Malala Yousafzai was not sold on marriage before she met her husband, Asser Malik.

“I never thought I would get married,” the Nobel Peace Prize winner told People in October 2025. “If you find the right person and you and your partner have mutual understanding about how this is going to be a journey together, and you will be looking after each other and making each other’s life happier than before it can work out really well.”

Yousafzai met Malik in 2018 while she was studying at Oxford. Over the next year, they grew closer — until Yousafzai finally confessed to her dad in summer 2019 that she liked Malik.

“‘I like him, Dad. I like him… romantically,’” she recalled telling her father in her 2025 memoir, Finding My Way, before they called her mom who was mad that he was not a Pashtun man

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