Introduction:
As I was digging through my laptop for previous articles I’ve written in the last five years, I found two letters that I’ve kept as a token of an experience that I have learned a lot from.
In November last year, something so magical happened to me. I fell in love with a woman. This experience taught me so many things, and it made me improve myself in many ways to win and woo her, and because she was my encouragement to be a better man.
That experience also gave me a heartbreak that I needed some time to recover from and revise my situation to learn from my errors. I am happy to have been through this experience, and I am happy as well that I get to retain all of the positive memories, experiences, and treasures from what I went through. I share this personal experience so that others may learn from what I have been through, and not repeat my mistakes.
In early November, I met a woman who was so beautiful and smart, and she was kind as well. I was at the stage of my life where I was ready to get married and establish a family. It appeared to me that she fit all my requirements of a good woman, but I needed to know more about her to ask her out, or to ask for her hands in marriage. In general, it is very hard to get to know people from the other sex, especially if they are traditional or religious, which I am not very much. So, getting to know her more required a bit of work on my part.
My ideals are very high, and I understand that even I fall short of these ideals. But I have friends, and none of my friends are perfect. And I love them for their imperfections, but only when they are moral people at heart. When I think about this, I am always reminded of Carl Rogers’ immortal words:
“People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be. When I look at a sunset, I don’t find myself saying, ‘Soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner.’ I don’t try to control a sunset. I watch with awe as it unfolds.”
Moreover, I am perfectly at peace with my faults: I understand them and try to correct them one by one. For one, I was very bad at high school, and I almost failed math and physics, but these two subjects became what I was best at in my undergraduate and graduate years. I never read a book before the age of eighteen and thought books were a waste of time, but since then, and after the encouragement of a dear friend, I have read over 700 books as of now, and I don’t think I will ever stop reading. I never thought I could write, and now I have written many poems, short stories, and two unpublished novels awaiting editing. Finally, I was a heavy smoker since high school, and I was overweight as well, but I have fixed these problems and I can run now, and my body is as fit as ever as I lost over twenty kilos of fat and gained much muscle. The last improvement was done after the encouragement of the very same woman I wanted to court and wed. I am proud of these advances and progress, and because I am always capable of improving, I look at people’s potential and not just who they are right now, and this makes me love them so much more. And there’s hardly a person I cannot find a reason to love in the world, despite their faults, unless, of course, they were corrupt and sinister to their cores.
This woman, whom I was interested in, was a bundle of potentialities: I loved the ideal that she could approach as much as I was fascinated and intrigued by her. I wished I had known her better, or could know her better, to make an informed decision. And asking her out was out of the question: It was hard to ask her to go for a walk with me, or if I could have coffee with her. But she seemed to me like the right person to be with, and perhaps it’s because I know many of the women in my life much more and notice their bright faults and lack of ambitions, or even their moral flaws that drive me away, so I do not pursue them romantically. I just had a feeling this woman might be different, and I wanted to try my luck to see if it was possible to know if she was really as special as what had seemed to me.
She was very kind and sweet to me. However, I did not mistake her kindness for attraction, as I am kind myself to many men and women, and many think that by my kindness I am showing them my feelings even though this is a habit I have learned to cultivate as part of my moral disposition. So, I had to find a way to express my interest and to know if she was interested in me. The only way I knew of was to talk to her and to inspect her character. I talked to her four times. However, none of that was revealed to me.
So, when my boss sent me to the book fair to chair three panels on scientific and engineering topics close to my field, I figured I’d bring some books to her with me. In our last discussion, I had many questions on my note, but I forgot to read her the last one which was to ask her if she read books and if it was okay to bring her some hand-selected books with me. (Initially, I brought her a physics book about invisibility written by one of my doctoral supervisors, and a novel about a surgeon whose life was destroyed by communism in Czechoslovakia; however, my friend told me to bring her other books, so I chose a novella by John Steinbeck, another by Najeeb Mahfouz, and an edition of the Quraan that was so hard to get there.) My error was that I went to her work without announcing that to her and she accepted the books but was very hesitant. I should have told her I was sincerely sorry for that, but my dearest friend advised me not to word it so bluntly. I didn’t know what to do. So, I wrote her a letter apologizing and stating my intention as clearly as possible. I sent it to her sister’s friend, who was my friend as well, and to ask her to communicate my intentions and my apologies.
