Salim was one of those men. There was a lot we discussed, there was a lot he said about being married to not just any woman, but a woman who is so successful. He revealed to me that it was she who proposed to him, a random factoid I didn’t know. He also spoke about their first date, which is when he said they both knew they were in love. All of this was nice stuff to hear, and I could certainly print out the transcription of what we said, but really, it won’t do the conversation justice, and what he said about marriage wasn’t nearly as important as to how he talked about it.
What I learned from Salim during our interview was that matrimony isn’t about being happily married so much as it’s about being comfortably married. Happiness is cool, but comfort is king. This wasn’t anything Salim said, this is my interpretation of what and how Salim spoke about marriage. Salim is one of the coolest people with whom I’ve ever talked, and that cool remains when he talks about his wife. Here was a man who before he was married, had a child at the age of 14 (according to the math and what he told me, which you will read in the story). A lot of people say it was Mara who brought him into the game, when really it was his own work that got him attention from Showtime and helped jump start his career as a writer on the series Soul Food where he was to the rank of executive producer.