After 70 years of marriage, Siti Hasmah and Mahathir’s relationship offers a reflection on love, patience, forgiveness and choosing each other through life.
I HAVE been thinking about love this week. Not the Instagram kind. Not the kind with roses, matching outfits and captions about “my forever” that disappear three months later.
I mean the real kind. The kind that survives bad moods, money problems, family drama, irritating habits, grey hair, ageing knees and seven decades of life.
The kind Tun Dr Siti Hasmah Mohd Ali and Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad had.
Seventy years of marriage – 70. These days, even saying “forever” can feel a little ambitious.
We live in a time when relationships can end with a WhatsApp message, a blocked number or a quiet unfollow.
“Tak ngam.”
“Tak boleh tahan.”
“Dah tak bahagia.”
And sometimes, yes, walking away is necessary. Nobody should be told to stay in a marriage that is unsafe, abusive or deeply harmful. But somewhere between knowing when to leave and when to stay, I wonder if we have forgotten something: The art of trying.
Siti Hasmah and Mahathir met as medical students in Singapore. On April 23, 1949, after watching a movie, the young Mahathir told her three simple words: “I love you.”
No dating app. No carefully selected profile picture. No “typing…” anxiety. Just three words. They married in 1956.
And then life happened – children, careers, responsibilities, politics, public life, successes, difficulties and everything that comes with growing old.
And somehow, they kept going. There is something wonderfully ordinary about that. Because perhaps that is what we have romanticised away.
We like the beginning of love – the butterflies, the first date, the first “I love you”, the wedding, the honeymoon. But nobody puts up a beautiful Instagram post saying: “Day 4,327 of tolerating his snoring.” Nobody celebrates the 17,000th time a wife has heard the same story.
Nobody makes a reel about staying when both people are tired, broke, stressed and annoyed with each other. Yet, that is where marriage actually lives. In the ordinary.
Siti Hasmah once recalled that the two of them would quarrel during their courtship, then go out for a meal and make up.
I smiled when I read that. Because suddenly their 70-year love story did not seem so impossibly grand. They fought too. They annoyed each other too.
Mahathir was particular about time. Hasmah apparently was not always in the same hurry. And eventually, he accepted that she was unlikely to change. That little detail says so much.
Maybe marriage is not about finding somebody who never annoys you but about finding someone whose annoying habits you eventually learn to live with.
Or, as Mahathir himself described it, tolerance. And perhaps that is the word we need to bring back: Tolerance. Patience. Compromise. Forgiveness. Not because people should put up with everything but because two imperfect human beings cannot spend decades together without occasionally driving each other slightly mad.
Today, we talk a lot about “red flags”. And yes, some red flags should send you running.
But perhaps we have also forgotten about green flags. Someone who stays. Someone who listens. Someone who apologises. Someone who changes when they are wrong. Someone who doesn’t give up at the first difficult chapter. Because marriages do not collapse only in dramatic moments. Sometimes they disappear slowly; one unspoken resentment, one neglected conversation, one “I’m too tired”, one “you don’t understand me” at a time.
And when marriages break, families feel it too. Children are often the ones standing in the middle of decisions they did not make. We cannot pretend every broken marriage can or should be saved. But surely, as a society, we should still want people to have the tools to build families that are loving, stable and kind.
That is why the passing of Siti Hasmah feels like more than the end of a remarkable woman’s life. It feels like the closing of a chapter in a Malaysia that once believed deeply in growing old together.
She and Mahathir did not have a perfect marriage. No one does. They had something perhaps more valuable. They had a long marriage – a marriage that survived real life.
And now, after 70 years, death has done what all the little quarrels, frustrations, differences and difficult years could not do. It finally separated them.
That makes me think about my own generation. We want love but we also want convenience. We want companionship but we don’t always want compromise.
We want someone who understands us but sometimes forget that we also have to understand someone else. We want forever but we sometimes get frightened when forever becomes hard work. Maybe that is the lesson Siti Hasmah quietly leaves behind.
Love is not always fireworks. Sometimes, it is two people sitting at the same table after an argument. Sometimes, it is waiting. Sometimes, it is forgiving. Sometimes, it is rolling your eyes and thinking, aiyoh, this person again. And sometimes, it is simply choosing, once more, to stay.
For 70 years, Siti Hasmah and Mahathir chose each other. Perhaps that is what makes their love story so rare. Not because they never had problems. But because they stayed long enough to have a whole lifetime of them.
And in a world that is becoming increasingly impatient with everything, including people, perhaps that is something worth remembering. Love is not just about finding the right person. Sometimes, it is about learning how to stay with the person you chose.
Hashini Kavishtri Kannan is the news editor at theSun.
Comments: letters@thesundaily.com
