What I Didn't Know My Soul Was Carrying Into Courtship: A Personal Reflection

I don't usually let myself be this visible.

There has always been a quiet voice in me that says a story like this belongs in a journal, not on a page other people will read, that sharing it might look like it's about me when it's meant to be for you. But I've come to understand that voice for what it is. It is fear wearing the mask of professionalism. The truth, the one I keep circling back to, is that the depth of work I can hold with clients comes from the depth of work I have done, and continue to do, with myself.

So this is me sharing a glimpse into my own premarital journey with this fear, because we often don't see examples of soulfully navigating, healing, and struggling with life.

What happened to me in 2007

I was twenty-five that year, freshly out of graduate school, working full time, and for the first time I felt steady in my own life. Solid in my mind, my heart, my faith. It felt like the right season to begin the marriage journey, so I did what a lot of us did back then and created a profile on an online Muslim matrimonial service. I met someone quickly. He too was a professional living across the country, but our lives rhymed in almost every way that seemed to matter. Similar values, similar faith practice, similar sense of where we each stood in life. We spent months getting to know each other through email (yes, it was 2007!), phone calls, and eventually the nervous, hopeful feeling of meeting in person. Something in me had already started to believe we were heading somewhere real and this was the intention we had set out at the start.

Then I met his mother, or rather, I sat across from her without ever really meeting her at all.

My aunt and uncle in Toronto arranged a gathering so our families could get acquainted, and his mother arrived with his two siblings. His father didn't come, and looking back, I can feel how much that absence was already telling me something. For the length of that visit, his mother rarely turned her eyes toward mine. She spoke only to my aunt and uncle, in Urdu, a language that moved through the room without including me in it (Context: I am ethnically half Pakistani and half Persian, and speak Persian/Farsi). He would glance my way now and then, something like reassurance in his eyes, but underneath it I could feel a wrongness settling over me that I didn't yet have words for.

A few days after I flew home, he called me. His mother didn't think I was Pakistani enough. He was ending things.

What I remember feeling the most, apart the sadness and shock, is the shame. How fast it moved through me, how it didn't stay in the shape of one thought but kept mutating, from I'm not Pakistani enough into I'm not good enough into I don't deserve to be chosen at all. When I finally found the nerve to ask him why he hadn't stood up for us, he told me simply that he couldn't, because she was his mother. I remember the strange hollow feeling of hearing that and realizing there was nothing left to say because there’s inherently something wrong with me. I didn't know it then, but I was walking away from that courtship with a deep emotional wound I didn’t know how to witness or tend to, and I was about to carry it, unhealed, straight into the next one.

What I carried forward, and what I couldn't yet see

The next courtship stretched on for a year and a half, and I want to bring you not through all of it but to the moment it finally broke open, in a therapist's office. The courtship had ended, and for the first time in my life, I sat across from a therapist and told her the entire story of what I had experienced and how I was left feeling.

I remember the particular quality of her silence as she listened, unhurried, letting me get all the way to the end before she spoke. And then she said, gently and compassionately, that what I was describing was abuse. That he had been abusing me, emotionally and spiritually both.

After the initial shock of hearing this wore off, I felt something shift. It felt like two puzzle pieces struggling to fit together that finally snapped into place - something that had been lodged there for a year and a half without a name. Suddenly I could see it all in a single unbroken thread running through all of what I had experienced,

Being told I made too much eye contact with men, that I flirted, that there were “white girls more respectful than I was.”

Being told I was desperate for attention and needed to dress with more modesty.

Being told I couldn't keep spending time with close friends who weren't Muslim, even though they had only ever treated me with respect.

Being told that he could be with any woman he wanted, yet here he was, with me.

I could feel, even years later, how quietly I had disappeared during that time. I stopped seeing the people who loved me. I dressed differently, not out of spiritual conviction and choice, but out of shame. I threw myself into more religious study and more Islamic gatherings, and I told myself the entire time that I was becoming a better, more devoted Muslim woman, when really I was watching myself vanish and calling it growth.

