn’t evolve out of thin air. Years of deprioritizing marriage, infantilizing Muslim youth, and a lack of preparation in the early years are all obvious factors that led to our current crisis. And if we so chose we can actively alleviate younger Muslims from going through the same hardships.

There’s far more I’ll likely write on this issue in the coming weeks but beginning to clearly conceptualize the problem and focusing on creating a generation made up of better potential spouses (before talking about getting married itself) may be a good start.

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Photo by Jack Sparrow from Pexels