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It’s hard to avoid making mistakes in the early days of the journey. You’re trying to do things right, thrashing around for guidance, reliant on the assumed knowledge of others — often contradictory — trying to find your way. It’s difficult to navigate those first few lanes, for the landscape is so alien and forbidding.

In my case, I was young (early twenties) and immature, and I suppose my naive sincerity made things more complicated than they needed to be. There was no reason that I had to tell my Christians parents that I had become Muslim. I could just as easily have simply returned from university announcing that I had become a vegetarian, and nobody would have been any the wiser. I could perform my prayers in private in my room, meals times made easy. Why didn’t I? I guess I was just being honest.

More complicated would be Christmas and Ramadan, which in those days coincided (Ramadan following a lunar calendar, its timing moving forward each year). My older brothers had left home by then, but my sister would witness the full strangeness of me not eating anything at all until sunset, which at that time of year was at about 4pm. In later years, Ramadan would coincide with family holidays, my parents, siblings, their spouses and all of our offspring coming together for the week. There again our faith on full display.

Only later would it occur to me that we could have utilised the well-established dispensations for travellers, far from home. Indeed, in time we discovered that we could have made life so much easier for ourselves, but such is the nature of increasing knowledge. There is no real handbook for those new to the road. You tend to start out very hard and rigid, only to mellow over time, embracing flexibility and instinct, and trust in your own intellect. Perhaps that also comes with age and maturity: who I am today is very different from who I was then. My whole approach to life is different.

In the years since my marriage, I have reflected on that too. The pressure that I was put under to abandon our intention to marry was so immense and intense that I nearly gave in, resigning to a life alone. But that was because I was intent on doing everything right, as I understood it at the time, making everything halal. For me, that was the sharpest test of my life: choosing between my faith and my family. Because I went ahead with our marriage despite those interventions, my family probably concluded I just selfishly disregarded them. But in truth, the pressure was so great that I actually asked God to take my life away just then, thinking it a test too great to bear.

Of course, in the years since then, it has occurred to me that we could have made life far easier for all of us. My wife and I could have simply done the religious nikah, witnessed by the few. For my family, we could then have gone through the motions of the long courtship considered normal in modern western cultures, and then announced our civil marriage and all of the associated celebrations at some far off date later on. Well, we could have done many things, but perhaps there was blessing in our actual approach.

It was a hard road to travel in those earlier days, made easier by the company of another. I think marriage changed everything, both of us converts, each of us finding our way. We’d both acknowledge that we’d do things differently if we had our time again, but I suppose those experiences shaped us. You don’t instantly become what you’re destined to be. It’s a lifelong journey, trial and error, successes and failures. At the end of the day, it’s a relationship between you and your Lord. It’s your life to live. Take it easy. Be kind to yourself.