Friend #24 - Zainab
The girl from university case competitions
Years ago, I was invited to a lunch that was hosted by my university. My parents and I sat around a table with other girls and their parents who had also ranked at the top of their classes in high school. We all engaged in discussion and during the car ride home I admitted to my parents that I didn’t think I was smart—I explained to them that my success stemmed from passion. “When you speak, you speak with your entire soul,” my dad said.
Over the years, I’ve been able to spot others who lay their souls bare in all that they do. During my exchange in Strasbourg in 2018, I watched a boy my age from Turkey give a presentation on wine from Georgia. “I think I’m in love,” I told the friend beside me as he captivated us with enthusiasm.
Then I met Zainab in my final year of school. She’s a year younger and in preparation for a case competition someone recommended that I connect with her. The two of us engaged in conversation week after week—I would leave energized while we rarely spoke about anything personal.
It had been three and half years since I’d seen her when we met for coffee last week. Zainab is noticeably calmer and moved downtown during the pandemic.
As we begin to catch up, she shares that she grew up in a two-bedroom apartment outside of Toronto with her three siblings and parents.
“I was born in Dubai and I was raised very religious,” she says. “I knew that I didn’t want to be religious but the values we shared at home are still a part of me. At home, the idea was to put everyone before you under the assumption that they are also putting you before them. But that doesn’t happen in the real world.”
This ultimately leads to a discussion on the difficulty that mentality poses when dating. “When I meet someone I like, I’m ready to jump over the moon for them,” I tell Zainab.
“Me too,” she says. “But the difference is that in friendship it’s easy to give and I never expect anything in return from my friends. In dating, it can easily be seen as too much.”
Personally, when I tell a boy I like him. It means that I could one day love him.
A view that goes something like this. Love is a choice. If I choose to be with someone then I choose to be interested in them. I choose to go through the good and bad times with them because both are inevitable. And when I feel that the man I am with understands love the same way then I will love him.
“I agree,” says Zainab. “I just want one person. I won’t look at anyone else or think about anyone else.”
I think that so much of dating is self-actualizing. It’s understanding what you value and what you need and more importantly what you’re ready to give and having the courage to defend that. It’s not about practice because of course one may know how to begin a relationship but who we are today with someone is not what we will be in five years with someone—that is where commitment is key.
In December of 2022, I went on a few casual dates in Miami with a boy named James. He was two years my junior and liked to salsa dance after work. I saw both those points as deficits. But he was confident and kind and weeks later I reflected on his being and concluded that if the man likes to dance, let the man dance.
“Let the man dance. I like that,” laughs Zainab.
“I told my mom the other day that she is naive and she said, ‘So what? I’m naive.’ We just need to embrace who we are and go with it,” I say. “Maybe we’re givers and overly passionate but that’s who we are and playing small won’t help us.”
“The problem is sometimes I feel this unnecessary fidelity toward people. Last year I wanted to be friends with that guy,” I share.
“But he was mean to you,” says Zainab.
“Out of fidelity,” I reply.
“I completely understand,” she says.
I recently read a quote by writer Anaïs Nin, it reads “Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by meeting that a new world is born.”
Zainab understood parts of me that I had trouble vocalizing. Parts that I now felt she understood best and I felt safe inhabiting those parts of myself when I was with her.
“I love you neither with my heart nor with my mind. My heart might stop, my mind can forget. I love you with my soul because my soul never stops or forgets.”
―Rumi
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