Matrimonial advertisements - check your priorities!

When seeking a marriage partner, remember, this is not just some pretty face that you get to admire or posses, or show off to your friends. This person is not a checkbook, or a status symbol, or a servant, or a household maid. This is not someone that you’ll see for a few minutes each day after work, and take with you to dinner parties.

This is someone you have to live with for the rest of your life. This is someone you need to be able to turn to when you’re sad, someone to support you when you’re tired, to nurse you when you’re sick, to share in your joys, play with you, struggle with you to achieve Jannah. This is someone to be a witness to your life, to know you intimately and affirm your worth as a human being (not that we need someone else to affirm our value – but it’s always nice to be recognized and seen).

Is that what you’re looking for? Make sure your priorities are in order. Look past the surface. Connect with the person’s soul. Find someone who will make you smile, and with whom you will be happy to share this strange journey we call life.

When seeking a marriage partner, be the person you are looking for. If you’re looking for someone polite and kind, then be polite and kind. If you want someone athletic and slim who loves the outdoors, then be athletic and slim and spend time outdoors. If you want someone emotionally balanced, unselfish, and trustworthy, then embody those character traits in your own life.

If you want someone who is totally honest, then be totally honest!

Don’t imagine that you can be dishonest, selfish, and out of shape, and yet attract someone who is honest, generous and fit. It doesn’t work that way.

Also please understand, I’m not saying that you should activate all these qualities in your life just so that you can attract a partner. No, I’m saying do it for God and for yourself. Be healthy, generous, and kind to people. Do it for yourself, so that you can grow as a human being. Be active in your worship, be humble, and be sincere. Do it for your own soul, and your own happiness.

If you do this, then you will find that good people are automatically attracted to you. Like attracts like. If you are happy, centered and sweet, you will attract someone who is the same. Of course you might also attract a lying, cheating bozo, but you’ll be able to see through that and kick that person to the curb.

Look, you don’t have to be perfect. Out of all the qualities I’ve mentioned, the most important are honesty and sincerity. It’s okay if you’ve got flaws. I can make my daughter a peanut butter sandwich or scrambled eggs, and I can open a tin, but beyond that I couldn’t cook my way out of a cardboard box. I weigh a little more than I should (my knees remind me of it every day), and I’m not the least bit handy with mechanical things and home improvements. Some of these things I’m working on, and some I’m not too concerned about, but I’m always struggling to improve myself in many ways. The thing is, I’m sincere. I don’t pretend to be something I’m not, and if I find that my words don’t match my actions, then I try to reform my actions.

Be sincere. Be honest. Live the life that you aspire to. Be the ideal person that you see in your mind. Eventually you will find yourself attracting people with similar values.

The remarkable thing is that every single question gets answered, although there is currently a backlog of about 70 questions waiting to be answered. Typically about two questions get answered every day, by lay people who have sound Islamic knowledge and good common sense. These editors are volunteers, working men and women with families of their own, who share the wisdom they have acquired and try to steer people the right way, Insha’Allah.

The formula has proven to be a hit, as traffic has steadily climbed and recently broke the 2,000 visitors per day barrier.

Zawaj.com Blog

Thank you for reading, and I hope you’ll continue to visit Zawaj.com and stay up to date on our constant improvements.

Hello, I need gentle Body with soft hands for massage and jelly buttocks to ride on. I am abdullah Shehri

Ha ha ha! It made me laugh out loud. So thanks, brother, I needed a good laugh. Of course it’s completely inappropriate for Zawaj.com, which is an Islamic matrimonial service! Emphasis on “Islamic.”

I don’t know what some people are thinking.

I realize I’ve written two posts in a row criticizing some members’ profiles, and the truth is that these silly profiles are the rare exception. Most of Zawaj.com’s members are quite sincere, intelligent, educated and respectful people. In fact, maybe I should post some of these wonderful profiles so you can get a balanced view, eh? I’ll do that soon Insha’Allah.

We do sometimes get unappealing profiles, however. Maybe they are superficial, or seeking an illicit affair, or simply strange.

I’ve decided to create an award called the “Matrimonial Blockhead Award” for the most ridiculous, moronic profiles that I come across.

Matrimonial Blockhead Award #1 goes to a Pakistani man who submitted a profile a few days ago. I deleted the profile and I will not reveal his name, but he made what he clearly thought was a generous offer to women. He offered the women one of two choices:

1. Any woman in Europe or North America could marry him and sponsor him to come to her country. She would support him until he becomes established, and then he would fulfill his duties as husband.

2. OR,  the woman could sign what he called a “fake marriage contract” to bring him to her country. His pledge was that once he got a job he would pay her a portion of his income for ten years.

Okay, that’s pretty bad. But that’s not why he’s getting the Blockhead award. You see, in case the woman in question might have doubts about getting paid, this man offered to sign a contract specifying the terms, so she would be protected.

Ha ha ha! Idiot! It is a crime! If you sign a contract outlining the terms of the crime, that is evidence in court against both of you!