It was my mother who finally reached in and pulled me back out. We had gone together to meet him at a cafe so she could ask direct, unflinching questions about how he intended to support me once we married, and something in his answers didn't sit right with her. A few houses from home, she asked me to pull the car over. And then she let it all out at once. She asked me plainly if he made me happy, if I thought he deserved me, and she told me she had looked into his eyes and seen nothing there. I broke down in that car in a way I hadn't let myself in a long time, and I told her the truth, that I didn't want to marry him. That same night I sent one text ending it and asking him never to contact me again. When he called anyway, during a work conference call I was attending alone, I felt my whole body go electric, my heart pounding, a hot flood of anger rising in me that I finally trusted enough to act on. I answered and yelled at him to leave me alone or I would call the police, and then I hung up. I still remember how good that felt. Curse word and all.

Looking back now, what I understand most clearly is that I had no context, no language, no skills for navigating any of it. I didn't know what emotional or spiritual abuse looked like, especially braided together the way they so often are. And I had no idea what I was still carrying from that first courtship in 2007, the shame I had never processed, the wound I didn't know I was carrying into this next relationship, making me more vulnerable than I understood at the time.

NOTE: Before I move from my own story into what I've learned from working with others, I want to be clear about something. Looking back this way is not about excusing or softening what he chose to do. Understanding why something happened is not the same as justifying it, and it doesn't erase the impact it had on me, or on his accountability for his actions in this life and the next. It comes instead from the belief that I did the best I could with what I knew and what I had access to at the time, and that accountability is one I hold for myself, since that is all I am in control of.

Why I'm telling you this

Most of us walk into the premarital season the way I once did, carrying almost nothing we actually need for it. We carry a checklist. We carry a sense of what our families expect, what our faith and communities will quietly approve of, what age feels acceptable to still be unmarried at. What we rarely carry with us is any real understanding of our own emotional vulnerabilities, the attachment patterns we absorbed long before we ever sat across from a potential spouse, or what it actually takes to heal an old wound before it steers a new relationship from somewhere underneath our awareness.

We tend to treat courtship as a matching exercise with a checklist. Right values, right background, right education, right family approval. These questions aren't useless, but they tell us almost nothing about what actually determines whether a relationship will be safe and sustaining, which is how two people handle closeness, conflict, and vulnerability once the excitement of matching wears off. Almost none of us enter courtship having asked what we're bringing into it from earlier relationships or from our families of origin. So we bring it in anyway, unexamined, and it shapes everything from underneath, the same way my unhealed shame from 2007 quietly shaped so much of what came after it.

And just as few of us learn to recognize our own patterns, fewer still are given real language for what an unhealthy relationship looks like, or the exact point where unhealthy becomes abusive. In my work with clients, I've watched someone stay through repeated infidelity long after anyone on the outside could see she should leave - not because she lacked judgment but because she had no framework for naming what was happening to her from inside it. I've sat with those who were worn down slowly, over months and sometimes years, by someone who controlled how they dressed, who they spoke to, how they understood their own faith, and who had no name for it until long after real damage had already been done. I’ve sat with those who continue wonder why they keep finding themselves with “emotionally unavailable” or “anxiously attached” partners.

From a compassionate perspective, the answer is that we don’t often have what we need to navigate the premarital phase.

The gap is still there

Not long ago I searched "Muslims and navigating premarital relationships" on YouTube, curious what I would find. What came back was page after page of religious rulings, cautionary advice, and warnings about premarital sex. Mostly from male scholars, imams, and others who tried to show up as either of these. And some female scholars repeating the same messages as their male counterparts. Almost none of it touched the actual emotional landscape courtship stirs up in us, the old wounds it reopens, the patterns it quietly repeats, the disorienting task of trying to tell whether what you're in is simply hard, or actually harmful.

