Love,Materiality,and Masculinity in Jordan

Introduction

Today in the Jordanian capital of Amman, young men regularly complain about the high cost of marriage. Even though young adults are negotiating the “traditional” paths to marriage and increasingly finding their own partners, Jordan is one of the Middle Eastern countries where most women would not consider marrying a man who could not provide her with a decent standard of living and in addition pay for a fancy wedding party and a costly bride-price, as local custom demands. According to estimates, the average cost of marriage in Jordan nowadays is around US$14,000 (Salem 2012, 7), and gathering the resources is a challenge for most young men, even with the support of their families. They often claim that women are only looking for material benefits from marriage, such as a luxurious lifestyle and status symbols.

During my ethnographic study of love and marriage in Jordan, one of my young male interlocutors, Jamil ¹ (a production engineer in his late twenties), said that a man cannot even start thinking about marriage before he has a car. Moreover, women often described their ideal spouse as “not stingy.” As I was to learn, the material aspects of marriage are an issue with which most young Jordanians are confronted, and yet another undeniable trend in urban, middle-class contexts in Jordan, as well as elsewhere in the Middle East, is the increased emphasis on conjugal love as the basis of marriage among young adults (Hoodfar 2009; Inhorn 2007; Schielke 2015; Wynn 2006). Rather than approaching these two trends as contradictory, the focus of the analysis I present in this article is to explore the material dimensions of love in the Ammani context.

On a broad level, this article contributes to an emerging field of anthropological study that explores the variety of ways in which, in different global social settings, people define and experience love in the context of intimate relationships and marriage (Cole and Thomas 2009; Wardlow and Hirsch 2006). I explore how young adults in Amman define romantic love, and how these local notions play out in the gendered couple dynamics of their relationships. Arab discourses on love are multidimensional and omnipresent around the Arab world, and some of them have an enormously long genealogy. The idealization of impossible love that stems from the ancient ‘udhri-love poetry genre still resonates among the youth (Schielke 2015) and love at first sight is romanticized in popular love songs and soap operas. At the same time, many young people around the Arab world believe in the popular saying, associated with the notion of “traditional marriage,” that “love will come after getting married” (Adely 2016; Inhorn 2012; Kreil 2016). Even though premarital relationships are still commonly deemed dangerous, and disruptive of the local values and social order (Schielke 2015), the nuclear family based on conjugal love has been associated with modernity in Arab state discourses and, perhaps contradictorily, with cultural authenticity in Islamist discourses (Abu-Lughod 1998; Kreil 2016). Yet, the anthropology of marriage in Arab societies has until recently paid very little attention to love (Adely 2016; Inhorn 2012). I contend, along with Adely (2016, 119–20), that what lies behind this is, at least partly “narrow assumptions regarding what constitutes love and the range of emotional attachments associated with marriage and married life.”

The following analysis concentrates on practical and transactional forms of love, especially on how masculinity is performed and negotiated within the practices of “doing” love. My starting point is an observation, gained as a result of a long period of fieldwork among young Ammanis, that, for them, caring actions are integral to love (ḥubb). When young men and women reflect on their relationships, love unfolds as a force that makes them do things for their loved one, including providing material well-being and gifts. This is a novel angle on the ethnographic depictions of romantic love in the Arab world, and I suggest that its absence so far can probably be ascribed to two factors. First, existing ethnographic accounts pay little attention to articulations of love within everyday relationship dynamics. Second, the practical and transactional aspects of love easily remain invisible to researchers who follow West-centric criteria regarding what is included in the category of love as an object of study. As Cole (2009, 113) notes, “the English word love is part of a cultural tradition in which emotion is supposed to exist within individuals and where great care is taken to distinguish between emotional attachments and economic interests.”

However, anthropologists have recently started to pay increased attention to the practices of “doing love” and to transactional forms of care in various sociocultural contexts around the world (Cole 2009; Härkönen 2014; Hunter 2009; McKay 2007), demonstrating how distinctions between the “instrumental” and the “emotional” nature of intimate relations are often artificial and how, hence, one should be careful not to downplay the affective dimensions of relationships in which materiality is involved. In a way, the emerging scholarly trend of “caring masculinities” in Arab societies can be seen as contributing to this approach, as it focuses on masculine forms of producing affectionate relationships through nurturing in the domestic context, such as practices of providing material well-being for the family (Elliott 2016; Inhorn 2012; Naguib 2015). My analysis here contributes to these discussions by demonstrating how the aspect of material forms of caring can provide insights when addressing masculinities in the context of romantic relationships as well.

