NOT NOSY ENOUGH

I have been feeling pretty sad lately. Please, bear with me...

Before I got married, I was in a pretty serious relationship with a certain T. We got connected through a common internet friend, Kak L. We started emailing each other, from discussing daily stuff to politics & religion, and sometimes just forwarding silly jokes. Well actually I've written about him before, but I don't feel like sieving through past posts and linking it now. Anyway.

Internet relationship is in a class of its own. You don't meet face to face, so you are not judgmental nor distracted by the other person's looks. Whether he wears designer clothes or a shirt from Jusco is irrelevant. For the same reason, you are less inhibited, and tend to write more intensely. So we got to know each other's mind and heart quite well. We don't always share the same opinion, but we got on very well. So well that I started to have feelings for him. He made my days very exciting and happy.

We did meet and talk on the phone, but not often. He is a pretty religious person, and at that point was doing extra studies under the tutelage of a prominent religious scholar. Slowly, his emails too start to hint at taking the relationship further. And I waited for him to actually pop the question, but it never came. To cut a long story short, he had misunderstood one of my emails, and he waited too long, and someone else 'cut in' - my ex, to be exact.

I accepted my fate. I accepted losing him through a stupid misunderstanding on his part. And I also accepted the rest of my marriage which is now a history. But in a moment of weakness a few months after the big D, I had contacted him again. I needed someone to console me, and he had always known how to pacify me, advise me religiously, make du'a for me. He guided me away from my crazy rantings. And somehow our relationship revived. This was in 2003, I think.

Only a few months later did I find out that he was married. I got very upset and wanted out. But him being of a religious background, started to educate me on the virtues of poligamy. Now that's a tough call, as I have never been exposed to that before. No one in my family, cousins and all, have ever been poligamous. Although I do not reject it as it is allowable in Islam, but I never considered it for myself.

But I learned. I read up on it, and my perspective changed somewhat. He too went a step further by telling his wife about me. Several times he asked me to meet him & his wife, to see for myself that a poligamous marriage is workable. Indeed one time during raya, he had actually parked in front of my house and I could see him from my bedroom window, but I told him to turn back, I was not ready for him to meet my parents. Rather, I know that my parents abhor the idea of poligamy!

Anyway, all that happened in 2003 and 2004, I think. During that re-connected time, he proposed directly 3 times, while hinting many more times, but I wasn't ready. Later he told me that he was taking another wife, a divorcee working at the same place. I respected his intention, it made me look up to him more, because I know that his reason for poligamy is an honourable one, to help divorced ladies find their foothold again. Much as what he intended to do for me. Indeed, this was what was practiced by our beloved Muhammad s.a.w.

Now here comes the miserable part...

By virtue of my work, I have access to some database, internal and external. I've had it forever, but don't know why, a couple of weeks ago, I decided to look him up. And only then did I realize that despite knowing a lot about this person's heart & mind, but I didn't know much about him. And for my nosiness, I got quite a shock, padan muka aku.

A search on the databases produced his NRIC and address, and of some other people connected to him. He was actually much older than myself. Come to think of it, I never did ask his age. He had different addresses, the earlier one in KB and the current one in BBB. OK not a problem there. But googling him, I found that he has 7 kids from his first wife. And that his second daughter had recently tied the knot last year at the age of 22... do you see it yet?

The time when we first got hooked up, he was already married, with teenage kids!

But he never gave a clue about it, even when we met and then came across some friends of his, he introduced me as 'the one' as if he didn't already have someone in his life. Why? I felt betrayed, but maybe it's partly my fault for not being nosy enough to establish those things first, earlier in the relationship. But I couldn't have known, could I? Wouldn't the onus to disclose such matter fall on him?

It is so sad finding out that someone you trust and respect so much, has not been truthful from the beginning.

SubhanAllah.