8 Small Habits That Keep a Muslim Marriage Strong While You're Building Something Together

Marriage

Nobody warns you that building a Muslim marriage and building a small business at the same time will run through the exact same muscles. Here is what has kept both of ours standing.

People ask us fairly often what it is like to be married and run Humraha together, expecting either a horror story or a fairy tale. The honest answer is neither. A Muslim marriage, like a small business, is mostly made of small, unglamorous habits repeated on the days you do not feel like it. We do not have this figured out. But a few habits have made the hardest seasons survivable, and we think they would help most couples, whether or not there is a business involved.

We Treat Communication Like It Is Part of the Job

When we started Humraha, we assumed that being married meant we would automatically communicate well about everything, including the business. We were wrong. Marriage does not come with a built in meeting agenda, so we made one. Fifteen minutes most evenings, no phones, just a rundown of what is actually on our minds, whether that is an order that got delayed or a comment one of us made that landed wrong that day. It sounds unromantic. It has saved us more arguments than anything else on this list.

What Keeps a Muslim Marriage Grounded When Life Gets Busy

The busier Humraha got, the easier it became to let our own relationship run on autopilot. What has kept a Muslim marriage grounded for us, more than any single conversation, is treating our deen as something we practice together rather than in parallel. Praying together when we can, even just once a day, changes the tone of an entire evening. It is hard to stay short with someone you just stood shoulder to shoulder with in front of Allah.

"The best of you are those who are best to their wives, and I am the best of you to my wives."Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), narrated in Sunan al-Tirmidhi

We Protect One Meal a Week That Has Nothing to Do With Work

For a long time, every meal we shared turned into a working lunch, because we were always together and the business was always on our minds. Eventually we set a rule: one meal a week, usually Friday dinner, where Humraha is off limits as a topic. It took discipline to actually enforce it, and we still slip sometimes. But that one meal has become the difference between feeling like coworkers who happen to be married and feeling like a couple who happens to run a business.

We Say Jazakallah Khair Out Loud, and Often

It is easy to stop thanking your spouse for things once they become routine, whether that is handling bedtime or answering a customer email at midnight. We try to catch ourselves and say it anyway, out loud, specifically. Not a generic thank you, but naming the actual thing: thank you for staying up to finish that order, thank you for handling the kids so I could take that call. Gratitude that is specific is harder to tune out than gratitude that is vague.

We Ask for Help With the Boring Stuff, Too

We make dua for the big things, patience, provision, protection for our kids. What took us longer to learn was making dua for the boring, practical stuff too: a calmer conversation about finances, the energy to be patient after a long day, the ability to actually rest on our day off instead of just being physically present for it. A Muslim marriage is still a marriage, which means it needs help with the ordinary, tedious parts, not just the dramatic ones.

None of this makes our marriage look impressive from the outside. It is fifteen minutes here, a protected Friday dinner there, a thank you said slightly louder than it needs to be. But this far into building a life and a business alongside each other, those small habits are the whole reason both are still standing.