We have no shortage of guidance on what courtship should look like from the outside. What we're missing is any real help with what's happening inside us while we're living through it.

The gap goes deeper than what shows up in a search result. Most of us enter the premarital season having never once been invited to look at our own soul, at the heart that has been quietly carrying wounds since long before we can even remember, some of them from as far back as birth. We enter it disconnected from our own bodies, having learned somewhere along the way to override what our body is trying to tell us rather than trust it. We enter it with almost no soulful understanding of our own sexual health, having absorbed either silence or shame around it, so that by the time intimacy becomes part of the conversation, we're working from fear or ignorance instead of any real groundedness in ourselves. All of this comes with us into courtship, whether we're aware of it or not, and it shapes the decisions we make there in ways we rarely trace back to their source. A body that's learned not to trust its own instincts will stay quiet exactly when it most needs to speak up. A heart still carrying an old wound will mistake familiarity for compatibility, because familiar can feel like home even when it's actually harm. Someone who has never been given a soulful relationship with their own sexuality will struggle to know what healthy intimacy even feels like, let alone recognize when something crosses a line.

And when all of this surfaces, who do we actually turn to? Friends are usually the first call, and they love us, but they aren't trained to spot a pattern or hold the weight of what we're describing, so their comfort, however sincere, often isn't the same as real support. Social media and influencers can name a feeling or a red flag in a fifteen second clip, which has its place, but it rarely goes further than the surface, and it isn't built for the slower work of actually processing what we're carrying. Islamic lectures offer something real and important, a spiritual grounding many of us need, but they tend to stay at the level of guidance and ruling rather than walking with us through the emotional and embodied experience of getting there. And now there's AI, which can hand us information instantly, but information was never the thing we were missing. What we're missing isn't only being witnessed by someone who can hold the whole of what we're carrying and reflect it back to us with a presence no screen can offer. It's also the capacity to witness ourselves at that same depth, to sit with our own soul honestly enough to actually see what's there.

Witnessing my soul

I don't think I've ever actually sat with these past experiences through a witnessing the soul lens until now. As I witness my twenty five year old soul from where I stand today, forty four, I would tell her that none of this was ever about not being Pakistani enough, or good enough, or worthy of being chosen. I would tell her that the wound she was about to carry into her next courtship deserved tending long before it did, and that needing to learn this the hard way doesn't mean she failed, it means she was doing the best she could with what she had at the time. I would remind her that God was witnessing her even in the moments she couldn't witness herself, and that every prayer she whispered in confusion was heard long before she understood what she was asking for. I would tell her that her body already knew, long before her mind caught up, and that one day she would learn to trust that knowing instead of overriding it. Mostly, I would tell her that she was never broken, only unwitnessed, and that the woman writing this now, and the years of sabr it took to get here, are proof that healing was always possible for her.

Witnessing your soul

I’m sharing a few reflection questions to guide your own reflection, and they are included in this free two-page digital guide.

What wound did I carry into my last courtship without realizing it, and where did it actually begin?

What did I mistake for love or compatibility because it felt familiar, rather than because it felt safe?

When did I override what my body or my instincts were trying to tell me, and what was I afraid would happen if I listened?

What language did I lack for naming what I was experiencing at the time, and do I have that language now?

If I could sit across from myself at that age, what would I want to say to her before she walked into that relationship?

What am I still carrying, unexamined, into how I show up in courtship or partnership today?

If you need more support

If any part of what I've shared here felt familiar, my book goes deeper into this emotional and spiritual terrain as we soulfully search for a spouse, and I also offer premarital counseling sessions and guidance sessions for anyone trying to understand what they're carrying into this season before it shapes the next relationship the way mine once did. You don't have to learn this the hard way, the way I did. I share more about what witnessing the soul tangibly means and how it looks in daily life through my weekly newsletter.

Join my newsletter below, and let's keep witnessing ourselves together. You don’t have to walk this alone.

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