lua, I am relieved to hear from someone who has been in my position. Relieved and also a little anxious since it seems that I need to plan on telling him.
Would you please share a bit more about how you told your husband about your apostasy? Are you out of the closet to your husband only, or are you totally public?
Edit, I thought I would do the smart thing and read your own intro post (I hope that doesn't qualify me as a stalker--eep!). You sound incredibly well-versed, far more than I could hope to be. I hope it works out for the best for the both of us.
Nah, the first thing I do when I'm curious about a user is see if they wrote an introduction, too.
As of right now, I've pretty much only told my husband and my grandmother and the whole internet, and I guess I wouldn't mind it staying like that...
Jedi and I are are definitely going to be giving you two polar opposite opinions on things like this, but, in the end, you'll know the guy best. In my case, had I told the husband about my apostasy as soon as it happened, it would have ended in divorce. There's no question. Even in those early days, he once made a comment about how, if I became an atheist and we had kids, he'd kidnap them to Saudi Arabia, but he generously added things like, "I wouldn't want to, I'd be sad to leave you, but you'd give me no choice."
Now, that was back when he was a strict Sunni who wouldn't eat baked goods with vanilla extract, who lectured me about eating at my parents' house when the family dog also ate in that house, was a vocal critic (instead of just a reserved one, now) of homosexuals and Jews, and literally believed that the world was controlled by the llluminati. Skip to today, he owns a dog that, dare I say, he loves much more than he loves me, and he has developed the good sense to he horrified by the hadith, he's taken this super liberal view of the Quran where like no one goes to Hell and the punishments aren't real, he skipped almost all of Ramadan fasting this year, and he's thrown down with other Muslims in this area over correcting them for being the kind of jerk he used to be.
I really had to push this development along in all sorts of ways, but in the end, you can lead a horse to water, blah blah blah. So I was really lucky that he was the sort of person who
can make these positive changes and developments. My attempts on a different man to make his mind a bit more open might have failed spectacularly. But the point is, for he and I to still be together to this day (although, who knows what the future holds for us), I would have gone crazy if I had to pretend for much longer, and he would have left me if the news of my apostasy came at an earlier time.
Like others said, it sounds like your husband is already a pretty liberal guy, but you need to get a feel for exactly how liberal. I mean, you're right in that a great many Muslims (not to mention imams) would consider a marriage to an apostate to be invalid, and if your husband hears this or knows this, you need to know ahead of time how it will affect him. Will he keep on going despite it? Will he spend the rest of your marriage trying to coax you back into Islam? Will he fear punishment and difficulties with the future kids and run off?
Thinking back to the time my husband made that comment, I am certain it came up because we must have been talking about someone I know (out of an unfortunate few) who was betrayed by their husband/ex-husband and who had their kids taken away for whatever reason. It may be worth it to spend the next month or so bringing up similar stories just to talk about the issue with your husband in order to get a feel for his position on these things, on mixed marriages like yours will be, and on atheists/apostates in general.
If his responses are disappointing, I guess you have a few options. Jedi, I think, is saying that you should just leave him be and lead by example. That wouldn't have worked for me, but maybe it would for you. You could also cut your losses and end the relationship, although that would be the hardest option, and the one I didn't have the nerve to do, myself.
Or you could spend a few more months, like I did, trying to slowly show him what he's missing, prompting him to walk in other people's shoes for a bit, seeing if you could build some platform on which you both can have at the very least some mutual understanding and respect that's not based on Islam. It's worth a shot, but there's no guarantee that it would work, unfortunately. But whatever you do, don't resign yourself to a life of pretending. That's the worst thing you could do.
Considering how laid back he sounds, I have a lot of hope that you can make this work. You just really need to get to the bottom of his beliefs and how strongly he holds them before you do anything else. It may be the case that he's more the sort who culturally identifies with Islam but can't be bothered to take the theology very seriously, which would be amazing, so long as he didn't have a sudden mid-life strict phase (seen that one happen more than once). But once you know for sure exactly what he believes and where he's coming from, I think you'd have a much better idea of how this can play out.
Finally, thank you for the well-versed comment! I'd think most people would say long-winded.
Topic: First comes love, then comes marriage...