When Asser told me he was coming back to the UK in July from Pakistan, I was delighted if not completely surprised. His niece was graduating from medical school and England was hosting the Cricket World Cup, a great opportunity to broaden his professional network as a mid-level cricket manager. But the main reason was me. He didn’t need to say it—I knew I wasn’t wrong about his feelings this time.
After that first phone call when I told him what I was going through at Oxford—the exhaustion and panic attacks—he called almost every day. At first he mostly checked on my health, making sure I took my iron pills and gently lecturing me when I admitted to eating nothing but french fries for two days in a row. Then our conversations got longer, stretching to include topics like celebrity crushes, our childhood dreams, the existence of God. Asser kept up with all the gossip about my friends’ love lives; I learned that he loved to deejay in college but gave it up after he witnessed a murder at an illegal rave in Lahore. Like most of my friends, I preferred texting over phone calls, but with Asser, I could talk for hours.
We had become more than friends and we both acknowledged it—he called me “babe” and said I looked beautiful in the pictures I sent him. My lack of dating experience sometimes meant I was trying to court a 29-year-old man with the romantic tool kit of a 12-year-old girl. If he sent a text saying he had a busy day and couldn’t call at our usual time, I sulked and replied, “u don’t even have time for me. must not be that important to u.” Sometimes I picked fights just to get his attention. He laughed off these antics, calling me “president of the drama club” and promising that he missed me.
“How much time will we have together in your busy summer schedule?” he asked one night, a couple of weeks before he was set to arrive in London.
Listen to Vogue’s excerpt read by Malala Yousafzai—from the forthcoming audiobook Finding My Way, courtesy of Simon Schuster Audio
“Short trips to Ethiopia and France, a longer stay in the US in August. But my calendar has a lot of open spots and they’re all yours! I’m actually more worried about….”
“Your parents?”
“Yeah. Last year, they didn’t pry too much, but the more we see each other, the more questions they’ll ask. Could get tricky.”
“Okay, what if I write your dad a letter? It will say, ‘Dear Mr. Yousafzai, Hope you are doing well. As you are aware, you have a daughter who has grown up to be a wonderful and beautiful woman. And….’ ”
At this point, he broke into song, warbling, “Le jayenge, Le jayenge, Dilwale Dulhania le jayenge!” The song, “The Brave-Hearted Will Take the Bride,” was an old Bollywood hit about a man making his case to the father of the woman he loved.
I had two thoughts at once:
I can’t wait to see him again.
That is possibly the worst singing voice I’ve ever heard.
From the moment Asser arrived in England, all our experiences—last summer’s fumbling around feelings and our recent four-hour phone calls—blended to create the thrill of a new relationship with the worn-in ease of an older one. We would spend all day together then call each other the minute we got home, staying on the phone for hours. On long drives to London, we sat in comfortable silence, content to simply exist next to one another while watching the countryside roll by and listening to my security guards’ 1990s playlists.
One evening we went to a restaurant at an old manor in the English countryside. “Excuse me for just one minute,” I said to Asser after the host showed us to a table by the window. I’d left my parents’ house in a shalwar kameez that met my mom’s approval but stuffed a change of clothes in my bag: a sleeveless, form-fitting dress in pale pink lace and my highest heels.
When I returned to the table, Asser sat up straight and his mouth broke into a smile I hadn’t seen before. He pulled out my chair and whispered, “You’re a sex bomb!” in my ear. I hid my face behind my dinner napkin, both delighted and bashful.
Asser’s arrival vanquished the dark clouds that hung over the prospect of my third term at Oxford, but it wasn’t exactly the carefree summer romance of rom-coms, as I worried a lot about getting caught. On a walk through London’s Chiswick Gardens one afternoon, I was showing off for Asser, climbing up a tree and daring him to race me to the top. When I jumped down, I grabbed his hand and pulled him close to me. That’s when I caught the eye of a woman on a park bench staring at us. She broke into a wide smile of recognition and pulled out her phone to take a picture. I ran behind a hedge to hide, alarming both Asser and my security team.
