Malala Yousafzai

I did not want to get married.

It was like...

It was not a cool thing.

If you wanted to have a future as a girl, you wanted to keep yourself away from marriage for as long as you could.

Because even later in your life, it just meant like more compromises for women that, you know, you had to readjust to the husband's family and you just had to pray that the husband turns out to be a nice, respectful person.

I remember when I was thinking about marriage for myself,

I put myself in my mom's shoes for the first time.

I had never thought about anything from her perspective before.

And I, you know, I would always admire my dad and I wanted to like follow his footsteps and all of that.

But this was the first time I wondered what life would have been like for my mom when she decided to marry.

How did she trust this man?

this guy she had not even known and decided to like move into his house and be married off and restart a new life.

And I asked my mom actually what were her dreams when she was a kid.

And she said, you know, I just wanted to find a husband who would be respectful and I can go into the city and like have nice food and like drive around in a car.

And I realized that my mom didn't even have a dream for herself.

that marriage was a way for her to find some sort of freedom, a little more freedom than she had right now.

So it was sort of a fascinating time.

When I saw Asar, I immediately fell in love with him.

I knew that I wanted to be with him.

And I knew that we had to be married because in our culture, for two people to be together, you have to be married.