Paying attention to masculine forms of doing love within relationship dynamics is also a useful perspective from which to address the recent discussions on the material aspects of marriage in the Middle East. Singerman (2011) has introduced the term “waithood” to describe the situation of young Egyptian ² men who cannot enter adulthood because they cannot afford to get married. Recently, Kreil (2016) explored Valentine’s Day and the material conditions of romantic love in Egypt, and Adely (2016) examined the role of similar class status as one of the aspects that young Jordanians consider necessary to ensure compatibility between spouses. These contributions demonstrate the integral role of material resources as a precondition for romance and marriage. My approach is slightly different, as I also pay attention to how providing material resources in a relationship is deeply entangled in the process of generating love itself. This is not to disregard the fact that in many cases it is the parents, rather than the young person, who reject a marriage to a candidate whose financial status does not meet their criteria (Adely 2016; Kreil 2016; Schielke 2015). In Jordan, the parents also often forbid marriage to someone from a different national or religious background. In fact, almost half of my interlocutors had abandoned their plans to marry a romantic partner because they did not want to oppose their parents’ will and run the risk of having to cut ties with them. In this article, however, I concentrate on how young people themselves find the material aspects of intimate relationships significant.

Yet, I do not try to claim that the entanglements of love and money are straightforward or simple for my Ammani interlocutors. As Cole (2009, 112) suggests, instead of asking whether love and money are opposed, the ethnographer should pay attention to the way in which the divisions between the two are socioculturally produced and managed. In addition, definitions of love and how it is performed are always embedded in the prevailing cultural as well as in material conditions (Adely 2016; Cole 2009). In Jordan’s current economic situation, young men often struggle to provide the material resources which performing the role of ideal male partner in a romantic relationship requires. As a result, the practical situations in which intimacy and material transactions become intertwined are often ambiguous. Hence, I also discuss the ways in which young men negotiate the entanglements of love and money through their shifting definitions of “true love” (al-ḥubb al-ḥaqīqiyy). Even though the emphasis in this article is on young men’s perspective, to contextualize the expectations they face, I also present some angles on the topic from my female interlocutors’ point of view.

This analysis is based on more than a year and a half of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Amman between 2012 and 2016, among young men and women aged seventeen to thirty-six. They include both East Bank Jordanians and Jordanians of Palestinian descent. Although this article concentrates on Jordanians, I also included Syrians residing in exile in Amman in my study. Most of my interlocutors shared a (lower to upper) middle-class background and a university education. Some had no experience of being in a relationship, while others were already married with children. Among the nearly forty young adults in my study, some became good friends, while others I met only once for an interview. Both participant observation and recorded in-depth interviews (some in English, others in Arabic) formed the core of my data. Living with young people, and in other ways merging with their webs of social relations, was valuable in giving me a sense of how affective social relations are formed and maintained in my interlocutors’ sociocultural context. The framework of approaching intimate relationships from the point of view of forming affective relations through actions emerged as a result of a long process, involving several subsequent fieldwork periods and preliminary data analysis in the intervening months. This also allowed me to observe the relationship histories of my closest interlocutors over the years and in different practical situations.

Addressing Love as “Doing”

To address the material dimensions of love in the Ammani context, I deploy practice-theory-oriented approaches that emphasize both the performative aspects of emotions and “making” affective social relations through actions. ³ Until recently, anthropology has largely ignored love as a specific object of study, even though kinship and marriage have a long history as central themes of the discipline. Thomas and Cole (2009, 6) ascribe this disinclination to consider love to the fact that anthropologists took for granted the epistemological foundations of Euro-American folk theories, which imply that emotions are psychobiological essences located within individuals, and hence outside the scope of social scientific studies. However, these notions were profoundly problematized by the emergence of a subfield of anthropology that concentrated on emotions as socially constructed (Abu-Lughod and Lutz 1990; Rosaldo 1984). Rosaldo viewed emotions as “embodied thoughts” and “social practices organized by stories we both enact and tell” (1984, 138, 143). The subsequent practice-oriented theories of emotions set out to deconstruct dichotomies such as cognition/affect, language/embodiment, and inner/outer manifestations of emotions (Rosaldo 1984; Scheer 2012).

Recently, Scheer (2012) has deployed the term “emotional practices” to suggest viewing emotional experience as something we do with our entire bodies, thus conceptualizing emotions themselves as a kind of practice. This makes it possible to pay attention to “things people do in order to have emotions, or ‘doing emotions’ in a performative sense” (Scheer 2012, 194). For Scheer, conceiving of emotions as practices means understanding them as emerging from bodily dispositions conditioned by a social context, which always has cultural and historical specificity. For example, thinking in this way, the distinction between the “inner” and “outer” sides of emotion is not a given but is, rather, a product of the way in which people habitually do experience (Beatty 2005, 27; Scheer 2012, 198–99).