The next day I rode to the airport with my dad to catch a plane to Addis Ababa. I couldn’t put it off anymore—I had to tell him about Asser. As he read the morning news on his phone, I stared out the window, rehearsing what I would say and bracing myself for his response. I wanted to stay in my secret world a little longer, free of people’s opinions and reminders about what I was risking. But that couldn’t last.
My dad and I loved to debate each other about politics, world events, feminism, anything at all. I would try to convince him of my side, and, most of the time, I succeeded. My whole life, I felt like I could tell him anything—but I’d never been in love before.
“Dad, you know…it’s hard to meet good people…like, people who have a good sense of humor but also find me funny,” I began. He looked attentive, like he was trying to understand me. Ugh, you’re making this worse, I thought. Just spit it out!
“It’s just like…when you meet someone and want to spend more time with them? Well, I guess…I guess, basically, I have met someone like that. He’s, uh, 29…he lives in Lahore, but comes to England in the summer to see his sister. And he works in cricket, which is great for me.”
My dad nodded slowly, as if everything I’d said up to this point was fine.
“We…Asser and I…,” I continued. “I like him, Dad. I like him…romantically.” A wave of nausea rolled through me as I choked the word out, but my dad just stared back at me without even blinking.
“I wanted you to know,” I continued, “but please, please don’t tell Mom. I’m begging you—I am not ready to have this fight with her yet.”
At first, it seemed like he was about to ask a question. But he stopped himself, looked straight ahead and said nothing. Then, I watched in disbelief as my dad, my lifelong confidant, pulled out his phone and called home.
On the other end of the line, I heard my mom say, “Absolutely not! Does he even speak Pashto? She must marry a Pashtun man!”
“If he’s here for the summer, we should meet him,” my dad said crisply after he hung up. “But we won’t announce the engagement until after your graduation.” I glared out the window, fuming at myself for bringing it up, at my dad for calling my mom, at my mom for being so small-minded, and at them both for bringing up engagements and husbands.
Why are you even thinking about marriage? I wanted to scream. Can I not just live my life like all the other 21-year-olds at college? But I already knew the answer: While my parents wouldn’t force me to get married against my will, they would never accept me having a boyfriend. No looking, no touching, no dating. Any conversations you had with a man before marriage had to be supervised by the parents. Those were the Pashtun rules, and I’d already broken all of them.
I planned everything to the minute: Asser would arrive by train to Birmingham at 11:45 a.m., get to my parents’ house for a 12 p.m. lunch, and leave by 1 p.m. to go back to London. Not much could go wrong in an hour, I figured.
He arrived bearing flowers and seemed a little bit nervous. I was flustered, too, and could barely look him in the eye as I showed him to the living room where my brothers, Khushal and Atal, were blaring drill rap and playing video games. My dad, who had double-booked by mistake and invited seven guests of his own, was in the garden trying to man the barbecue, serve tea, and carry on multiple conversations. My mom sat under a tree in a lawn chair, evaluating everyone, particularly Asser. She asked him if he knew any Pashto, and he gamely stumbled through a few phrases. My mom wasn’t impressed, but she seemed, at least, to credit him for making an effort. The whole situation was making me increasingly anxious, while Asser loosened up, chatting with my dad and his guests about his grilling techniques, encouraging Khushal to keep up with his studies, and even beatboxing with Atal.
At 1 p.m. sharp, I called a car for him and whispered “I’m sorry” as he left. When he was gone, a weight lifted from my shoulders. I was relieved to have my identities—the chaste Pashtun daughter my parents expected me to be and the fun-loving girlfriend Asser knew—separated again, back in their own boxes. But the reprieve was short-lived, quickly replaced by the desire to run after his car, hop in, and escape together. I didn’t know how I would survive the next few weeks without him.
Before sunrise the next day, my parents and I traveled to Heathrow and boarded a plane for Boston. They were taking me to Massachusetts Eye and Ear to see Dr. Tessa Hadlock, a Harvard Medical School professor and pioneer in treating facial paralysis. Under Dr. Hadlock’s supervision, I was undergoing a complex series of surgeries called a cross-facial nerve graft. If it worked, I would have more movement on the left side of my face.
