Istikhara

WARNING: this post is a long one.

In my parents' culture/religion, they have this thing called an istikhara. The idea and purpose behind an istikhara is that before making a big decision (like getting married) in life, a concerned party spends an evening or two performing certain prayers and then within the next few days, the praying person expects to receive some kind of "divine" sign, often (but not limited to) in the form of a dream. However, there are conditions involved with this divine-dream sign; the greatest being that you will not see anyone or thing in definite clarity, but rather in colors, shapes, sounds, and movement. This means that the dream must be individually and personally interpreted.

Shortly after Imtiaz and I got engaged, his mother and my mother both decided that they should do an istikhara on behalf of our decision to get married. They both did this without consulting either Imtiaz or me. That, really, came as no surprise to either of us, as both sets of parents were adamantly against the idea of our engagement and impending marriage. What did surprise us was the fact that both his and my mother came away from the istikhara with similar signs: of struggle, difficulty, and anger. And, also somewhat not surprisingly, both mothers came to us with similar interpretations: if we got married, we would be unhappy together, and spend the rest of our life together resenting each other and arguing.

At the time, this worried both Imtiaz and I because we actually had been arguing for some time. Mostly about the fact there were so many parts (location, time, work and school schedules, etc.) of our relationship that weren't falling into place, and the fact that our parents were trying everything in their power to pull us away from one another wasn't helping either. We wondered if we had rushed into our engagement a little too early; it WAS an incredibly short span of time between meeting and getting engaged.

We took a few days to step back from it all and figure out if getting engaged was the right decision. It took me all of two days (the story of what took place these two days is one worth writing about, maybe I'll do it another day) to figure out that I could not, in fact, imagine a scenario of my life in which I was not spending my life with him. So, I knew that through thick and thin, I was in this for the long hall. Now, I'm not a mind reader, so I can't tell you with 100% accuracy, but if you can take a person as his or her words, then Imtiaz felt the same exact way.

Imtiaz and I have been engaged for well over a year now. We have had our ups and downs. We have had hardships and arguments. But at no point in any of it have I ever thought for even a moment that "I do not want to be with him". You can roll your eyes and mutter under your breath about how I'm still young, ignorant, blinded by love, and stupid, but the reality of the situation is that every argument that we have ever had and every hardship we have had to overcome has done nothing more than cement into my mind that my heart was right. If anything, our arguments have helped me to see that even though we have differences of opinions (considering we were both raised in different cultures) on some really big issues, we are both willing to work pretty damn hard to understand, accept, and accommodate each others' point of views. To see that even though we have come to the point (a couple of times) where two people start to consider whether it would be best if they walked away, we are both willing to take a step back from that ledge and work out the issues. And don't even get me started on the things that I have learned about myself and the capacity of love.

Sure, ever relationship comes riddled with complications and arguments, I am not denying that. And I am no future teller, so I cannot even imagine what the future holds for us (good things, I hope). But in the last year and a half, I have had been blessed to be in a loving relationship with a man who is willing to work through every hardship we have come upon so far, which gives me hope for the future. So, you can imagine that I have not given much thought to the results of the two istikharas that were done on our behalf by our mothers.

Until recently. Two days ago, I received some very bad news. And it seems that we are going to have to postpone our wedding plans even longer. We were sooo close *pinches fingers together* to setting a wedding date for late October of this year. But, alas, for what seems like the hundredth time, we have come across another hurdle.

As most of you know, Imtiaz lives more than 5,000 miles away from me, in Italy, right now. Our plan was that we would wait until he could come to the U.S. to get get married. In the past year, every time we get close to getting everything in order, something happens and we have to spend months overcoming a new hurdle so that we can set a new time frame. First, we decided we would get married without our parents' blessing. Then we decided to wait to get married until we could convince them to give us their blessings and be a part of our happiness and our lives. It took us 8 months to convince both sets of parents to meet, and my parents and I flew to the other side of the planet (almost 8,000 miles) to meet his parents, but that all blew up in our faces. Then, when we finally decided, again, to go ahead and get married without our parents' blessings, he had an issue renewing his residency permit in Italy, which delayed us by another 4 months. NOW, when he finally got that all resolved and we got all our fiance visa papers together, my lawyer informed me that the visa process has been extended from its original timeline of 6 months to a new timeline of 15 months (that's 2.5 times longer)!

I honestly don't think I can wait another year and a half to marry him! So, here we are again, trying to figure out what we should do.

And my mind keeps going back to the istikhara. Is this--our constant struggle to overcome the several hurdles in the way of us being together--what the istikhara could have really been about? Are these the difficulties, the struggles, and the anger that our mothers dreamt of? I am not saying that we are going to stop fighting and just give up. No, we are going to KEEP struggling until we get what we want: to get married and spend the rest of our lives together! But, are we going to have to struggle after that, too? If we are having to overcome so many hurdles just to be able to get married, what kind of struggles are we going to have to face after we get married?