About love and about mariage

I never quite understood why they called Paris the city of love until I moved in the Middle East.

I had lived in the US before that, but only in the Middle East, I realized how central love is in my culture.

In fact, I think it’s fair to say that if you took love away from French people, most of us wouldn’t know why we would get up in the morning anymore. From a young age, we are raised on this idea that love is the holy grail. We are raised on this idea that if you find love, everything else can fall apart, love will protect you. We have this expression “vivre d’amour et d’eau fraîche”, which means “living off love and fresh water” I can only guess how exotic that idea must be to people in the Middle East. No wonder we French sometimes come across as romantic butterfly catchers.

There are many things that annoy me about French culture, our consistency in thinking we are better than everyone else first comes to my mind, but this thing about love, this is great, definitely something worth defending, something worth explaining and something worth spreading.

Needless to say I was quite puzzled when I came to the Middle East and I discovered that public displays of affection were at best frowned upon. I meant to be respectful of local customs, but deep down, I couldn’t understand why those rules were in place. I could of course imagine the possible abuse for allowing people to display their affection in public but I still couldn’t understand why, because of a few who might abuse it, small gestures like kissing, holding hands and hugging were forbidden to everyone.

An Arab friend of mine recently told me that for my own sake, I shouldn’t try to understand the laws, I should just follow them. It made me laugh. I come from a place where we are expected to understand the logic behind things. We are taught to learn to see a particular issue from different, sometimes conflicting perspectives. I suppose this is exactly the critical thinking that Saudi Arabia is now introducing to schools.

Over the years, I started to understand the logic. There are many things I love about Arab culture, but this one, no, this one is still foreign to me. Probably also because I see the negative consequences this has on people.

I will pass on the scientific evidence that kissing and physical touch in general is actually good for your health, because it makes the body release substances that are good for you. I suppose, kissing is not forbidden, only kissing in public is.

In Paris, when you walk in the streets, when you take the metro, you might see people engaged in passionate kissing, and sometimes, true, people are even pushing it a bit. You are sometimes tempted to suggest they should check in a hotel, but such comment would be said with kindness, again because there is this idea that love is a great thing, something that’s worth protecting and nurturing. Most people living in Paris wouldn’t say a thing, because our eyes are numb to it, because we see this as normal, because, if anything, we would be happy for those people.

It was only after years of living in the Gulf that I started having the distance with my own culture that actually lead me to notice this.

In France, I feel we so respect love that we let it grow at its own pace. There was a whole generation that rejected the idea of marriage. People who spent decades sometimes with the same person without ever being married. Former president François Hollande is one of them, he spent decades the same woman (Segolene Royal, who lost the presidential election in 2007 to Nicolas Sarkozy), they had four children together, but they were never married.

Those liberals saw marriage as a useless, unrequired procedure only producing paperwork. But then in my generation, marriage made a comeback. Even though it’s not required, people tend to get married again, as an additional, official commitment to each other, but sometimes that happens after years of being together, after the kids were born.

The Middle East certainly has forced me to change my behavior. I married because of the Middle East. I think I also divorced partly because of the Middle East. There certainly were other problems but the fact that my ex-husband and I couldn’t kiss in public, the fact that we were not even sure we could hold hands in public, that certainly was one factor that made us grow apart. Displays of affection, in public or otherwise, had always been an important component of our couple, and it was all of the sudden as if we were right-handers who had to learn and write with the left hand. We stopped writing altogether.

I realised looking back that not being able to show my affection in public also caused me to show it less in private, because it was easier, it seemed, to give up on it altogether, rather than selectively depending on the place where you are. This ban in the public space killed spontaneity at home as well.

Of course, living in the Middle East, I also understood a thing or two that might explain the broader context of this. I am not judging but it surprised me how many couples in a place like Dubai are actually the result of an arranged marriage, or the result of a reasonable choice. I have observed over the years those people who are married and who get along well but who are little more to me than roommates who happen to have kids together. They are friendly to each other, they are respectful of each other’s boundaries, but sorry, this isn’t love. It’s something else, it’s respect, it’s affection, but it isn’t love, and it doesn’t deliver as much as the love I know.

Those people, of course, they are not interested in seeing more public displays of affection because it would only highlight the compromises that they made. To me, those couples are based on a defensive conception of the couple. They are together because life is easier when you are two, they stay together for the sake of their children, or because this is was society expects from them.

Over the years, I have talked to a number of people who found it odd that I might have left a husband who wasn’t beating me. Quite a number of them. I know those people think I am a selfish woman who doesn’t care enough about her son to make the required sacrifices.

I don’t really care what people think of me, and sometimes that’s fortunate. See, I have this idea that God wants me, like all people radiating with happiness because people radiating with happiness can truly inspire others. And to become that person, sometimes you have to make brave choices and refuse those half-cooked compromises.

My son is actually, precisely one of the reasons I left his father. Of course, once the love vanished, I could have stayed, I could have become one of those wives, the wives who go to the gym, the wives who organize dinner parties with friends and vacations, the wives who take care of the kids and of the house, one of those “practical wives”, as I call them. We could have become a couple of polite roommates. One night, I could have moved to a different bedroom because of a migraine, and then I could have stayed there. Maybe everyone could have been content with that.

But this is not what I wanted for me and it’s also not what I wanted for my son. I want my son to know what true love is, I want him to be able to see it with his own eyes. I want him to experience what a difference true love makes on someone’s happiness. I want him to see me beaming with happiness at the breakfast table, I want him to see me kissing a man I truly love. I want him to experience what those vibes feel like. And if I was not able to achieve this with his father then let me try and find someone else to do that.

The truth is, true love is something that is hard to explain but easy to understand once you see it. I didn't see it much as a child, my parents were one of those reasonable couples. The issue in this region is that too few people see it. A lot of children grow up with this idea that the perfect marriage is a union between two people who can stand each other, who respect each other and who will help each other. Such marriages bring safety, they bring peace of mind, they bring contentment but they don’t bring radiant happiness. Only true love brings radiant happiness.

As the region is interested in improving people’s happiness, I am surprised those questions are not more discussed. Of course, change won’t happen overnight. But I think those things should be discussed. To me, they are at least as interesting and as important as the politics.