In general, courtship, from the perspective of this theoretical framing, has performative effects on the constitution of feelings and the gendered self, as the socioculturally specific modes of doing the interaction between a couple cultivate “a certain kind of feeling between potential marriage partners” (Scheer 2012, 209–10). Interestingly, in addition to this, in the sociocultural context that I study, the “emic” view of love as an emotion explicitly emphasizes the performative aspects of generating affection, which in turn affects the experience. These include producing affective social relations through different kinds of caring actions and forms of exchange.

The idea that affectionate social bonds and kinship ties are “made” in embodied practices has become a prominent angle in ethnographic kinship studies since practice-oriented approaches began to emerge (Carsten 2000, 2004; Sahlins 2011; Van Vleet 2008). Also, ethnographic studies from different parts of the world have shown the variety of ways in which intimacy and (romantic) love can be conceived as entangled with actions and different forms of exchange (Cole 2009 on Madagascar; Härkönen 2014 on Cuba; Hunter 2009 on South Africa; Ochs 1988 on Samoa). For example, McKay (2007) explores intimacy among Filipino migrants and claims that familial intimacy among them is expressed in economic terms; transfers of value enact practical love and care and are considered necessary to show and share feelings. Paying attention to these forms of intimacy, in which “emotional nurturing and economic provision are not separable,” also makes visible the masculine forms of emotional labor, as “the work of caring…is equally expected of men as fathers, brothers, and uncles” (McKay 2007, 191) and, I would add, as romantic partners and husbands.

As seen in this special issue, ethnographic studies in a variety of Arab societies also show that men express their love and care for their families by providing material resources for their well-being. In addition, ethnographies that concentrate on caring masculinities in the Arab context have shown how men demonstrate their care by, for example, going through in vitro fertilization treatments with their infertile wives (Inhorn 2012) and providing food for their families (Naguib 2015).

These various studies have made visible the transactional forms of love that often easily go unnoticed by observers who have internalized the Euro-American popular ideology that deems intimacy and material exchange as oppositional and incompatible (Zelizer 2005). However, in practice, as Zelizer (2005) has argued, even in the contemporary United States, plenty of economic activity goes into creating, defining, and sustaining intimate social ties. These connections are also institutionalized, for example, in legislation concerning inheritance, alimony, and sharing possessions after divorce. In a similar vein, Jamieson (1999) has problematized Anthony Gidden’s (1992) influential argument on the prevalence of the “pure relationship” as the lived everyday experience in the late modern context. “Pure relationship” refers to the kind of intimate relationship that is based, rather than on factors considered “external” to the relationship, on the enjoyment of one another’s unique qualities, events of opening up to each other, and intimacy achieved through mutual self-disclosure. Jamieson (1999), drawing from empirical studies on couple relationships in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia, contends that intimacy remains multidimensional, and acts of practical love and care cannot be disregarded as ways in which intimacy is constructed in everyday relationships. The ways in which money and material things are managed necessarily become both symbolic and reflexively constitutive of the relationship itself and means of communicating care or neglect (Jamieson 1999, 491).

Nevertheless, I suggest that practical and transactional forms of love are experienced differently in such sociocultural contexts, where material and affective elements of intimate relationships are not contrasted in lay ideologies of romance but instead are conceived of as mutually constitutive. A good example of a context in which material investments are used explicitly to express and generate romantic love is Cole’s (2009) depiction of intimate relationships in Madagascar. She explores thoroughly the entanglements of (passionate) love and different forms of exchange by concentrating on material elements. Thus, in this article, I draw many comparisons to her work. According to Cole, especially in the rural areas of the central east coast of Madagascar, the local notion of love, fitiavina, is constituted through the continuous reciprocal exchange of material support and care, and, thus, affect and exchange are treated as mutually constitutive (see also Hunter 2009). Providing resources for the well-being of others as the primary way to create attachment makes sense in a context in which people rely on collaboration for survival (Cole 2009, 112). In Madagascar, the link between material exchanges and love is, in many cases, straightforward. For example, the practice of a man buying clothes or other gifts for his loved one is an integral part of romance and is read both as a direct expression of fitiavina and as constitutive of the emotion itself. However, even in Madagascar, the extent to which individuals make or do not make analytical distinctions between instrumental exchanges and “pure love” varies across generations and between urban and rural contexts (Cole 2009, 112).

Ammani Notions of Love as Caring Actions

Even though these performative, practical, and transactional forms of love have been addressed in ethnographic research literature in various sociocultural contexts worldwide, studies on Arab notions of romantic love have so far paid very little attention to these perspectives. A few studies briefly touch upon some relationship dynamics of this kind, by connecting the discussion to the notion locally associated with traditional marriage, which is that love comes after getting married (Inhorn 2007 and Kreil 2016 on Egypt). Adely (2016) describes how many young Jordanians are reacting to uncertain times by questioning romantic love (hubb romansi) as a reliable foundation for marriage and are instead basing their choice of marriage partner on calculations of compatibility (insijam) (including similar class background, level of education, moral standing, and religiosity) that they hope will help in gradually developing love after they get married. In these accounts, passionately romantic love that precedes marriage and the kind of love that grows slowly during marriage are typically contrasted (by young people themselves and by scholars, at least as analytical categories), and economic factors are deemed one of the practical elements that complicate combining marriage and romantic love (Adely 2016; Kreil 2016; Schielke 2015). The actual processes that are locally assumed to develop love between the couple have not yet been addressed in research (except in the early work of Inhorn 1996).

