Interreligious Dating

We were on a double date of sorts, walking around the Bab Touma neighborhood outside the old city and enjoying the Good Friday festivities. I slept through last week's Western Easter, though I could hear the merrymaking and bands.

We saw a bit of a parade, with a drumline, scout-like uniforms, and a giant paper-mache Jesus on a paper-mache rock, but left before the stage show because of the pressing crowd. It was packed on the street in front of the church, the kind of crowd where moving more than your neck was impossible, and waves of pushing with no discernible source swept through us.

After we extracted ourselves from the crowd with great difficulty, the other woman's mom called. I was instructed to go say something so the mom could overhear and rest assured that her daughter was hanging with the fairer sex. I ran over and said, "Hey! Where are we going now?" She looked at me quizzically. When she hung up I apologized, telling her the boys had sent me over so her mom though she was hanging with girls.

"Oh, she doesn't care that if there's boys, just that we're all Christian."

Earlier, the two boys and me had met up with her and some friends. "Don't mention anything about us being not Christian to her friends" her boyfriend whispered as we approached.

We were out late, until one, and took a taxi back to Jeramana. After we let her boyfriend out, mine turned to me and said, "It's sad. Their relationship can go nowhere."

It reminded me of the matchmaking I had done for some friends. "He's cute, he's educated... he's Druze."
"He's Druze! When can I meet him?"

Or remarks when two friends start dating: "Oh, and they're both Christian. Awesome."
Or sympathizing with a friend when she couldn't date a boy she really like cause it wouldn't go anywhere. "He's X. It's impossible." Or a Christian friend who eloped with a Muslim man. Her parents still won't talk to her. She called on Christmas and they wouldn't answer.

Not that it doesn't happen. Last summer an Alawi friend's relative married a Sunni Muslim woman. He reported that her family didn't seem that happy with all the booze at the wedding. But for every married interreligious couple I know, there must be 10 thwarted relationships, if not by the law, then by parents.

Not that this is a Syrian phenomenon: I know American couples who had to convert from one branch of Christianity to another in order to appease some parents, and a friend who was disowned for marrying a Muslim.