The letter, with many redactions, and with her name changed to Iris for her privacy, is enclosed below.
Proposal Letter:
To Iris, dearest,
Good day,
You are a smart woman: I shall not trouble you with specious pretenses. I want my intention from the start to be crystal clear. Or, since a crystal refracts, reflects, and attenuates the light, I want it to be as clear as air, or better yet, ‘empty-space.’ This letter will be a window to my character, and I will plant myself here for you to see me.
I have a crush on you. I am interested in you. I write poems about you when the inspiration comes, and I cannot stop thinking about you. I think you are a wonderful, gentle, beautiful, admirable, respectable, and kind-hearted woman. But these are mere intuitions, gestures suggested by my mind. The gestures are not very naïve, mind you, as the mind is a computer of great capacity, but they lack sufficient data: And as a scientist, I understand that a theory lacking in data is necessarily flawed. I need to confirm them by understanding you.
Therefore, I want to get to know you more, and I want you to get to know me more, to see if we are both compatible. A Khutba may be the best method in Kuwait. More importantly, if it was your preferred method – I am perfectly willing to have my parents talk to yours, to ask for your hands in marriage. Otherwise, I can sit with you and your family – and you can sit with me and my family – and I can make a great dinner and serve it.
I want to approach and pursue you in a way that keeps your privacy and security intact. And I want you to be comfortable around me. Our culture raises us to feel bad about and threatened by the emotional gravitation between individuals, natural and conducive as they are to our survival. My intentions are very pure, as you can see, and I want nothing that will diminish your self-respect or your capacity to live the best life possible.
I consider love to be the cooperation between individuals to improve the lot of their significant other. It is not the crass emptying of pent-up desires, nor is it a ritual that all adult men and women must engage in; nor, finally, is it mere friendships and simple attractions – but as Jesus saw in Peter the rock on which to build his church, I see in you the foundations of a family. My admiration for you is Platonic, in the true sense of the word.
I must apologize for something. […] I saw something in you that I could not ignore. I could not name that vague quality that captivated me. But nonetheless, I was intrigued.
An excuse had to be made up for me to see you again. I discussed some issues with you, and my feelings were cemented. Unlike Romeo and Juliet, I do not believe in love at first sight. I believe, however, in the ability of the brain to create those sparks of initiation that motivate us to follow and court our love interests.
My second aim from the second visit (let us call it Secunda Secundae) was to plant the seed that will allow me to visit you a third time. I figured it would be wise to have a plan. I saw you the third time and gave you my e-mail to discuss the two research articles. […]
My ultimate goal was to have a path to interact with you out of our professional setting, as I consider […] to be sacred, and would never consider violating it.
I have obviously not been successful, as you did not e-mail me. There may have been many reasons why this didn’t work: (i) You are a busy woman and do not have sufficient time to read articles that are not necessary for your current objectives; (ii) you saw through my ploy and chose not to play into it; (iii) I did not give you sufficient time to read and analyze the articles; (iv) you felt intimidated, threatened, or uncomfortable and were carefully considering the possible consequences; (v) you may have thought I was a vile man and were afraid of me; or (vi) there may have been other reasons which I am oblivious of and cannot namely enumerate them here. The possibilities are endless, and this is why I want to be as direct, and as ‘empty-space’ clear with you.
It is imperative that I also ask for your forgiveness about the present I have brought you at […]. I may have embarrassed you and caused you to feel shame when nothing you have done was shameful. You are the image of modesty and civil discourse, and it would have been only me who erred if an error were committed. I thought nothing more of it: I was in the book fair for work, and you were on my mind. I did not want you to miss out, seeing that you were busy due to the nature of your profession and […] education. So, I brought great books for you to read. Maybe I should have waited. And maybe I should have sent someone to give them to you. Maybe it was not supposed to be in front of your colleagues (I had no method, nor any right, to isolate you from their eyes and judgments). […]
[…] I have strong feelings for you and wish to court and wed you in a direct, ethical, manner. This would not be possible if […]. And thus, as of today, […]. Second, I want to give you more time to think about what I said, process your feelings and emotions, and come up with your response.