In the following analysis, I aim to show that young Ammanis conceive specifically caring everyday actions as integral to the dynamics of generating love, not only within traditional marriages but within romantic premarital relationships as well. Ethnographic participant observation of everyday life has revealed the importance that my Ammani interlocutors, in general, ascribe to caring actions in constituting affectionate bonds between friends, lovers, and kin (see also Cole 2009; McKay 2007). By claiming that my interlocutors emphasize the performative aspects of love, I refer, first, to their emphasis on the processual aspects of generating love and the role of shared experiences in constituting love. The Arabic concept ʾishra refers specifically to this kind of attachment that develops over time, for example, by sharing food and living together (Abu-Lughod 1986; Kreil 2016). Caring actions are an important part of this interaction, as my interlocutors often give receiving kind and considerate treatment from someone as a reason for their developing romantic feelings toward that person.

Second, my interlocutors experience love as a force that makes people do things for their loved ones. In other words, what I would define from the point of view of my own cultural understanding as the “inner” emotion and the “expression” of it often seem to be inseparable for my interlocutors (Scheer 2012). As Beatty (2005) notes, when conceived thus, “love is as love does” or as my young female interlocutor Nadine puts it, “you can’t just live the feeling without giving the one that you love the things that he needs.” Hence, my interlocutors pay specific attention to each other’s caring actions, not only as symbolic expressions of affection but also as delightful direct indicators of it.

In the Ammani context, there are at least two overlapping categories of doing love in a couple relationship. The first is attending to the gender-specific needs of the partner so that both members of the couple get what they need in a relational process (as men need things only women can deliver and vice versa—for example, traditionally manly men literally cannot cook or do housework, while respectable women do not go out to earn money or mingle in the sūq to do grocery shopping). In these kinds of practices, the couple ideally produces mutual affection in a reciprocal cycle, briefly described by Inhorn (1996, 97–98 ⁴ ) as the ideal relationship dynamic among Egyptian urban poor. Second, doing additional little things knowing that their partner like—conceptualized as “pampering” (dalāl)—is an important practice in a loving relationship and is also gendered. For example, men may give gifts and women prepare sweets or display their feminine beauty.

Conceived thus, the scope of love is wider than it being a mere inner feeling, for example, or a successful process of mutual self-disclosure (Giddens 1992). Instead, it extends to material, practical, and temporal dimensions—devoting all one’s time, the details of everyday tasks, and one’s material resources to the well-being of the partner. These features of love are experienced as passionate elements of romance among my interlocutors, whether they occur before or after marriage. This is not to say that other elements of romantic love, for example, physical attraction, compatibility of personalities, and a mental connection, do not count for them, but rather that the significance of a love relationship and what someone feels for someone else is necessarily represented by actions. The downside, however, is that, conceived thus, love can mean a lot of work, as it needs to be articulated through actions. Affectionate social bonds have to be maintained by constantly attending to the loved one’s needs and requests and by carrying out deeds and doing favors for them. Importantly, the unselfishness of these actions is what defines their value from the point of view of generating love (see also Inhorn 2007, 97–98). In particular, compromises and sacrifices denote love and are conceptualized as extremely romantic. In addition, the processes of generating love by doing things for the partner are often gendered, and also deeply entangled with materiality, especially when it comes to performing masculinity. Men often need to work hard to provide the resources needed to keep up the kind of relationship dynamics that grant them their partner’s affection and trust. Next, I discuss some empirical examples of the entanglements of affective and material elements in the relationship dynamics of my Ammani interlocutors.

Giving Love, Giving Money: “The More You Love, the More You Give”

When I asked my interlocutors to define love, young men from different backgrounds, maybe even more so than the women, emphasized being willing to do or sacrifice anything for their loved one. Ayesh, a thirty-six-year-old Syrian mechanic residing in Amman who found his beloved wife through family contacts, defines love in this way: “It is a feeling inside of you, when you are with a person, you feel, for example, that you can sacrifice anything for her.” ⁵ Idris, an accountant in his late twenties who was still longing for a woman he was forced to break up with, described the advanced stage of love like this: “You give her anything she asks for, do anything for her.” ⁶ He said that love is like a tree, and the nourishment that makes it grow are “feelings, love, sacrifices, that you give up a lot of things for your ḥabība (female romantic partner).” To shed light on the way in which the state of being in love and the willingness to give are fused in my male interlocutors’ narratives, I next present an interview extract from Ammar, a man in his mid-twenties who works in the tourism industry. As he tells me about his relationship with his ex-fiancée, Aida (a woman a few years older than him, who was one of his teachers at university), he describes how, for him, providing material help is a self-evident element of a caring relationship, and how being willing to receive such help is also an essential part of these dynamics.

