A Strange Connection: Adultery and the Iraqi Refugee Crisis

by Michael Boyce, Yale College Branford 2011 – Blogging live from Amman, Jordan

As I wrote in my previous post, I am currently spending winter break in Amman working with Iraqi refugees.  One issue that always seems to come up is sex – sex, sex, SEX.

A twenty-something Iraqi male, like a twenty-something American male, can hold a conversation about the opposite gender for hours; and I have certainly had an hour-or-more long conversation about women with Iraqis. Yet, unlike conversations with my friends back home, conversations with Iraqi males usually bring up far more culturally concerned issues: questions about finding American wives, normal ages in America to lose one’s virginity, what sort of public displays of affection are appropriate in the United States and, with my closer Iraqi friends, actual relationship stories.

My perspective on these matters are inherently male biased: I have never talked with an Iraqi refugee female about sex. So the ability to generalize my observations is entirely up for debate. One thing I have certainly noticed in my time here is that the guys are certainly caught in a bind.  The Jordanian government does not allow them to work, and while many of them hold under-the-table jobs, these are inherently unstable and temporary. Unable to find long-lasting work, and waiting on the possibility of resettlement in America or another country, these shabab (young men) chose not to start families in Jordan. Moreover, many women in Jordan refuse to have premarital sex.  As a result, the men look for alternative ways outside of the traditional route of marriage to get laid.

Generally, the strategy is a simple one: married women, or if you are lucky, young widows or recent divorcées. Obviously, the best catch would be a woman who doesn’t believe that sex implies a potential marriage proposal.  But the generally poorer Iraqis that I’ve been meeting don’t have the money or the cultural skills to hang out in the ritzy neighborhoods of Amman where such girls spend their time. Instead, rumors abound over which nationality of girls is easiest to get with - Jordanian girls are cold and more difficult to score, while Saudi Arabian girls (in my ‘extremely scientific’ poll of 3 Iraqis,)are the most promiscuous,.  This is in spite of, or perhaps because of, the very gender- segregated society that they come from.

I have a couple of stories to illustrate this.  One Iraqi  that I work with, who does a lot of work with other Iraqis, had me over to his house to meet an Iraqi family. At the time he told me I should come because the daughters in the family were very cute,  a claim well-supported by reality. The family consisted of a mother in her late twenties or early thirties, and her four daughters. Her husband had been a lieutenant in the Iraqi Army and was killed when the United States invaded. After chatting with the mother for a while, my friend and I were left alone.

“I want to tell you the truth,” my friend said. “You know the mother, she was not so pretty today, but that was just because she didn’t have a chance to change her clothes and that sort of thing. Usually she is very pretty.” Little more needed to be said but he continue, “you know we talk a lot and I think that she might be interested in me. What do you think?” I told him that I couldn’t, at my age, imagine dating a woman with that many children, and in my naiveté I asked him why he didn’t try dating a younger woman.  In retrospect, I could have surmised the answer for myself.  My friend blushed and said, “Well, since she was married, she doesn’t have the same problem younger girls have…”

In another situation, I was with an Iraqi who I cared very deeply about and had met the previous time I was in Jordan. While visiting him, he received a phone call that inspired him to suddenly spruce up, changing into nice clothing and spraying cologne on his neck. I asked him what was going on. He explaining to me that a girl was coming.  How nice, I thought, he’s going to introduce me to his girlfriend. I asked him if she was his girlfriend and he said yes. He continued to explain that he was only going to introduce her to a nearby doctor and then return. Oh yeah, and her husband and children were coming too.

This clearly put me in a weird  situation.  I was not about to walk up to a some random Jordanian man, as the friend of the man his wife was cheating on with.  So I faked laziness and told him to go and I would wait for him for after. As a safety measure, I pretended I had some urgent call. An awkward situation was successfully avoided.

After he returned I asked them how they met. In perhaps the least romantic way imaginable, she had called him one day when she dialed the wrong number. Somehow their relationship continued, and now he was secretly dating her behind her husband’s back.

What is my point in all this? Regardless of your opinion on premarital sex, virginity, or even extra-marital affairs, the fact that Iraqi males are actively seeking out married women and widows as their only path towards romance is a problem. These are relationships that are unstable and rarely end well. It speaks to what is saddest about the Iraqi refugee crisis, and truly all refugee crises: the lost human potential. In refugee crises often educated and very capable people  put their lives on hold until they find a permanent place to restart. This means lost work, lost education, lost time and, in this particular case, lost romance.