All the Reasons I Loved You.

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Give me a daughter with your stubborn heart, or your quiet patience that steadies mine. Let our children carry your gaze, those dark, thoughtful eyes that taught me gentleness, or your smile that always turned my hardest days soft.

Give me a son who grows into the kind of man you are, one who holds love with both strength and care, who speaks little, but means everything, and carries in his presence the same calm, that once taught my restless heart to rest.

Let them inherit the way you love, with mercy, with a heart that forgives before it is asked. How you choose me and keep on choosing me, as if your heart knew mine, long before we ever met.

I want them to see how you hold a home together, not with brick walls, but with a kindness that never speaks out loud, with hands that give more than they take, and a heart that makes space for mine, again and again.

Let them learn love from the quiet moments, the way you stop to listen when I falter, how your presence alone turns ordinary days into ease, as if mercy lives in the spaces you fill.

I hope they carry your strength in silence, the way you endure without hardening inside, and your faith softens every hardship, until even trials feel like something we can bear together.

I hope they notice all the little ways in which you love me, how you remember what I forget to say, how you stay when days grow heavy, and still find ways to reach for my laugh, as if loving me was always part of your every day.

I hope they grow with the patience you show, learn to speak gently when words might hurt, to hold tightly without clinging, to give space and still stay near, so that love becomes something they carry, not just witness.

And if they ever ask me what love is, I will not speak in grand words, or definitions, but I will point at you, to the life we built in patience, and in trust.

Because loving you was never loud, it was steady like a stream, constant like breath, a quiet certainty placed in my chest, that with you, I had already found enough.

And if I am ever remembered for anything, let it be that I loved you gently, that I did not rush what was sacred between us, that I learned your soul as one learns a prayer, slowly, with care.

And if the world was ever cruel in ways I could not see, know that none of it followed you into me, because with me, you were never what the world made you, only who you truly were.

There are parts of me only you have seen, unspoken fears, quiet fractures I could not name, yet you held them without ever turning away, as if loving me was never a burden for you to carry.

So, if love has a witness beyond time, it will be in the way I still look for you in every crowd, in the way my heart learned your rhythm so completely, that even silence began to sound like you.

That even when we are gone, the world will see within them, everything that made my heart choose you, in their patience without complaint, their courage when it matters most, their quiet ways of making others safe, and in the warmth, they carry like light, so that our love, once lived, will never leave.

And even at the end of all things, when words fall away and this dunya grows distant, know this, loving you was the truest thing I ever did.

Allah states in the Quran:

وَمِنْ آيَاتِهِ أَنْ خَلَقَ لَكُمْ مِنْ أَنفُسِكُمْ أَزْوَاجًا لِتَسْكُنُوا إِلَيْهَا وَجَعَلَ بَيْنَكُمْ مَوَدَّةً وَرَحْمَةً ۚ إِنَّ فِي ذَٰلِكَ لَآيَاتٍ لِّقَوْمٍ يَتَفَكَّرُونَ "And of His signs is that He created for you mates from among yourselves so that you may find tranquility in them, and He placed between you affection and mercy. Indeed in that are signs for people who reflect." (Surah Ar‑Rum, Verse 21)

Love between spouses is not just a fleeting passion or a desire, but a quiet, steadfast mercy woven with deep affection. Real love is choosing each other over and over, in moments big and small, without keeping score. It asks us to see beyond ourselves, to soften our hearts for another, and to carry each other through both ease and trial.

May we all find such love in this Dunya and the Next, Aameen.