Initially, I did not want to do the cross-facial nerve graft; it meant spending weeks of time in hospitals and recovery rooms for three consecutive summers. My parents, however, wanted to erase the memory of seeing me for the first time in the Birmingham hospital with sunken eyes and a paralyzed mouth—to silence the comments, from relatives and online trolls, about how pretty I “used to be” before the shooting.
On the plane, I got a message from Asser: Have your mom and dad said anything about us? I told him the truth. They were worried. Someone could take a photo, they said, or word could get out through one of our friends. They anticipated a scandal and said I should stop seeing him. I wasn’t going to do that, but I hated the tension my relationship created with my parents.
Wasn’t it their job to be happy for me? I normally would have sat next to my dad on the flight and chatted with him for hours. This time, I put a blanket over my head and went to sleep.
Luckily, the procedure went as planned. When I woke up, I saw the sunshine coming through the hospital room window and my whole body relaxed. You made it, I thought.
When I got back to London, I met Asser at a Cantonese restaurant in the Dorchester hotel for one last dinner before he returned to Lahore. My face was still heavily swollen from the surgery, but he smiled at me the same way he did at the start of the summer when I wore my “sex bomb” dress.
For months, we’d avoided defining our relationship, enjoying each other’s company as if nothing would ever need to change. I had preferred it that way, but being away from him the past few weeks had intensified my feelings. Now I needed to know what he was thinking.
Throughout dinner, I fumbled around the question, never quite asking it. But he must have known what I was after.
“I’m going to miss you a lot when I leave,” he said. “I feel kind of…hollowed out at the thought of not seeing you every week. You know—because I told you the second time we saw each other—that I’m looking for a long-term relationship….” He paused in thought and my heart sped up, unsure where the conversation was going next. Was he proposing or dumping me?
They were both unfavorable outcomes in my mind.
“The truth is, I would marry you tomorrow, and I hate myself for saying that. It’s not a fair thing to put on you. Because you’re too young. You’re still changing as a person, still trying to figure out what you want in life.”
In the moment his words seemed so condescending that I didn’t pause long enough to admit to myself that they were true. “You think because I’m young I can’t know how I feel? How do you, at the advanced age of 29, know if you love someone?”
“I ask myself questions. Do you have the best time with her? Enjoy talking to her for hours? Do you trust her? Do you want to kiss her in the cloakroom at the Dorchester hotel?”
My face flushed and I tripped over my words. “What about…just for now…let’s call it an open relationship…except that it’s closed at your end,” I ventured. Asser laughed so loud that people at nearby tables turned to look at us.
“Okay, that was funny…but it’s also part of the problem. You won’t even call me your boyfriend. Being someone’s secret doesn’t feel great, especially when I want to tell the world how amazing you are. I would love to go on beach vacations with you and have a phone full of pictures of us. And I don’t know when, or if, that will happen.”
“The secrecy is to keep my parents calm. They’re scared of creating a scandal.”
He leaned over and took my hand. “I will always protect your privacy. Always. But, if I’m honest, Malala, I also think you’re keeping it a secret because you’re not sure what you want in life, or with me. And that’s fine! But that feeling doesn’t really change as you get older, there are no signs pointing us in the right direction. None of us are ever certain—there’s always the possibility of making the wrong choice or getting your heart broken. It never goes away.”
I pulled at the sleeve of my dress, suddenly nervous around him for the first time all summer. “Could we maybe pause our feelings for now, just until I finish at Oxford? We can pick up right here next June and figure things out.”
“I’m not sure feelings work that way,” he smiled. “But, for you, I’m willing to try.”
We found a low-lit corner of the hotel lobby to say goodbye. When he put his arms around me, I whispered, “I love you.” Then he was gone, and the summer was over. ∗
Copyright © 2025 by Malala Yousafzai. From the forthcoming book Finding My Way by Malala Yousafzai, to be published by Atria Books, an imprint of Simon Schuster, LLC. Printed by permission. Audio excerpt courtesy of Simon Schuster Audio, a Division of Simon Schuster, Inc. Used with permission from Simon Schuster, Inc.
In this story: grooming, Craig Taylor; makeup, Kristina Ralph-Andrews; tailor, Jemima Hastings
Produced by artProduction.