Umm Salamah (RA) and the conditions she named before she said yes

The story

When the Prophet ﷺ sent someone to propose marriage to her, Umm Salamah didn't say yes right away. She sent back a list of reasons he might want to reconsider: "I am a jealous woman. I have children. And none of my guardians are here to give me away."

He answered every objection in turn. Her jealousy — he would ask Allah to remove it. Her children — he would take care of them himself. Her missing guardians — none of them, present or not, would ever object to this marriage. There was nothing left standing between her and an honest yes.

It hadn't always been an easy question for her to answer. Before he died, her first husband Abu Salamah had once made her promise something: if he passed before her, she should remarry, not stay alone out of loyalty to his memory. She'd agreed, reluctantly. When the moment actually came, she couldn't think who could possibly measure up to him. "Who is better than Abu Salamah?" she kept asking herself, unable to finish the prayer for a replacement he'd once taught her to make.

She married the Prophet ﷺ not long after, and stayed jealous exactly as she'd warned him she would — 'A'ishah admitted later she'd felt it first, certain no one that beautiful could be anything but trouble. But Umm Salamah's home became one of the Prophet's favorite places to rest, and to the end of his life he would walk in asking after her by the name he used only for her — "Where's the little Zaynab?" — for the daughter she'd carried into a whole arrangement that had started with nothing settled but her own honesty about what she needed.