Is marriage fard or wajib according to Quran?
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Since you say it is "compulsory", then you should get married NOW! Otherwise you are just contradicting yourself.
I think you're adding a time-value to the word "compulsory" that isn't there. It is synonymous to obligatory, both of which must rely on other words to describe the time value. Since the Quran doesn't give a specific time reference, I assume the time to be "before you die." So no, I'm not contradicting myself.
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It is best to hold off getting married for as long as possible surely?
...although that may be the way I was brought up, that sex/relationships are bad/dirty/sinful and needing a 'partner' in life is suspicious Jesus should be enough for you!
(except when it is a priest touching you up and then is suddenly A.O.K! brickwall).
General idea in Catholicism
unmarried celibate people (priests, nuns etc) = strong, pure, holy people that God loves
married people = weak people that God tolerates as long as they stay faithful and do not divorce
adulterers/fornicaters/homosexuals/pimps/prostitutes/divorcees/contraception users = people about whom we do not speakStill struggle with this stuff (.
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unmarried celibate people (priests, nuns etc) = strong, pure, holy people that God loves
married people = weak people that God tolerates as long as they stay faithful and do not divorce
adulterers/fornicaters/homosexuals/pimps/prostitutes/divorcees/contraception users = people about whom we do not speakStill struggle with this stuff (.
Though I was not raised Catholic, my father and his family are. My mother and her family are firmly Southern Baptist.
The way Catholicism's is, to me, you get closer to God by fasting from physical desire. That doesn't make much sense once you critically examine it though through their own book(the Gospel). God asks them to procreate, and also tells them not to fornicate. So, you gotta get married and make babies. By denying God's wish to marry and procreate (in their book), they can't really be the most holy people on Earth could they?
It also challenges them when posed with the question, should everyone be as Holy as the pope, cardinals, and nuns(in terms of abstinence)? If they were, humans would cease to exist. Its definitely a voluntary restriction that does not correlate with innate moral values.
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What does marriage mean? Having a partnership by law and on paper? I think a commited relationship is the same.
Before I reverted, I was in a "committed" relationship for 5 years. In my experience they are similar, but not the same. I had a typical Western-style relationship where my ex and I lived together, went to the same university, and did things you generally consider reserved for a married couple. All of our friends/family thought we'd get married, we even assumed it would happen at some point.
When you live that way, you take marriage for granted. I certainly did. I'm a very honest, monogamous, and committed person. As was/is my ex. However when the tough times came, as they always do in a relationship, we decided that we had other life priorities that were more important than our relationship at the time and we ended it.
Now that I'm older, and much more religious inclined, I feel like I have a perspective that a lot of born/raised Muslims don't have. At least the ones with parents who were very active in assuring that their children did not have serious relationships before marriage. I believe now, that if you value marriage as not only commitment to yourself and your spouse, but also to God, you have a lot better chance of having a happy relationship with someone. That is because you have a larger stake in it. It's not something you feel as though you can just walk away from. There are 3 factors (the relationship, the marriage, and God) as opposed to just 1 (the relationship) in a committed non-married relationship.
If you'd like to say that you can have a serious(living together, sex, children, etc) relationship with someone w/out being married, I would truly love to see the justification for that in the Quran. I'm not going to do that again (be in a relationship like that), but if I did, I would now do it with the understanding that what I'm doing is counter to what God has requested in each of the three books He gave us. And I'd hope that I was so good in everything else that I did that I still made it into Paradise when I died.
peace