Valentine’s Day—Eid El-Hob or “Love Day”—is normally big enough in Cairo, celebrated in a way that American couples would recognize: red roses, plush hearts in gift stores, specials at romantic restaurants. This year, though, the revolution has overshadowed everything. As a friend put it to me, “I feel bad for the stores that stocked up on teddy bears. Everyone’s buying Egyptian flags instead.”
But love and revolution are not unrelated. There is much talk about a “marriage crisis” in Egypt—low employment rates lead to low matrimonial rates—and the protesters in Tahrir Square were, indirectly at least, marching against it. Lack of jobs was high on their list of grievances. Many of those I interviewed said that getting married and having a family were things they dreamed of most in a post-Mubarak Egypt. One twenty-eight-year-old man I spoke to, on a relatively quiet day in Tahrir last week, illustrated his frustration by thrusting his hips back and forth, explaining, “No money, no sex.”
Funny gesture, serious problem. Some months ago, I spoke to Hanan Kholoussy, the author of “For Better, For Worse: The Marriage Crisis that Made Modern Egypt,” on the occasion of the publication in English of “I Want to Get Married,” a blog-turned-book by Ghada Abdel Aal, which had become a best-seller in Egypt. Kholoussy said that the marriage crisis goes far beyond the frustrations of finding the right person; in Egypt, before marrying, men must have a job, some money, and an apartment. Some save well into their thirties and others have to leave the country in order to earn what they need. Their mass exodus is often decried by Egyptian women, who feel that they have been abandoned; it is common to be told that women significantly outnumber men (even though statistics don’t support this). When the men do return—sometimes from the Gulf, where work can be degrading and tough—they often marry much younger women; the bitterness these marriages inspire is apparent in “I Want to Get Married,” in which Abdel Aal, at the age of twenty-seven, feels intense dread at becoming a “spinster.”
This marriage crisis is often cited to explain, at least partially, the rampant sexual harassment in Egypt. Premarital sex is forbidden by Islam, and one theory is that the resulting frustration, or the alienating distance it imposes between men and women, manifests in streets that are sometimes inhospitable to the solo woman. It also means that unmarried Egyptians cannot easily have children, and there are other ways in which life begins at marriage. Most women in Egypt live at home until they move in with their husbands. Their mobility is restricted, in a society in which women’s freedom is already very limited. Paradoxically, marriage, to many Egyptian women, may mean more freedom.
Whether or not the marriage crisis is anything new—and Kholoussy argues in her book that, historically, it is not—means little to the millions of Egyptians who feel that their joblessness is preventing them from starting a family. The protests attracted middle or lower class Egyptians who find that their income restricts their options for marriage.
Perhaps, then, it was an early sign that the protests were working when last Thursday two couples—one of whom had met only days earlier in Tahrir—chose to get married in the open (and somewhat fetid) air of the square, among tanks, tents, and fellow protesters. One couple professed to choosing the location because they wanted their marriage to emulate the revolution—to “succeed”—and the second because they wanted to make the protesters happy. But both couples also managed to skirt the normally exhausting and expensive demands of the Egyptian wedding.
It was a savvy and romantic move, and the marriage crisis, at least for the moment, was transferred from Cairo’s lower and middle classes to its wealthy couples who, according to local wedding planner Hala Baraka, had to postpone their lavish weddings. Most of their guests, it turned out, had a more pressing engagement in Tahrir Square.
Read more from our coverage of the protests in Egypt and beyond.
Photograph: Heba Afify.