[…] The choice is completely yours. I will respect and honor your choice whatever it may be. And I wish you happiness and success, in all cases.
Cordially yours,
Adnan.
(Early December, 2023)
After the first letter:
My method did not work. I felt dejected and saddened. I did not want to give up on her, and I also wanted to give her some space. A no means a no, however, and that is true regardless of how I approached her. She was not married, but maybe she was in a relationship or had someone in her mind. I could not know without asking her. But should I? I should be graceful and walk away.
Something bothered me at first: I didn’t know exactly why it didn’t work. There was no engagement so far, just a rejection, that came from a third-hand source. I let thoughts about her rest, even though they came to me every once in a while. I completely forgot about her by late January of the following year.
However, suddenly as I was cleaning up my room, I saw a memento that reminded me of her. I started asking myself those vicious what-ifs. That was two months after moving on with my life, why should I remember any longer? I destroyed all those mementos and tried to forget again. It felt that she was the perfect woman for me. I pushed away all the women interested in me one after another because I thought I had finally found the one. That one could not entertain my fantasy, however.
I asked my dear friend, who was a psychologist, about what went wrong so that I would not repeat the mistake in my future endeavors. She told me that of course, it would fail because I needed to go through the official route and to ask for her hands in marriage directly. She told me that there was a big chance the attempt didn’t work because of my method and that it was okay and common to ask through the official route. That happened because my family refused to help me, thinking that woman was not of my sect. We discovered later that she was Sunni, the very same day she refused me, literally seconds before she did.
My friend told me to try again, and I trusted her opinion because I have known her for a long time: We formed a book club during the COVID-19 lockdowns, where she demonstrated her ability to understand others much more than I could, and she was very smart and optimistic. So, my friend called her and told her that I apologized to her for what I did, and I was still interested in her if she was interested, and she refused me again but much less frigidly this time. She was very nice, empathetic, and compassionate this time, and I respected her all the more for it.
She told my friend that she had special circumstances that would not allow her to do anything about it. I felt more dejected than last time, and I wrote another letter on the same day (enclosed below). Minutes after that call, her sister called my friend and started shouting at her. It was at this moment that I lost interest in her completely. My friend was innocent, she was so gentle and kind, and she went straight to the point. How could they do this to her? Maybe her sister was afraid for her, but they both knew that I would not even think of harming her.
I never sent the second letter as I did not want to contact her: It would do me no good whatsoever, and if she had wanted me she would have known how to reach me anyway. I would never have accepted her if both she and her sister apologized to my friend. So, I forgot about her completely and moved on. As I read the letter, I wondered how I would have written it if it had been after I knew that her sister screamed at my friend!
An Unsent Farewell Letter:
To Iris,
Good day,
This is a letter of reflection, which you need not read at all. It is written by myself, for myself, and to myself (though you are the nominal addressee). Its purpose is to out my feelings in order to precipitate a sense of closure that will help me ease my mind and lose the strong sense of loss I went through. And how can I agonize over losing something I have never gained? That will remain a mystery to me, forever. Though write this letter I will, and unlike my previous proposal letter, I will choose not to send it to you, and not to anyone, but to the æther. If reading it may produce in you feelings of uneasiness, please commit it then to the flames: for they contain nothing but the sophistry of a lover with a now hardened heart.
The chapter of my life in which you have been the main passage is bittersweet. It is a chapter of adventure, of loss and grief, of perseverance, of invention, of learning, and of progress. I have enjoyed my attempts at getting to know you better, where I planned each step and thought about the questions carefully; each question was designed to give me some new information about you that you were willing to provide. You were a Dunkelfrau. There is a magic to you that I wanted to understand, something to decode, anything to explain my madness. How come you have occupied my mind so, what has drawn me to you hand and foot?
