I have a recommendation, which I hope will be worth thinking about.
Consider the type of family that you'll be joined to, once you go through proper courtship and marriage. Don't think about your future wife specifically, this is not the beginning of a fantasy, instead think about her dad.
Oh yes, this is not a fantasy. We're looking at a Muslim family that takes their faith seriously, and you're looking at a man who takes the well-being of his daughter very seriously. So let's imagine he's sitting across from you, sizing you up, and he'd like to talk to you about a few things.
He doesn't want to scare you too much, let's give him the benefit of the doubt. But he does have some genuine curiosity about you. Are you prepared to support a family financially, are you stable, that's always going to be a part of it. But there's quite a bit more to this as well. You haven't dated in the non-Muslim sort of way up to this point (I would assume, he would assume, and this is true so far). And that's good, he approves. So in the absence of that sort of thing, what have you been doing to mature as a man, what have you been doing to develop your character, what has gone into your preparation to be a husband and pursue a truly serious relationship with real commitment as an adult?
At this point, if you were to respond to any question remotely like this, I believe I can assume you would not tell him you've been avoiding meat and engaging in regular physical activity to tire yourself out. You would not tell this man about how you have been taking anti-depressants and this reduces your libido, so that....oh dear, he does not look especially happy with the direction this is going.
Now, those things are....not bad ideas. Not at all, and you're trying to have some self-control. That's the whole thing. It's tough, and these are some of the strategies that can help you try to deal. However, in the conversation I've asked you to imagine, these sorts of things hardly begin to address all the concerns that a (good, devout, Muslim) father is going to have when he's sitting across from you.
So may I make a suggestion. Make a point of focusing on how you can develop yourself as a person, to the eventual satisfaction of the scary man who's going to ask you all these questions. Talk it over with some people, see what you can figure out in terms of what you'll really want to focus on, and come up with a few things that you can act on and pursue on a regular basis.
This isn't really about finding the right things to say. The purpose here is not to imagine yourself lying to this man, and fooling him into thinking you're ready to go. The purpose is to give you some particular things to focus on, and those particular things involve your maturation process and they involve molding you into a person who's going to have truthful things to say and real experience to draw on that basically says, Yes I have put the work in and I am in a good place for courtship and then marriage.
I think this frames your situation in a fairly helpful way. You do have a lot to look at, and a lot to do, before you will be ready to sit down for this type of conversation. That's okay though, this is a normal place to be at. So figure out exactly what those things are, focus on them, make that your priority, and then the courtship love and marriage comes after you've put the work in.
Meanwhile, while you're putting in some legit work that will benefit you very much in the long term, I do believe you'll naturally start to think of certain time-wasting activities for what they really are. They're detracting from the personal growth that you're trying to achieve, so divert your attention from that to one of the more positive things that will actually help you with what you're working on at this stage.
eace: