Courting in Libya: Part III

This will be the final installment for my attemtped 'essays' on dating in Libya. It is continued from this piece here . Because i've brought it up to date thepost is not as long as the previous ones as this is an ongoing development. Readers can add to these observations if they want.

Enough babbling go on and enjoy now :)


By the late 90s the girls became quite bolder, they are dating more than one guy at once and whoever asks them for marriage their will dump the others- that’s very callous and I’m really disgusted. With all due respect to the good conservative respectful girls this is what used to happen. Sometime this is the impression I got, it’s better than watching a TV show.

Basically they are doing everything a Western girl is doing but pretending not to. No one fears going out in a guy’s car, to his flat, to picnics, beaches, hotel rooms, and forests whatever. If it will make him marry you , you do it ! This is the decade where prostitution of Libyan young women has begun to be palpable . It was no longer the Moroccan guest workers (no offense to anyone – but that was our reality here), oh no, they learned from them and were competing now.

Of course there are the romantic and sweet and still well behaved men and women, but unfortunately they have in my opinion been outstripped by a vulgar bunch. The taxis became the pimps and means of transport, the cellphones gave freedom of communication and chatrooms and paltalk ( no idea why Libyans like it so much) etc multiplied.
How did you bump into a guy? Well he could be your colleague, classmate, friend’s friend, friend’s brother just like anywhere else in the world. But the frenzy to get married was always palpable.

My theory : it is because then you can be in a couple legally and have your independence from family as well. I don’t know why I’m cynical about it, it just does not seem that it was done to found a family;although I know ultimately a woman’s dream is that. I felt there was too much cunning involved on both sides.

Well the girls still have to plot and find excuses to meet with their boyfriends, and there are all sorts of fun stories and things taking place. But it just looks like the innocence was lost somewhere along the way with the encroachment of materialism and globalization or maybe I’ve simply grown too old finally to understand them.