The moment I first saw you, I froze in my position. I saw myself in the place of Catullus, seeing for the first time the object of his adoration, exclaiming: ‘For as soon as I saw you, // Lesbia, nothing … is left for me // … // But my tongue freezes, a gentle flame flows down // Under my limbs and my ears ring with their own sound. // Both my eyes are blinded by night.” I could not sleep. I spent the waking hours remembering you. I dreamt only of you, dream after dream after dream: Of me protecting you from vile men and women; of you asking me to cook for your family dinner; of us reading together till the late passages of the night; of our travels together to lands remote, of our dreams pursued and accomplished, of the children we will now never have.
Was it a physical attraction that so captivated me? Not at all, for beautiful women abound, I can relate to few. Though you are truly the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, your voice the most soothing, your countenance relaxing, your closeness endearing, and these were not the sources of your gravitas: I treasured something in you that I could not yet name. Indeed, how I wished to tell you these things, that the sight of you makes me happy, that your voice has a stronger effect on me than the serene climaxes of Tchaikovsky’s concertos, that I am calm when you are with me, that I feel safe and protected and nurtured with you. All my instincts live for you: I am at once your father, your brother, your husband, your protector, your provider, your poet and bard, your philosopher, your dreamer, the man who sleeps under the shade of your leaves wondering what joyous fortune he was blessed with.
This situation is reminiscent of the fable of the diamond: Where two men walk by, and one sees a bright diamond. He tells his friend, who dismisses him in disbelief, thinking that if such a beautiful and bright diamond was there, it would have been picked up already. How joyed was I when I saw your ring finger lacking its anulus aureus! How much ecstasy have I drawn from the belief that this bachelor girl would, perhaps, await a man to come forward! May I be such a man, and how can I be so? Such questions ailed and inspired me.
Oh, how much I relished the thought of a life well-lived with you, a fantastic image I have nourished for days and days, for months now. You circulate in my thoughts, even after your rejection. Again and again, I saw you, and blessed were I in your company. With each sight, your image was etched into my memory only for a new meeting to chisel the canvas anew. I felt at peace with you. My heart settled in thee, and seeing you gave me pleasures beyond expression. Every time I have seen you, I was struck: For could this be my iris, so different from my memory, yet more beautiful than the smiling countenance I remember? Your voice rings melodic in my ear, and it engulfs me in serenity. The world is no longer dull or ashen or alight; it was good.
Ah, flower of my life, iris of the fields of memory. How cold and cruel your neglect, how bitter the distance, how bleak the farewell, how suffocating the loss.
The adorer can never satiate himself with knowledge of the adored. I sought to know you, to reach a homeostatic friendship. To improve, qualitatively and quantitatively, my conception of you, there was nothing I would not have done. I wanted each calculated move to yield a satisfactory result. How disappointed I was with an aloofness and frigidity that banished me into forlorn gloom.
What could I have done not to drive you away? Should I have given you my number? Or asked you out on a date? Would I that I could embrace you into my arms, kiss your forehead, inform you how much I appreciate your imminent presence, how I loved your kindness! But I did not know what you would accept. Maybe that would have repelled you forever. O, heart tormented: I can not even know what you would like or find respectable and kind to do. I treated you like one would a maiden, precisely because I was afraid of rushing like a dumb ox. How much I wished what passages to take to court and wed you, how much!
I did not know you and could not have loved you without proper knowledge. Deep in me, something wanted you to be the object of my love. I was mad for you, and I wanted nothing but to be madder for you, if only you would have allowed me to. You did not even allow me to convince you that I was worthy, and your reasons may well be justified. Moreover, it is not in my right to know them. That, in all cases, bears no relevance to my heart’s fracture, for the heart runs by its own logic.
Were you committed to a relationship? Are you soon to be engaged? Is there a man in your life? Are you disgusted with men, do you find women preferable? Did you suffer in an abusive relationship? Were your father oppressive, your mother ridiculing, your sister controlling? Questions, questions, none to cure my ache, none to fix the matter one iota, none to bring you to me to reside you in the four chambers of my heart. It is futile to talk about this. If only I could have convinced you that we can overcome the past, that we do not have to repeat the sins of our fathers, that we could make it work if we tried, that would have been spectacular; and spectacular of otherworldly brilliance it is, for it will not be realized. Oh, how I wished to sit down with you and discuss our history together. For then, maybe the wound would have been sutured, the love reconciled.
