I used to think being rich would look a lot more glamorous. Gold bangles stacked around my wrists. A beautiful home. A career people are impressed by. The freedom to walk into a shop without checking my bank account first. A passport full of stamps and enough money that I never have to think too hard about the price of anything again.
I still want some of those things. But lately, I have started to wonder whether I am already rich.
Not in the way my bank would recognise, and definitely not Forbes. But in chocolate cake.
For one of my birthdays, my friend Zaina surprised me with a chocolate cake. There was nothing extraordinary about the cake itself. I had actually started to feel sick from all the chocolate I had eaten recently. What mattered was that it was chocolate. She knew that was what I liked.
There is something almost embarrassingly simple about the things that make me feel most loved. Someone remembering my favourite flavour. Someone picking something up because it reminded them of me. Someone noticing a detail I mentioned months ago and storing it somewhere in their mind.
My family buy chocolate milk because they know I like it. It sounds insignificant. It is a drink you can pick up from almost any supermarket chilled section. But I will open the fridge, see it sitting there and know that, at some point while somebody was shopping, I existed in their thoughts. They saw chocolate milk and thought of me.
Perhaps to be loved is simply to be seen.
We often imagine love through its grandest expressions. Proposals. Weddings. Bouquets. Holidays. Jewellery. I like those things too. But some of the most convincing evidence that I have been loved has been painfully ordinary.
My friend Dorcas once organised a gift card for my birthday. When I was around thirteen, she gave me a makeup palette. I am twenty now. I still use it.
It is probably well past the point when any beauty expert would advise me to put it near my eyes, but every time I see it, I remember being thirteen. I remember somebody choosing something for me because she thought I would like it. I think objects can become little archives of love.
A palette stops being a palette. Chocolate milk stops being a drink. A chocolate cake stops being a cake. They become evidence.
You were thought about. You were remembered. You were known.
And there is a particular kind of wealth in being known.
We live in a world obsessed with becoming visible. We want recognition, influence, status. I am not immune to that. I have wanted the impressive career, the achievements and the rooms where important people know my name.
Perhaps power is having the whole world know your name. But love is having someone walk past a bottle of chocolate milk and think of you. As time passes, the more I wonder which one I would actually miss when everything else disappeared.
There is a romantic idea that people with less are somehow happier. I don’t completely believe it. It is easy to romanticise simplicity when you have never had to worry about rent, food or bills. Poverty is not spiritually purifying. Money matters. It gives people safety, choices and freedom.
I want financial security. I want success. I want to give my family things they did not always have. But Islam repeatedly asks us to question what we call wealth. The Qur’an speaks about “competition in increase of wealth” [57:20] before reminding us how quickly worldly things fade.
That image unsettles me because competition is exactly how adulthood can feel. Who earns more. Who owns a home first. Who has the better career. Who wears the gold rather than merely looking at it through a shop window.
A simple life, then, does not have to mean an impoverished one. To me, it means a life where the ordinary has not lost its value. A home where people sit together. Food shared across a table. Parents who are still here to call. Friends who remember what cake you like. Chocolate milk waiting in the fridge. Maybe simplicity is not having very little. Maybe it is needing very little to recognise that you have been given a lot.
There are things I will never be wealthy enough to buy. I cannot buy somebody thinking of me when I am not in the room. I cannot purchase a childhood memory. And, perhaps most painfully, I cannot make somebody love me.
That has been one of adulthood’s more uncomfortable lessons. You can make yourself beautiful. Interesting. Accomplished. Easy to love. You can shrink yourself or expand yourself or spend months wondering which version of you might finally be enough. And none of it gives you control over somebody else’s heart.
I cannot pick who loves me. But I can pick whose love I build my life around.
Instead of measuring my worth by the people who did not choose me, I can look at the people who have been choosing me quietly for years. The people who buy the chocolate milk. The friend who remembers the chocolate cake. The decade long friendship preserved inside an old makeup palette.
