Summary: Assalamoalaikum warehmatullahe wa barakatahu<br> <br> I have about fifteen minutes to address all of you and this is a very critical subject and there's so much that can be said about it and I am really glad that Altaf bhai’s presentation was very comprehensive and it touched upon a lot of things that really need to be given a lot of attention. Each one of his points is chapters in the book of marriage and really it should be taken very, very seriously. All of those things can be mentioned very easily in a sentence or two but when it comes to implementing them in our family lives; it's actually a very heavy discussion. And the few minutes I have with you I have to be selective in what I think is pertinent and what I think inshaAllah wa tallah is an Amana to share with you.<br> I see these conference presentations opportunities not just for rhetoric and takbeers in the end but also opportunities to share food for thought and I want to pretend in these few minutes that I am just talking to a family that I know, just one of you or a family that I know and there is a marriage that is about to happen in your family. You are about to get your daughter married or you're about to get your son married and I just want to share some very relevant, I think relevant advice in regards to this matter.<br> Marriage is all about trust from the very beginning and its one thing that unfortunately I'm noticing more and more in the premarital process is missing. The foundation of two families coming together if it is not, trust, transparency and openness there’s going to be clearly problems after marriage. You know marriage has become almost like a very difficult sale you know you go to a car dealer ship, the salesman presents his best self and the best features of the car and he gets really offended if you ask difficult questions and if you start asking about the transmission problems that have been reported previously or the recalls or anything else he goes like “I don't know if I want to deal with this”.<br> What's happened to us in the marriage discourse is that we actually market ourselves. The boy and the girl and the families, they market themselves so they turn the house into something it's not when they're coming over, when the in-laws are coming over they turn themselves and their conversations into something that aren’t genuine and is not really a representation of who they are. How many families, and I can't even count and he and she (pointing out to other speakers) are from the counseling profession and they can tell you families would come and say we had no idea they were like this, no clue who we were dealing with, they were completely different people before. This kind of scamming which you would think would happen in the sales industry is actually happening in the institution of marriage and that's a crisis! Some of the more I guess forward thinking families that aren't as conservative quote and quote they say no let the girl and boy talk to each other let them email one another and let them have a few conversations. But at this point, both of them are so blind and they are so interested in just getting on with the celebrations and the new dress, the gifts and you know all the stuff. They are so caught up in the hype and all the congratulations that they are getting, phone calls and text messages that when they even talk to each other it's empty fluff conversations and they see what they want to see in the spouse. They are not able to have an intellectually sound conversation a lot of times the young men and young women because you know Hub ul ain la tara or Ain ul hub la taraa the eye of love can't see. You are already infatuated with the idea so you have a hard time seeing any flaws and that infection actually lasts a little bit longer even after the marriage. For the first couple of weeks, you can’t see any flaw in your spouse even the way they sneeze you're like "it's amazing the way the boogers just spread o...