Of course, I worked on foresight – for if I had my current hindsight, I would have noticed that your reluctance and avoidance were portents of the failure to become of my endeavor. The admiration may have been one-sided, and so be it: For a man contemplating a blooming iris cares very little if the flower reciprocates his admiration. To me, you were that flower, my iris. Seeing you made me understand again that truly, all is right with the world. Time stood still in your presence, not only away from my stresses and anxieties, but in the same manner with which time halts as the poet considers the moon and stars, or when he realizes in a daisy a magnificent new beauty previously unknown. All is gone.
In my distorted estimation, I saw a delay where there was an emotional void; I believed, and dearly wanted to believe, that it was due to mounting responsibilities that you avoided contacting me. Wanting to be a man who fit the name, I also wanted to make bold steps. Sadly, my steps were far from bold. I was so afraid of missteps that I cowered in your presence, as you froze when I gave you the poem, the letter, the novels, the scripture.
And what can I do but make vacuous assumptions about you? Every step I have taken fluctuated between an assumption of your religiosity and one of your unique intelligence. I went to you in […] because I wanted to believe that you would appreciate my strong driving interest and boldness. How else can I prove myself to you when you have not followed up on my initiation? Aided—but not adhering—to the sound advice of mentors, I did not listen for I wanted to believe that you and I were different; that this would be appreciated.
I know I should have asked you to accompany me to a walk or to walk with me at a park, where we might discuss our interests and talk to each other with fondness: Dare I even dream, while holding hands. I should have asked you out more clearly. However, as I reflect now, I do not think that would have been easy or possible, not out of a fear of rejection, but of a fear of making you afraid of me: A fate to me worse than humiliation; a fate now concrete.
It seems to me that you did not want me in your life. You wished not to be in my presence. My curiosity did not exhibit in you, for whatever reason that made it impossible or unlucrative for you to pursue me with the vigor I have pursued you in. That should have been reason enough to leave you. I gave you chance after chance and fought for you. Will this be appreciated, or matter in your eyes? That scarcely can be the truth as I estimate it now.
Blind to the facts of experience, I rationalized away every impediment and thought that I should make the right decisions. I do not now think there were any right decisions to secure a long-lasting friendship or to fortify my chances of marrying you. I think that it was doomed from the start. Perhaps, that was why I acted too quickly and forced it into mechanical failure. I prized you too deeply, wanting to turn my interest into proper love. It is obvious to me now that you saw through this and blocked all the passages I might have taken. This is something I need to learn from so as not to have my failures repeated.
To an adorer, the adored is the glorious flower. Still, I cannot conceive of a woman I wish more to be with, to hold her hands, to admire, to love. A man makes no move which he does not calculate some profit from. Your participation in my life, ex-ante, was to be the most important external contribution to be added to my life besides my eternal pursuit of the truth. You can only imagine now why I bereave your loss. The conscience voice tells me I am not strong without you. Pathetic, I am not, but who can raise his nose to the presents of God? Are we not all in need of love, of reassurance, of acceptance? Valued, you are, more than anything to my then and still troubled mind, you appeared to me to be that present, heaven-sent, and ready for the plucking.
It was to impress you that I quit smoking after 15 years of indulgence – a period spanning exactly half of my life as of writing; for the same reason, I took better care of how I looked, how I dressed, how I exercised and with what intensity and diet – which I am proud to announce resulted in me losing 13 kgs so far. I won’t stop this progress because you have rejected me and with icy finality but will proceed ever further. Often, the thought occurs: But to whom? To whom, to what point will this progress be? I cannot respond to these questions, but ignore them and move forward, hoping they will be justified at the end.
I should have done all of this for myself, and I should have given the vessel in which my soul nests in better care and respect. I should have known that going out of my way to impress another person or attempting to make them like me is almost always wrong and will always end up in failure. Men and women alike value themselves more when they are pursued when they are wanted; they are all the more naïve to believe that this state of affairs will bring them happiness.
I can control my perception of myself but not that of others. It is ultimately up to me to choose whom to love. No one can make me love them. Most importantly: I should know that if no sign of affection was explicitly shown and communicated, I should not make any move. That’ll be my lesson going forward. And if I have learned anything from my attempts to wed you, I will put this in mind for the future and be guided by it.