Sometimes she had problems and she didn’t tell me about her problems and it’s something I don’t like, you have to be very open with me, I’m here to help you, I’m in love with you. […] She didn’t like me to support her at all, like money or something. But it was difficult for me to see that she needs something, and not being allowed to help. Like if I’m able to do it, I do it, I had a good salary. I feel like it’s part of me so I couldn’t let her be like this, but she at the same time, she didn’t want to accept it from me. I don’t know why or what was in her mind, we are supposed to be in love. ⁷

When describing the agony of a situation in which Aida forces him to see her suffer, Ammar concludes that there was something wrong in the relationship because she refused to accept the material help he offered. In the end, it was the flows of material resources beyond their relationship that played a major role in dissolving it. Ammar and Aida were about to marry, but his family did not have enough resources to marry off two sons at the same time and, rather than wait for him, she married someone else.

Of course, these narratives, in which young men emphasize their capacity for giving and sacrificing for their loved one, are situational—being interviewed by a young Western female, more or less an outsider to their social networks, is possibly a suitable context in which to perform the excessively romantic masculine subject (regardless of whether I was considered a target of flirtation). However, in other kinds of social situations, especially in the presence of other men, such a narrative may be less likely to be deployed. Among Ammani men, having the capacity to provide material resources for your loved one is seen as an expression of masculine strength. Respectable men are expected to love their wife and treat her well by providing her with everything she can reasonably ask for. Yet, on the other hand, as being passionately in love is conceived as a force that makes people give and compromise excessively, it can be considered a loss of agency (see also McKay 2007, 188) as well as of another important masculine feature, reason (Abu-Lughod 1986; Hoodfar 2009). Even though romantic feelings between spouses are no longer a taboo to the extent they were earlier in history (Latte-Abdallah 2009; Mernissi 1975), the hegemonic notion of masculinity (Connell 1987) still seems to emphasize not being at the mercy of one’s romantic emotions and, hence, of women.

In the following interview extract, I discussed this issue with Jamil, a production engineer in his late twenties who represents a small, underprivileged Jordanian tribe. When I interviewed him for the first time in 2013, he was still recovering from a forced breakup from his university girlfriend (her Palestinian parents did not want their daughter to marry a tribal Jordanian man). Currently, he is happily married to a German woman. I asked him whether people in his social circles would consider being in love a weakness for a man because of how it can make you more likely to compromise. He concurs that many would consider it embarrassing for a man to love his wife “so much.” He describes this as something a man would not admit to verbally, but which is nevertheless visible to others in the way he does “everything for her,” buying her things and giving her money (see also Latte-Abdallah 2009, 50).

Hence, hegemonic masculinity is negotiated as a balance in the amount of love a man shows toward his wife—expressed by how much he spends on her. Jamil challenges the notion of masculinity that is prevalent in his social circles, which requires men to control their passionate love, by saying: “But if you love her so much, why not like give her a car?”

The Material Means of Love, From Dating to Marriage

Dating has become a relatively common courtship practice in Amman, although many couples do it secretly as it remains controversial, especially from the point of view of a woman’s reputation. Unlike the traditional men’s cafés that are not considered suitable for women, contemporary public places such as shopping malls and Western-style coffee shops provide venues for dating (Adely 2016, 109). In these places, however, the prices resemble those in Europe. Also, in the rare cases in which both partners agree to share physical intimacy before marriage, it is not easy or cheap to arrange a place where they can be alone, as most single young people still live with their parents. Usually, performing the masculine role of provider is expected to begin at the dating stage, in the practices of meeting the dating expenses and giving gifts. These investments are potentially related to the previously described gendered processes of generating love.

Yet, young men in particular often complain about the ambiguity of the transactions. Some women, they claim, pretend to be in love to benefit from the company of a young man who will spend money on her, for example, by giving her gifts, taking her out to expensive places, and paying her mobile phone bills. When sexuality is involved in these relationships, the ambiguity is further increased. To discuss how the entanglements and divisions between love and money are produced and managed among young Ammanis, I next discuss in some detail the story of a twenty-one-year-old university student, Ahmad, and his (now ex-) girlfriend Shirin, whose relationship I followed through its different stages. This is also one of the rare cases in which cohabitation preceded marriage, and hence the male partner was considered responsible for providing the accommodation and supporting the female partner’s livelihood.

