On Romanticising the Past...

Today has been ordinary. No hematology class as usual on Thursdays and no practical either, so my schedule opened up in a way that makes me feel like I have time but also like I'm wasting it. I spent the morning in the hostel, read a little pharmacology,then picked up Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, let the day move slowly.

Later , I went online this afternoon and opened the LCU MSSN sisters group chat.

LCU was my first university. The place where I made my first real friends after secondary school and madrasah. Where I also learned what sisterhood felt like outside of family. Where everything was new and intense and formative in the way first experiences always are.

But left after a year and a few months. I've been at my new school for three years now. I said ‘new’ because somehow,every single day that I awaken here, everything still feels strange and LCU feels like home even when I'm no longer there.

And for most of those three years, the feeling still looms. This persistent feeling that nothing here measures up to what I had there. That the friendships here aren't as deep. That the spirit of sisterhood isn't as strong. That I made a huge mistake leaving even though I had valid reasons.

I've romanticized LCU the way you romanticize anything you didn't get to finish.

But today, I don’t why but my thought process was different. I looked at that group chat and had my bouts of nostalgia and then finally thought about it differently. Honestly, for the first time ever.

I weighed the two experiences against each other. Not emotionally. Objectively.

And I realized: there isn't actually much difference between the friendships I made there and the ones I have here.

The difference is psychological.

LCU was my very first exposure. Where I met my first university friends. First taste of that specific kind of closeness. So it imprinted on me in a way nothing else could. Psychologists call this the primacy effect. The first experience in a category becomes the standard against which everything else is measured. It gets encoded differently in memory. Weighted differently in significance.

And because I only spent a year and a few months there, I never got past the honeymoon phase. I never stayed long enough to see my friends' faults clearly, never stayed long enough for any disappointment to accumulate, never stayed long enough for the reality to complicate the ideal.

So in my memory, those friendships stayed as perfect as ever. Frozen in that early state of intensity and promise.

Meanwhile, here at this school, I've been present for three full years. I've seen my friends at their worst. I've watched them fail to meet my expectations. I've experienced the disappointment that comes with longevity. I've seen the mundane reality underneath the initial excitement.

And because I'd already decided when I left LCU that nothing could ever compare, I've been interpreting everything here through that lens. Confirmation bias. I was looking for proof that this place was inferior, so of course I found it.

But the truth is simpler,that is what suddenly occurred to me this scorching evening as I sit in front of my hostel, I barely really knew my LCU friends. Not really. Not the way I know the people I've spent three years with. I knew the version of them that exists in brief, intense friendship. The version that hadn't yet had time to let me down.

And so, I sat with it and I think this is is exactly what happens with haram relationships.

I have a piece in my draftsbabout discipline in Islam, maybe i’ll put it out sometime soon. It's basically about how every act of ibadah connects to psychological principles we're only now discovering through research. How praying five times a day builds consistency and emotional regulation. How fasting teaches delayed gratification and impulse control. How Islam's structure around relationships protects us from specific patterns of self-sabotage.

And this thing I've been doing with my friendships? This romanticizing of the past, this unfair comparison, this attachment to something incomplete?

This is what happens when you have romantic or intimate experiences before marriage. You create imprints. You form attachments to people you were never supposed to build a life with. You collect experiences that become the measuring stick for everything that comes after.

Then when you finally do get married, you enter it already preparing comparisons. You're already holding your spouse up against memories that have been edited by time and distance into something unrealistically perfect. Already disappointed because reality can't compete with fantasy.

You spend your marriage longing for a past that probably wasn't even as good as you remember it being.

Islam protects us from this by design. No dating. No trial runs. No collecting experiences with people you won't end up with. You marry once, ideally, and that person becomes your entire reference point for intimacy. There's no ex to compare them to. No "better" version in your memory that they have to compete with.

As restrictive as the rules seem now, it's protective.

Because the human brain is terrible at objective memory. We don't remember things as they were. We remember them as we felt about them. And feelings change based on context. The friendship that felt magical at LCU would probably feel ordinary if I examined it now with three years of distance and maturity. But I'll never know, because I left before the magic wore off.

And that's the trap.

When you don't stay long enough to see the whole picture, you preserve the illusion. When you move on before reality sets in, you get to keep the idealized version forever. And then you spend the rest of your life measuring new experiences against an impossible standard.

This is why Islam says: don't engage before you're ready to commit. Don't create attachments you'll have to break. Don't collect memories with people who won't be in your future.

Because those memories become ghosts. They haunt your present. They make you ungrateful for what you have because you're too busy mourning what you think you lost.

And if I can do this with friendship, imagine what it does with romance. With intimacy. With the person you're supposed to spend your life with.

Every prior relationship becomes a comparison point. Every ex becomes a ghost at the table. Every memory becomes evidence that maybe you settled. Maybe there was someone better. Maybe you made the wrong choice.

Islam removes that possibility entirely. It says: this is your person. This is your only reference point. Learn them. Grow with them. Don't waste energy comparing them to people who were never meant to be yours.

And I'm only just now understanding it, three years into romanticizing a past that probably wasn't as beautiful as I've convinced myself it was.

The friends I have here are good friends. Real friends. Friends who've shown up consistently for three years. Friends who've seen me at my worst and stayed. Friends who've disappointed me, yes, but also friends who've had the chance to repair, to grow, to prove their commitment over time.

The friends I left at LCU are still good friends too. But they're not better. They're just unfinished. And unfinished things always look more appealing than completed ones because you get to imagine how perfect they would have been.

But imagination is not reality.

And Islam, in its wisdom, knows this.

It knows we're prone to nostalgia. Prone to comparison. Prone to building altars to the past and then feeling robbed when the present doesn't worship at them.

That's what I'm teaching myself today.

This does not apply just in marriage, though that's where it matters most. But in everything. In friendship. In places. In life experiences.

Stay long enough to see the raw edges. Don't leave before reality sets in and then spend years mourning an illusion.

The present deserves better than to compete with a past you've mythologized.

And there are lots of lessons to pick from this. Of which the most important is that you,my dearest reader, preserve your heart from premarital attachments and entanglements that'll set some kind of imaginary platform for comparison in your future.. And you should also learn,to be grateful for the present,to find your balance in it rather than spending your days wallowing in a past that isn't really better.

---

Took this picture during a study session with my friends here,that day I travelled back to my 100 level study session days with my LCU friends and I let it rob me of the magic of the moment. Not anymore⁠)⁠/⁠～⁠♡