The Love Letter in Berlin

i.

There is a word most people never learn, because the feeling it describes is one most people never question. The word is limerence. The obsessive, involuntary state of longing for another person. It disguises itself as love. It wears love's clothes, speaks in love's voice, and burns with what feels like love's fire. But it is not love. It is the hunger for love. And I know this, because I have been consumed by it.

I need to tell you something about myself first: For most of my life, I believed I was someone who didn't feel things deeply. I moved through the world like a strategist. School was a system to decode. I figured out how to earn the highest marks with surgical precision. Social media was an algorithm to master. I built an audience of millions by the time I was nineteen. Everything in my life had a formula. Input, process, output. I was good at this. I was comfortable in it. Emotions were background noise.

Then my father was diagnosed with cancer.

And the walls I didn't know I had collapsed.

ii.

Grief does strange things to a person. It doesn't just make you sad. It opens you. It tears something loose inside your chest that you didn't know was sealed shut, and suddenly you feel everything. Not just the pain you expected, but things you never gave yourself permission to feel. Tenderness. Vulnerability. Longing. I went from someone who barely registered emotion to someone drowning in it overnight. I was falling apart and falling open at the same time.

It was during this period, this season of being completely unraveled, that I met someone.

I won't say her name. I won't describe her in ways that make her recognizable. But I will say this: Not even the best cameras in the world could capture her beauty the way my eyes did. There was something about her presence that silenced every strategy I had ever known. I couldn't plan for her. I couldn't optimize my way into her attention. I couldn't reverse-engineer what I felt. For the first time in my life, I stood before something I could not control.

iii.

I wrote her a letter. A real, handwritten letter. My hands were trembling. In an age where people confess feelings through texts they can delete, through DMs they can unsend, I chose ink on paper. Permanent, irreversible, terrifying. I gave it to her in Berlin, and in that moment I felt more exposed than I had ever felt in front of a camera, an audience, or a crowd.

She was kind. She told me, days later, with grace and respect, that she wasn't looking for a relationship. That her focus was on building her vision, her business, her life. And you know what? I loved that about her. I love it still. A woman who knows what she wants and has the discipline to pursue it. That is not rejection. That is focus. And I respect it more than she will ever know.

But between the moment I handed her that letter and the moment she responded, there was a silence. And in that silence, my mind did what unhealed minds do. It spiraled. I convinced myself I had frightened her. That the look on her face was not surprise but disgust. That I was too much, too strange, too broken to be wanted. I carried that for a long time. It sat in my chest like a stone.

I am telling you this not for sympathy, but for honesty. Because if I am going to write about love, I have to start with what I got wrong.

iv.

What I felt was not love. It was limerence.

Limerence is what happens when your mind fixates on someone and builds a cathedral out of a conversation. It is the fever dream of connection. Intense, beautiful, and fundamentally incomplete. It lives in the absence of knowing someone fully. It survives on uncertainty, on the question mark, on the space between "maybe" and "never." The less you know, the more your imagination fills in the gaps, and what it builds is intoxicating. But it is architecture without a foundation.

Real love is nothing like this.

I know what real love looks like, because I watched it my entire life. My mother and my father. They didn't have fireworks. They had something far greater. They had decades. They had two people who carried more than they should have been able to, and still chose each other every single morning. They had nights of worry about money and mornings of figuring it out together. They had my father, a factory worker who never complained about a life that was heavier than anyone knew. And my mother, who worked as a cleaner, then at forty years old decided to go back to school, study, and become the first person in her family to earn a university degree. And my father, who never once made her feel small for wanting more.

Without my mother, my father would not have been half the man he was. And I believe he would say the same. That is love. Not the trembling, not the obsession, not the letters written with shaking hands. Love is what remains after limerence burns out. It is built in years of fighting side by side. In shared missions and shared silence. In the way someone holds your hand not because their heart is racing, but because their heart is steady.

v.

My grandfather, and I am laughing as I write this, once climbed a minaret in Turkey and threatened to jump if he couldn't be with my grandmother. I come from a lineage of men who love recklessly, dramatically, almost absurdly. There is something beautiful about that. But there is also something I want to do differently.

I don't just want to find the right woman. I want to be the right man.

