What is the purpose of starting a family?

What is the purpose of starting a family? Everyone seems to know this, but we found it necessary to note it as a reminder for our young people. The family is one of a person’s innate needs. The more a person grows up, the more deeply he feels a sense of loneliness. He comes up against the need to lean on someone and be close to someone. Starting a family fills this very emptiness: by marrying a worthy girl and by marrying a worthy young man, a sense of wholeness appears in the young man and the young woman who have come of age. In fact, this brings a divine truth to light: our mother Hawwa, peace be upon her, was created from the rib of our father Adam, peace be upon him, and husband and wife keep feeling themselves to be halves until they are joined with their lifelong companion. It follows from this that starting a family is the basis of spiritual and emotional wholeness, the foundation of a person’s living happily and calmly in the life of this world. Secondly, the physical state requires being married. Certain needs that arise in the body are met only through lawful family relations, and this ensures a person’s physical health. Thirdly, the purpose of leaving offspring. A person, if God so decrees, grows old and loses strength; with the passing years sorrows thicken and the future takes on a misty hue. Then a person understands that he needs a successor, a child who loves him and serves him with affection and love. The child gathers in himself the lineage and qualities of the parents and carries them on. Parents go on living in the faces of their children. The child pleases the parents in their lifetime and gives them bright days, and after they pass from this world, he prays for them and fills their graves with light. There should be many children. Those who say, “Family planning,” and “I will raise such and such a number of children,” are mistaken. Children raised with affection and kinship become a support to one another and together overcome the various calamities and hardships of life. It can be repeated that keeping the ties of kinship is extremely important here: loving one another, cherishing one another, being considerate of one another’s feelings, advising one another and keeping one another’s secrets. Sometimes we see siblings in mutual envy and enmity: instead of rejoicing at each other’s successes, they burn with jealousy; they rejoice at each other’s misfortunes; they never understand one another as friends, they hurt each other’s hearts; they speak of one another only with irritation and with bad omens and suspicions. This is not good. My dear young friends! Life is a journey that lasts a long time. On this journey hardships and joys walk together. Hardship seems great because it is painful, joy seems small because it is sweet. In moments of despondency, in days of illness, in poverty and want, you need a spouse who will be your companion, who will not sell your secrets, who will be patient with your shortcomings. If you marry and your wife’s tongue is poison, if she pays you no regard, if she sells your secrets, if at the slightest offense she runs out into the street saying, “I’m leaving,” if she barks, “Give me a divorce,” if her heart is enslaved to the world and she keeps wanting to buy things needed and needless, if she keeps making your relatives look bad, if she uses her child as a noose to tie you down — you will live unhappily all your life. In this case the wife’s beauty is of not a penny’s worth of use; on the contrary, beauty turns her into a she-demon. Girls, if you marry a young man who is a petty talker, lazy, womanizing, who tells his wife’s secrets to his mother and to others, who loves the world, who loves pleasure, who is a liar, two-faced, unreliable in his word, unable to make a decision, you will be left wandering and lost all your life. At such moments neither that young man’s good looks, nor his father’s wealth, nor his own possessions will matter. The most interesting thing is that, with that bird-brain of yours, you do not yet know people; you do not tell good from bad, you do not distinguish friend from foe. You know nothing of the human qualities needed in life. That being so, dear girls, you do not recognize the young man who presents himself in the street as modest and God-fearing; and you, young men, do not recognize the fake and cunning girl who puts on a God-fearing look, memorizes clever phrases, sharpens her voice, speaks with sniffling coquetry, falsely lowers her gaze and wins people over as a chaste one.

You will achieve nothing even by following the degrading advice of the “family experts” — to whom no one has handed the microphone — who sit in podcasts and tell you, “Talk for four hours and get to know each other.” Even if you make a pact, saying, “We are setting out on a voyage by ship, we will not abandon each other halfway,” it is useless. Because words are one thing and deeds another. A person’s qualities and upbringing show themselves at the time of action. What can one expect from a frog that croaks prettily? The “girl” who stretches out her voice saying, “I am like this, I am like that,” tomorrow, if your voice rises a little, may run screaming to her mother’s house and never tire of showering you with a thousand slanders. Or the young man who stands there saying, “I am descended from such and such a saint” — you will see him become even more of a nag as soon as you get a little fussy. That being so, the matter rests with the parents. Dear parents, do not leave the work of destiny to the children. You know everyone well. You know people. You know about people’s lineage and ancestry, their lives, the skills and tricks they have shown, their morals and temperament. They say, “Look at the mother, then take the daughter.” They say, “Whether you’re qazi or qarta, you take after your true breed.” A child will in any case repeat the qualities of the parents. That is why, first of all, look for a match for your child in your own neighborhood. They say a good girl does not leave the neighborhood. If there is a good, conscientious family, do not let it slip away. Whether it is a bride or a groom, inquire into seven generations of their lineage. Talk thoroughly with the groom and test his intelligence and perceptiveness, take an interest in his workplace and his place of study. Make grooms of the responsible, serious and intelligent young men who pass such checks well. These words of ours would in fact make a big book. Deriving a ruling about the family directly from the verses and hadith is complicated. One must look at the matter with the eye of wisdom. All these words concerned the matters that come before starting a family. What happens once the family has been started, and what must be done — that is now the subject of another chapter.