Ahmad and Shirin lived together in his apartment. Yet, Ahmad was also renting a room for Shirin in a neighboring building even though she hardly used it, to conceal the fact that they were living together and to protect her reputation. When I first talked with Ahmad about the topic, he said that his relationship with Shirin was different from previous ones because they were really in love with each other (the term “relationship” often refers to casual relationships in Jordan). Even though they were living together, they were abstaining from premarital sex—in Ahmad’s terms, it was part of being serious with her, as he could not imagine presenting his mother with a bride who was not a virgin (even though he considered himself far too young to marry anytime soon). It seemed obvious to him that he would support Shirin but, at one point, he started to complain that she was asking him to buy her pricey gifts, such as a fancy new mobile phone, that he had difficulty affording (on the pressures of consumerism on intimate relationships, see Cole 2009). Soon afterward, she left him. When we discussed the breakup, Ahmad appeared sad and told me that during the three months, they had lived together he had become very attached to her, getting used to her being the first thing he saw when he opened his eyes in the morning. However, pointing out (perhaps to reassure himself) that he probably should not care so much about losing her, he said that he had done everything he could for her, but she did not appreciate it. Moreover, he switched his narrative from the earlier account of true love to describing Shirin’s goals as instrumental. In retrospect, it seemed to him that she had spent time with him just so he would support her and buy her gifts. He apologized for using the word, but he said she had behaved like a “bitch,” a term that locally refers to a woman who has sex with men to gain (material) benefits. Since anonymity here is secured, I can mention that it turned out that at some point shortly before the breakup, they had indeed started to have sex.

Ahmad’s shifting narratives on the nature of his relationship with Shirin tell us something about the more common ambiguities of dating that young people in Amman often encounter. They complain that men as well as women might very convincingly play the part of the ḥabīb/ḥabība for what they can gain from the exchanges of favors, goods, and intimacy or even just for entertainment (taslīa), with no genuine intention of planning a future together (see also Schielke 2015, 91). Serious relationships in which material investments by the male partner are not part of the picture at all are rare, as women read these as integral signs of his appreciation and feelings toward her as well as of his character; they usually do not see a future with a man who is too stingy. Even though masculine expressions of love require material proof, young people often do make distinctions between exchanges of goods within the framework of “authentic” emotions and an instrumental relationship (being maṣlaḥjī/maṣlaḥjīa). Ahmad, for example, defined the nature of his relationship with Shirin in terms of whether the exchanges were instrumental or not. Yet in real-life situations, drawing that line may be next to impossible. In addition, a single relationship can potentially processually switch from either type to the other over time, as the case of Ahmad and Shirin perhaps demonstrates.

Unlike most countries in the Arab Gulf, for example, Jordan is one of the Middle Eastern countries where getting married is expensive for men, especially considering their average income (Salem 2012, 1). According to local customs, the groom (with the support of his family) is responsible for nearly all the costs of marriage, including the engagement and wedding parties and the mahr, or bride-price, and he is expected to be sufficiently economically established to be able to support the family and provide an independent, furnished apartment with all the necessary appliances, as the trend (among both rural and urban residents) is to prefer nuclear to extended family living (Adely 2012, 139; Kanaan and Hanania 2009, 161; Salem 2012, 7). The average cost of marriage in Jordan nowadays is approximately 9,900 Jordanian dinars (about US$14,000; Salem 2012, 7). Collecting the resources for getting married is, therefore, a challenge for most young men, and many of them involuntarily delay marriage because they cannot afford it (Kanaan and Hanania 2009; Singerman 2011).

The young men I met in Amman commonly complained that young women seem only to be searching for a rich man to marry. However, from the female perspective, the issue is more complicated; for them, their partner’s financial investments in a relationship signal care, commitment, and respect. To elaborate on how the material and affective elements are fused due to a number of significant contextual factors, I present here a few angles on the topic from my discussions with Nadine, a twenty-five-year-old woman from a relatively conservative and well-off Palestinian community in western Amman.

As mentioned, many couples meet and date on their own rather than follow the traditional paths, yet the current dating scene in Amman is confusing and ambiguous. It is hard to tell whether a dating partner has serious intentions or is just doing it for the “entertainment.” Nadine said there was no guarantee that a man was not dating her just for fun, unless he was ready to get formally engaged. At the same time, previous relationships, even in the form of an engagement, are risky for a woman, as most men in her social surroundings prefer a bride with as little experience from previous relationships as possible. Even though a formal engagement is a socially accepted way for a couple to date and find out whether they are compatible, broken engagements can severely affect women’s marriage prospects. Hence, Nadine explained, when at the point of formal engagement (katib al kitab), the male partner pays the first part of the bride-price (mahr, on average around US$5,000) as local custom demands, in addition to its being an indicator of appreciation for the bride (Latte-Abdallah 2009, 50–51), it is an important sign of commitment to a relationship in a very tangible way: If a man wants to break off an engagement after the katib al kitab, he cannot get the mahr back. Therefore, paying the mahr guarantees that the male partner also has a stake in the relationship’s success, as otherwise he might get engaged without much consideration and then break it off just as easily. Also, the second part of the bride-price (muʾkhar), which is only paid in certain kinds of divorce case (see also Carlisle 2015 concerning Syria) or if the husband dies, can be seen as a guarantee that the husband will treat the wife well or at least not divorce her on impulse.