This is the part most people skip. Everyone talks about what they want in a partner. Loyalty, ambition, beauty, faith. Few talk about what they are building in themselves to deserve it. I want to be the kind of husband whose wife looks at him and thinks: He makes me braver. The kind of father whose children grow up knowing what a good man looks like, not because he told them, but because he showed them. The kind of partner who supports his wife's dreams with the same intensity he pursues his own. Not behind her. Not in front of her. Beside her.

vi.

I want a woman with her own agenda. Her own fire. Her own vision she is building with her own hands. I don't want to be someone's world. That is too much pressure for any one person. I want to be part of a shared universe. Two people with their own orbits, choosing to revolve around the same sun.

Nationality doesn't matter to me. Background doesn't matter. What matters is character. Values. Whether we are on the same wavelength. Whether she can build an empire by day and live simply in the mountains by night. Whether she can conquer the world by day and still long for a quiet life with goats and tea and peace. I want someone who holds both of these worlds inside her, because I hold both inside me.

And I want us to build something that outlasts this life entirely. I don't just want a partner for the Dunya. I want a partner for the Akhira. Someone I will stand beside not only in this world, but in the next.

I read something recently that stayed with me. Someone asked: what matters more, the journey or the destination? The answer was: the company. I could not agree more.

vii.

I think the reason love is so difficult for someone like me is that it demands the one thing I have spent my entire life avoiding. Surrender.

I have always been the person who figures things out. The one who finds the pattern, builds the system, solves the problem before it becomes one. Control is not just a habit for me. It is how I survived. It is how I turned a 2.0 GPA into a perfect 4.0. It is how I built everything I have from nothing.

But love does not respect control. It does not care how prepared you are. It walks in without permission and rearranges the furniture of your mind. And the hardest part is not the feeling itself. It is accepting that you cannot earn it, force it, or fix it. You can only stand still, open, and hope that what is meant for you recognizes you too.

And there is certainly no strategy for letting go of someone you were never allowed to hold.

viii.

I don't know if the woman I once wrote a letter to will ever read this. Part of me hopes she does. Part of me hopes she doesn't, because I never want her to feel burdened by feelings she did not ask for. I have kept my distance. Not because my feelings faded, but because I respect her enough to let her live her life uninterrupted by mine.

I have accepted that we may never be together. And I mean that. Not as a performance of maturity, but as a genuine resting place my heart has found. I don't know if what I experienced was a test of acceptance or a test of patience. In Islam, we call this sabr. The beautiful, aching discipline of trusting Allah's timing even when your own heart is screaming for an answer. Maybe He placed this longing in me to teach me that only His love is permanent. Maybe He separated my heart from hers to protect something I cannot yet see. Maybe the wait is longer than I imagined. Or maybe the destination was never her at all.

Either way, I am at peace. My heart is at ease, knowing that what is meant for me will never miss me, and what misses me was never meant for me.

And if He does bring us together one day, in a way that honors both of us, in a time that is right for both of us, then I would not simply be happy. I would be the most grateful man alive. And I would spend the rest of my life proving that the patience was worth it.

ix.

I want to tell you about the moment that changed everything.

When my father passed, I washed his body. In Islam, we wash our dead before burial. I chose to do it myself. I stood there, hands wet, looking at the body of the man who raised me, the man who worked in a factory his whole life so that I could dream bigger, and something hit me like lightning.

Every single thing in this life is worth feeling.

Every heartbreak. Every rejection. Every letter written with trembling hands that went unanswered. Every silent prayer at 3 AM. Every moment of longing for someone who may never long for you back. All of it. Every emotion, every blow that fate delivers, every triumph and every loss. It is all evidence that you are alive. That your heart works. That you are capable of feeling something so deeply that it reshapes you.

I used to think unrequited love was a waste. Now I see it differently. The love I carry, whether it is ever returned or not, has made me softer. Kinder. More human. It broke open a version of me that strategies and systems never could. And for that, I am grateful.

I do not know who my wife will be. I have someone in my heart, but Allah knows best. What I do know is this: I am not waiting for someone to complete me. I am becoming complete on my own. Everything I am building in myself right now, every lesson, every prayer, every quiet act of growth, my future wife will one day benefit from all of it. Not because I did it for her. But because I did it for the man I want to be when she arrives.

Love is not about finding someone. It is about building someone. Yourself.