LOVE · RELATIONSHIP · PERSONAL ESSAY
A personal essay on love across borders, quiet promises, and what it truly means to cherish someone.
By HUSAIN AFRICA·Love & Relationships·5 min read
A note from Ink & Ideas: Some stories don’t announce themselves. They arrive quietly, like this one — honest, warm, and deeply human. We are honoured to share voices that remind us what love looks like when it is chosen, every single day.
Introduction
Recently, I came across an Instagram post that stayed with me longer than I expected. The caption was simple: “A woman is like a flower, cherish her.”
In that post, the writer shared a real story of a girl who got married and moved to Mombasa from India. She left behind her family, her comfort, her food, and her familiar life — stepping suddenly into a completely new world. What made the story special was not the change itself, but the way her husband stood by her. He understood her loneliness, her adjustment struggles, and her emotional distance from everything she had once called home. He didn’t just bring her into a new life — he made sure she felt at home in it.
That story deeply inspired me, because it reminded me of my own life in a very personal way.
Our Journey
I belong to India, and my wife belongs to Pakistan. We met through a social platform — almost by coincidence — but what started casually slowly turned into something very real. We talked for almost two years, sharing our thoughts and lives and slowly building a trust neither of us had expected at the beginning.
Eventually, we reached a point where things became very clear between us. I told her that if I ever received a visa to visit Pakistan, I would not return from that decision without certainty. Either we take this forward seriously, or we stop right there. There was no middle path.
“Chatti ma likhayu hase toh emaj thase.”
A belief my father often shared with my mother — that a child’s destiny is written on the sixth day after birth, during the naming ceremony. If something is meant to happen, it will happen.
By the grace of God, everything aligned. And today, we are married and living a happy life together.
“A flower doesn’t only need admiration. It needs presence, patience, and someone who understands its silence.”
Understanding Love
They say, “a woman is like a flower — cherish her.” And over the years, I have come to understand that in a much deeper way.
A flower doesn’t only need admiration. It needs presence, patience, protection, and someone who understands its silence, its moods, its seasons, and its quiet strength.
It has been ten years with my wife now. Different countries, different cultures — she is from Pakistan, and I am from India. The world may see borders, differences, and distance, but in our lives, those things never became barriers.
From the very beginning, I made a quiet promise that she would never feel alone with me. Not physically, not emotionally, not even in her thoughts.
“Real love is not built on big words or dramatic moments. It is built in small, everyday things — in understanding silence, and in choosing each other, again and again.”
Somewhere along the journey, I began to understand her more deeply, and she began to understand me even better. That is when love became a bond — not just a feeling.
Conclusion
She is not just someone I cherish. She is someone I respect, someone I learn from, someone who completes parts of me I didn’t even know were missing.
A flower blooms only when it feels safe. And if she has bloomed all these years, it means something was done right.
But the truth is — she has given me just as much, if not more.
So no, she is not just a flower to be cherished. She is my partner, my peace, my strength.
And after ten years… I still choose her, every single day. ❤️
Published by Ink & Ideas Publication House
This is the kind of writing we exist for.
At Ink & Ideas, we publish voices that write from the heart — love stories, memoirs, personal essays, and poetry that resonate because they are real. If you have a story that deserves to be told, we want to hear from you.
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This is the kind of writing we exist for.
At Ink & Ideas, we publish voices that write from the heart — love stories, memoirs, personal essays, and poetry that resonate because they are real. If you have a story that deserves to be told, we want to hear from you.