Other contextual factors behind the fact that women do not easily compromise on their material requirements for marriage are related to how, in Jordan, marrying a man without resources has direct consequences for a woman’s standard of living. Even if a woman comes from a wealthy family, or works, it is considered the husband’s responsibility to provide for her (see also Adely 2016, 111). Nadine was planning to get engaged to a man she really liked. However, he was severely lagging behind in collecting the resources for their marriage due to job issues. Nadine was also working and in principle could have helped him with the costs. However, she refused. She explained her reasons in this way: a man who works hard to get a woman is also more likely to appreciate her. She told the story of her two sisters: the sister whose fiancé had to work hard in the Gulf to gather the resources for marriage now appreciates his wife more, in Nadine’s eyes, than the husband of the other sister, who is from a wealthy family and did not need to work at all to get her. From the female perspective, then, if the fiancé is working hard to collect the material resources for marriage, this is an expression of genuine love and commitment to a relationship, and even something that makes him appreciate her more.

Again, I want to point out that in real-life situations, it can often be artificial to draw a line between women’s material expectations as being instrumental or greedy, and their being necessary indicators of commitment and appreciation. Also, when women read their partners’ failures to provide the material means of love, in practice it is difficult for them to make a distinction between their truly not being able to afford them and their just not being committed enough or properly motivated by love (see also Cole 2009, 115). Nadine’s solution was that she did not proceed with the marriage plan until her fiancé had worked out how to fix his financial situation to meet her standards. She felt that if she gave in now, he might get used to underachieving because he would have the option of relying on her salary to support the family. Once married, she would not have many tools with which to negotiate the situation, as for women divorce is a poor option in Jordan (remarrying poses a great challenge because virgin brides are generally preferred). Similarly, Hoodfar (2009, 272–73) explains in her study on Cairo’s urban poor that women do not easily compromise on their requests regarding their fiancés’ financial investments before marriage as, after the wedding, men no longer have the motivation to work to improve their standard of living, which results in “poverty forever.”

A similar class status is a factor that both young people and their families in different Arab societies often require from the marriage candidate (Kreil 2016; Schielke 2015). As Adely (2016) argues, many young Jordanians consider it important in guaranteeing the compatibility of the partners and, hence, in facilitating the process of developing love within marriage. Based on my analysis, I suggest that behind this reasoning are, at least partially, local ideals concerning gendered couple dynamics that emphasize the practical and transactional aspects of processually developing love. Some of my female interlocutors pointed out that it can be challenging to make a marriage work with a poor man. For example, as a reason not to marry a man from a lower social class, Nadine mentioned that it can be difficult for a woman to adjust to the standard of living such a man can offer. And, conversely, if a man is rich enough to provide a comfortable standard of living and to pamper his wife, this is seen as a factor that is likely to increase her love for him. For example, I have sometimes heard in conversations among my interlocutors a passing assumption that women love their husbands a lot because they are rich and pamper them. Hence, women often contemplate whether it is wise to become enmeshed in a relationship that is doomed to suffer from difficulties caused by the fact that the husband cannot play his part in the gendered processes of generating love (similarly in Madagascar, see Cole 2009, 126).

This narrative is also visible in some media texts, such as Arab soap operas and women’s magazines. The following plot summary from a recent Syrian drama series ṣarkha rūḥ (2014, season 2, episode 1) is illuminating, as it makes visible the many conflicting moralities concerning the role of money in marriage.

A beautiful young woman suffers in a marriage to a poor man she fell in love and eloped with. She finds it difficult to love him any longer due to his failings to provide her with a better standard of living in the challenging context of civil-war-torn Damascus, even though he turns to illegal means to earn more. Also, her parents refuse to help her, as she married against their will. She dreams of buying fancy clothes and envies her identical twin sister who is married to a wealthy man. The twin sister dies in a car accident so she, craving a life of luxury, pretends to be her. She ends up living with her sister’s husband, but it turns out he has sadistic traits and cruelly exploits her. Going back to her real husband is, however, impossible after her deceit.

Even though one of the morals of the story is that passionate love might not be enough without the material means to make a marriage work, the main character’s greediness teaches her a bitter lesson. The narrative shows that she would have been better-off had she committed to loving her husband enough to tolerate his shortcomings and had appreciated his sincere efforts to provide what he could in a challenging situation. In other popular soap opera texts, as well as among many of my interlocutors, romantic love that defies family authority and causes someone to sacrifice everything, including material sensibilities, is also highly romanticized as such. I next turn to narratives that emphasize these aspects of love as selfless actions and as sacrifices.