Congratulations, winner of Matrimonial Blockhead Award #1. You win a t-shirt saying “I am a Matrimonial Blockhead”, a lifetime subscription to Dummies Anonymous, and a block of gouda cheese. To claim your prizes, send me your name and address written on a $100 bill, lol.

In other developments, I had a scare recently when some of the pages on Zawaj.com began showing up as blank white pages. My programmer said that some of the .php pages had mysteriously disappeared from the server. In the middle of working on this problem, the pages reappeared and the site began functioning properly again! I think maybe the web host was doing some maintenance and then restored everything from backups when they were done, I don’t know.

In any case it’s no mystery that the site really needs to be re-developed from the ground up. The programming is old and out of date. It works, but it could be much better. Of course Zawaj.com is a free service, so the funds for this kind of development are lacking. I really like having it as a free service. I like the idea of offering a free matrimonial service to Muslims from all over the world, many of whom (especially women) cannot afford the fees that some matrimonial services charge. So if there is  donor out there – an individual or a company – who would like to fund the redevelopment of Zawaj.com in exchange for sponsorship messages or just for barakah – please contact me.

First let’s look at some examples of what you should not do in replying to a sister’s profile, or in writing your own profile:

1. Don’t write canned responses. Don’t write the same response to every sister’s profile, saying something like, “From the first moment I saw your photo I fell in love with you and can’t stop thinking of you. I want to marry you right away and come to your country.”

This kind of reply is transparent nonsense. You should approach a woman with sincerity. Reply to her particular profile and her personality. And if you are only writing to her in order to get residence in her country, you are wasting everyone’s time.

2. Don’t complain about your ex-wife. Don’t write a message that is just a long complaint about your ex-wife. “She was ungrateful, she did not cook the kind of food I like, she used to argue all the time… so I want a woman who will be grateful, cook good food, and don’t argue. If you want to marry me then you should meet these requirements.”

Sounds ridiculous I know, some men actually write these kinds of messages. Any reasonable woman is going to read this and think, “This is a man who is impossible to please. He does nothing but complain about his ex-wife and he would do nothing but complain about me if I married him.”

3. Don’t have a long list of strict requirements. Don’t write a long letter specifying point by point all the requirements that a woman must meet in order to be your wife. Why would someone be interested in trying to meet all your requirements? Why would a woman want to be with a man who is so picky and demanding, and who is more interested in what he can get than what he can offer?

What has your experience been? Have you seen some unappealing profiles or received unattractive responses? What was it about them that turned you off?

Five Pillars of a Successful Muslim Marriage:

1. Faith
2. Respect
3. Love
4. Trust
5. Communication

As I said, I will add more details later, but if you have any thoughts on this now please feel free to comment.

Yes, that’s right, Zawaj.com is ten years old. As far as I can tell Zawaj.com is the oldest existing Muslim personals or Muslim matrimonial website. Shaadi.com and Matrimonials.com are older, but they are not specifically Muslim websites; rather they are for Indians in general, including Hindus.

MuslimWedding.org, another old veteran of the Muslim personals industry, didn’t come around until 1999, a year after Zawaj.com. I remember that the Muslim Family Network (al-usrah.net) introduced a free Muslim personals database around that time as well. Zafaf.com (created in 2001) was another Muslim personals pioneer, but it only lasted a few years then shut down. Many others have shut down or dropped out since then.

MuslimMatch.com hails from the same era, around 2001. Today’s big daddies of the Muslim personals industry, such as Nikah.com (2003) and Qiran.com (2004), are all latecomers, introduced in recent years with funding behind them and corporate offices around the world.

Zawaj.com predated them all and outlasted them all. And where are we now, ten years in?

1. The Zawaj.com Muslim personals service is 100% free, with no fees or premium memberships, and that’s something I’m particularly proud of because it makes the service available to poor people, for example women from Morocco or Egypt who could otherwise not afford it. At the same time we continue to attract Muslims from the USA, Canada, Britain and Europe.
2. We have a huge database of articles about marriage in Islam, Islamic family issues, and women in Islam.
3. We have spun off a few other successful Islamic websites, such as AskBilqis.com, TeenPerspectives.com and a new one we’re working on, IslamiNet.com.
4. Many, many Muslim couples have met through Zawaj.com and built successful marriages and families.

What Needs to Be Done

In spite of all our progress, we’re kind of stuck in a holding pattern at the moment. The Muslim personals database desperately needs to be re-built from scratch, as the programming is several years old. I hope to find a sponsor to fund this, or perhaps a grateful former member.

Another project waiting to happen is to rebuild the main site using a content management system, rather than the straight HTML pages that it consists of now. This would not be so expensive, but will be time-consuming and laborious.

On the whole, however, I’m optimistic about Zawaj.com’s future. The site is heavily linked on the internet, ranks well in the search engines, has been reported on many times in the media, and is virtually a household name in the Muslim community. Also, the fact that the site needs to be rebuilt is not entirely a negative, because when we rebuild it we can add in all kinds of advanced features. This is a fantastic base to build from and I’m excited to see how things will evolve in the next few years Insha’Allah.