Perhaps love is less about being adored and more about being paid attention to.
And yet there is another reason I have started paying closer attention to these things. I often think about a life without my parents. Not because they are old - they aren’t - but because my parents are getting older, and I have begun to understand that the people who make up the architecture of my life will not always be here.
As a child, your parents seem permanent. They existed before you, so naturally they will exist forever. Then you grow older and begin noticing time.
You notice grey hairs. You hear them complain about aches they didn’t used to have. You realise that while you have been busy becoming an adult, they have also been becoming older. And suddenly love develops a shadow.
I imagine all the things I once thought would make me rich: independence, a career, a beautiful home, gold stacked around my wrists. And then I imagine having all of it without my parents. I would give every bit of it back.
Every bracelet. Every title. Every room with my name on the door.
There is something frightening about building a fruitful life while knowing that, one day, some of the love that made it fruitful will become memory.
I spend so much of my twenties imagining independence. My own home. My own routines. My own family, perhaps. A husband. A career. A life that is undeniably mine. And yet when I imagine finally having all of those things, I also imagine what might be missing by the time I reach them.
A fruitful life of independence can still contain a fruitless landscape of fleeting love.
My parents were my first love. Before I understood romantic love, marriage or what it meant to choose somebody, I knew what it was to be somebody’s daughter. I think there is something important in acknowledging that romantic love is not the first great love story of many of our lives.
There is something in Islam that has always made me think differently about the word soulmate. The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ said that “souls are troops collected together” - a hadith describing how some souls have an affinity with one another. I find that beautiful because the idea is not confined to romantic love. Perhaps a soulmate can be the friend who has known every version of you. Perhaps it can be a parent whose presence feels woven into your own existence.
Islam gives marriage enormous beauty too. The Qur’an describes spouses through tranquillity, affection and mercy. But romantic love does not have to erase all the other forms of love that carried us there. Maybe Allah allows us to be loved differently, by different souls, throughout our lives.
We are taught to wait for somebody to choose us. One day you will meet the one. One day somebody will love you so deeply that everything will make sense.
But some of us were being chosen long before anybody asked us on a date. We were somebody’s daughter. Somebody’s sister. Somebody’s friend.
Somebody knew which cake we liked. Somebody brought the drink home. Somebody remembered.
And perhaps that is why I resist the idea that a life without romantic love must automatically be a loveless one. Romantic love can be extraordinary. I hope I experience a marriage filled with tenderness, friendship and devotion.
But it would be unfair to all the people who have loved me already to behave as though my life begins the day a man decides to love me.
I have already been loved. Abundantly.
Being rich is not about possessing an endless amount. Maybe it is having enough love around you that ordinary things become precious.
It is opening the fridge and seeing chocolate milk. It is cutting into a chocolate birthday cake somebody chose because they knew you would prefer it. It is finding an old makeup palette in a drawer and realising a friendship has lived beside you for years. It is looking at your parents while they are still here and understanding that their presence is not mundane simply because it is familiar.
Perhaps that is also why Islam asks us to look beyond the glitter of the dunya. The things we compete over are temporary. The people we love are temporary too. But that does not make them meaningless. It makes gratitude urgent.
Gratitude is noticing your wealth before it becomes memory.
I still want the career. I still want independence. And, yes, I would still quite like the bengali gold bangles stacked around my wrists.
But I hope that if I ever get everything I have been chasing, I do not become so distracted by acquiring a rich life that I fail to notice the one already placed on the dining table.
A slice of chocolate cake.
About the Author
Tanisha is a British Bangladeshi writer, political activist and UCL student based in London. She creates personal essays and social commentary exploring faith, identity, politics and social inequality, with a particular interest in amplifying the experiences of working-class British Muslim women.
About Muslim Women For
Muslim Women For regularly publishes submissions to the blog. We encourage submissions from community members. To learn more, visit our submission criteria page. The views and opinions expressed in these posts do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of the organization, ‘Muslim Women For.'