Negotiating the Entanglement of Material Exchanges and Love

The other side of the narrative that emphasizes actions as the basis of love is indeed the aspect of selfless sacrifice (Inhorn 2007). Young Jordanian men, perhaps especially due to the financial challenges of courtship they face these days, often deploy this aspect of local conceptions of love and associate true love (al-ḥubb al-ḥaqīqiyy) with the female partner’s willingness to compromise on the material requirements of marriage (on the shifting narratives of true love, see also Kreil 2016, 131). Some men mentioned as examples of ideal love cases in which the wife does not complain even though her husband cannot provide those things that are commonly considered her right. For example, for the abovementioned young man, Jamil, lasting love is the kind that makes people tolerate the possibly challenging situations of marital life. He told the story of a colleague who failed to provide a heater for his household in the winter because of his low salary, and how his wife did not complain, even though it is so cold in Amman in the winter that she would have had every right to demand one. Jamil said that this is true love, not the fun part of going to the movies and coffee shops. Indeed, as Inhorn (2007) writes about couples facing challenges of infertility in Egypt and Lebanon, the new values of conjugal connectivity are challenging some assumptions about what is necessary in marriage, as people are willing to make sacrifices for their spouse and tolerate their normative shortcomings (see also Carlisle 2015). Also in my data, love often unfolds as a force that can make people tolerate the normative shortcomings of their partners. Nadine felt that if a woman was really in love with a man, she might consider marrying him and, in her words, “sacrifice everything,” even if he came from a lower social class. Some women are prepared to hide the financial shortcomings of their loved one from their parents in order to marry him, for example, by secretly accepting fake gold as a bride-price or assisting financially with household expenses. Perhaps the ultimate sacrifice for love is the runaway marriage, marrying regardless of one’s parents’ objections.

Hence, the love-as-sacrifices narrative can also be deployed to negotiate the entanglement of material and affective elements in relationships and to evoke an analytical distinction between instrumental and true love (for very similar narratives in Madagascar, see Cole 2009, 129). Probably, this narrative of sacrificing oneself for romance is so popular nowadays because of the unfair situation in which men can be denied intimacy because they cannot afford marriage (Cole 2009) or because their genuine but unsuccessful attempts to gain the necessary resources are interpreted by women as their “not loving enough” (to work even harder). On the other hand, as Cole (2009, 132) notes, the kind of true love narratives, in which affect is privileged over exchange, can be used to justify women’s self-sacrifice. Considering the circumstances I describe above of women who compromise on material requirements, there is a very fine line between romantic sacrifice and exposing oneself to abuse. For example, I heard of cases in which a woman accepted fake gold as a dower to marry a man who then turned out to be abusive, and she found herself in trouble because she did not have the financial security that real gold would have guaranteed. Or, even more strikingly, when a woman marries a poor man in a runaway marriage, she often truly sacrifices everything else. If she has no income of her own, she will be dependent on her husband for everything, as she no longer has her family’s support; if the relationship fails, she most likely cannot return to her family, she does not have the bride-price for financial security, and the chances of remarrying are poor. Knowing this, it is understandable that women do not often “buy” young men’s true love narrative of sacrificing everything by eloping.

Conclusion

This article has revealed the importance of local notions of practical and transactional forms of love in understanding the continuing significance of the economic side of marriage in Jordan (Adely 2016). In addition, it contributes to deepening our understanding of how the gendered dynamics of caring actions are related to producing affective relations in men’s everyday lives (Inhorn 2012; Naguib 2015). Performing masculinity and care by material means are deeply entangled in the intimate relationships of Ammani youth, as both masculine strength and love are straightforwardly expressed by providing material well-being for the female partner. Unlike earlier generations, young Ammani men are not ashamed to show their vulnerability as devoted caring husbands and romantic partners. Yet, young men whose resources are limited find themselves in a difficult position, both as compassionate partners and as manly men. They make use of the shifting narratives of true love as sacrifices to negotiate the entanglement of love and money. Hence, even though material exchanges are usually considered an integral part of performing love in Jordan, in some situations, young men deploy distinctions between the two categories (Cole 2009). Love is often negotiated in terms of a balance between two types of performative act, both of which are considered to build and express love: on the one hand, working hard to maintain the material means of romance and on the other, compromising on material requirements.

In today’s Jordan, there are certainly practical realities behind the entanglement of love and money. Marriage is a financial investment for men and a basis for a livelihood for women. Nevertheless, material exchanges cannot easily be separated from the processes of generating genuine love, when love is conceived as being constituted and articulated by actions.