Often, the question occurs in my mind: What have I done wrong? (1) Did I act too fast? (2) Was I too reserved to ask you out on a date (or ask you for your hands in marriage)? (3) Did I abridge your privacy by asking about you and coming to your work? (4) Did I fail to make sure that my proposal letter reached you? (5) Was I not too clever with my ploys? Or, is the question altogether wrong – and there was no chance of me ever being with you? That, I will never know now. And a closure has to be construed without you.
I am both embittered at our culture that does not allow us to pursue our love interests, and at myself for not having acted properly. I am mostly embittered at my madness: How could I invest so much of my emotions in expecting anything from someone who did not even care to show me any reciprocation of my emotions? Why did I believe for an instant that you would prize me all the more for having fallen for you? I said, however, that it is her right not to care, and it is her right to dispense with my attempts. But those rights, when exercised, should inform me to avoid investing my emotions in her. Though, I speak here without an appreciation of the complexity of the human mind or its propensity to desire those whom one can not secure. We are forever cursed with wanting what is not available, and you have made yourself scarcer by removing me. No doubt, you have your reasons; and legitimate as they can be, I will still harbor pity in myself and care to heal my broken heart with the balm of soft words uttered in consolation.
But I shall move on now. You are like that beautiful flower in the field: I am contented to have appreciated you. And I am sure now that plucking you up for further consideration will have been the end of my appreciation. What I wanted was the inspection of that flower to see whether it truly was meant to be mine. That phase, which is necessary for the growth of love, I was denied. And so, I will now only look forward, aided by Pablo Neruda’s ‘If You Forget Me’ and Catullus’ Carminae ‘LXXVI’ and ‘VIII’ try to forget about you. Farewell.
Previously madly yours,
Adnan
(Late January, 2024)
Commentary:
I have learned many lessons from my experience, and I will share the ten abstract lessons that I believe to be most important when you’re ready to find a partner for your life and start a family.
(1) If people want you in their lives, they will furnish the reasons themselves, regardless of your qualities, and if they want you to adopt some qualities they will try to convince you to adopt them. And vice versa: If they do not want you in their lives, they will find any reason to push you away.
(2) In a romantic relationship, a man should express his interest as clearly as possible and then give as much space as possible to a woman and allow her to pursue him. If she was not interested, a man should not try harder, and he should move on with his life. Evolutionary psychology informs us that this is one of the many reasons men pursue many women, as their chances become greater this way, seeing how frequently men are met with refusal. In general, the woman should be the adorer, and not vice versa. The man should be, or feign to be, as unaffected as possible.
(3) Mystery is potentiality, and it is attractive. But time is scarce, and not everyone is worth the time and resources needed to uncover the mystery to see if someone can be a suitable partner. If the other party makes it harder for themselves to be known, then one should walk away and not expend their time and resources over something that is not worth it.
(4) Do not love someone, and do not try to love someone, if you do not know their moral values and accept them. If you don’t know their moral values, consider point (3) above.
(5) Don’t make many excuses for people. One or two excuses are necessary for social cohesion and charity. Adopt the principle of charity and give excuses for people. But don’t overdo it. If they keep acting in a way that you don’t like, even if they are not to blame, move on.
(6) If you love someone, make it explicitly known to them. Do not try to involve third parties. It always ends badly when more people are involved before everything is settled.
(7) Improve yourself so that you can be as desirable as possible to as many people as possible, but don’t lose yourself in the process. If someone demands the impossible, they do not want to be in a relationship with mortal humans.
(8) Anyone who requires, for any reason, for you to lose your grace, authenticity, or ambitions, then they do not love you, but love something they might not even know and project that onto you. Don’t play that game. Move on.
(9) The more requirements you put for your significant other, the less candidates will be available and the harder they will be to find and to have in your life. Some compromises are good (and necessary).
(10) Don’t take advice from people who don’t want what’s best for you, and don’t know how to get what’s best for you. People will give you conflicting pieces of advice, and most probably, they don’t know what they are talking about. Do you really need to listen to them?
Surra,
March, 2023.
Derbeel Q8 