The first two quarters of the year are always hectic for me. I know I should be blogging more, but I truly feel drained by the time the week is over and I've been trying to avoid using the computer on weekends because life is just too short. However, this morning I'm going to dust off my pink grill shades and write a post. I envy people who can write everyday. Sometimes words flow easily with me. Other times, I feel blank. I'm such an intense person, I feel I need to 'plan' my posts. Then I get stressed in the planning process and end up not writing at all. You'd be surprised to see the number of draft posts in my inbox. Can I just point out that I've really been enjoying daily posts from A Nomad in the Land of Nizwa lately? Thank you Catbird. You inspire me to write. I especially enjoyed your bucket list post.
I've been thinking a lot lately about friendship. Society here in Dhofar is still very conservative. Men & women still don't mix. Friendship itself with people from 'outside the tribe' is also a relatively new concept, even if it's men with men and women with women. I'm not talking about the guys you hang out with at the hookah (shisha) cafes or the girls you glue yourself to in college. I'm not talking about your sisters. Or your mothers. I'm talking about true friendship. Friends you can call at any time of the day or night when you're upset. Friends you can confide in. Friends you know will stand by you through thick or thin. Friends you can discuss your deepest fears with. Friends who can see your true colors. Friends who won't judge you. Friends who will be honest with you.
Sadly, many of us have never been able to experience that kind of friendship. Last week a colleague of mine came to my office here in Salalah at the end of the workday for something and he was clearly upset about something. I don't know him too well, so I helped him with whatever he was doing but towards the end of his visit, I told myself "to hell with customs & traditions" and decided to ask him if he was ok. He said 'fine, fine' without looking me in the eye. I've studied NLP, so I used my magic techniques to get him to talk. I told him he looked upset and even though we don't know each other too well, we're all humans and as a fellow human, it upset me to see him like that. You have to understand that in Dhofar, it's highly inappropriate for a female to ask a male those kinds of questions. Naturally, I don't give a damn how inappropriate it is.
After about 5 seconds, he made eye contact. Tears had gathered in the corners of his eyes and he started to tell me about the problem. It was a very personal family problem that was weighing heavily on his heart, but he wasn't able to tell anyone about it because people 'talk'. He said he realized he had no friends to confide in and no one he could talk to normally. He told me that men in Dhofar don't discuss personal problems with each other no matter how close they are. It's considered 'un-manly'. He called it 'The layers and layers of prestige & protocol'. After about 20 minutes, he'd let it all out and he leaned back in my guest chair and closed his eyes, then he thanked me for just listening and not judging him. I felt like crying myself but managed to remain calm and collected. I was humbled. How horrible it must be to not have someone to talk to. Bottling it all up inside must feel like crap.
Interestingly enough, we spent the next half hour or so discussing whether true friendship can exist between men & women in Dhofar. I think it can. He thinks it can't. I told him I didn't think God had created a world of men & women only to have them live in two parallel universes, as is the case in Dhofar. Humans need humans. Relegating men to the role of husband only would leave me mighty lonely. After having several very good platonic relationships, I feel qualified to say men and women can be friends. Very good friends. The problem is that there aren't many role models for these kinds of relationships (ESPECIALLY IN OMAN), so at times it's hard to navigate. Trust me, though, it's possible.
In Salalah, it's hard to maintain friendship with members of the opposite sex because of how society views relationships between men & women. The general feeling in this region is that any form of relationship between men & women outside of marriage = bad. This will change over time.
This post may not make sense to many of you out there, but I'm sure at least a few of you will understand what I'm talking about. So, tell me, do you have a good friend of the opposite sex? If no, then why? If yes, how do you maintain the friendship and do you feel any kind of pressure?
Nadia
Yes! I have a very good female friend, and even though we have never been physically attracted to each other at any stage, my wife (and her husband) make it really hard for us to keep up the friendship. We've known each since before we were both married, so I refused to give up on our friendship.
ReplyDeleteMohammed
Not possible. All men think about is sex. Unless it's a very very sensitive man who needs to cry on a friend's shoulder all the time.
ReplyDeleteD.
men are weirdos. we can't trust them. most of them see women as a body.if you asked him if he is OK just like you did he will think that you have a crush on him or something they might not show this to you but believe me they can't control their desires toward women "kids"
ReplyDeleteHey Nadia,
ReplyDeleteWelcome back! I can’t imagine living without having a friend to talk to!! I would die!!
I believe opposite sex friendships CAN happen depending on the male and/or female personality and how do they see the other person. A lot of people mix admiration with love especially in this scenario. I have a couple of good male friends that I love in a brotherly way and yes I have a female mind, so the thought of love crossed my mind once (or twice!) but realized that my feelings are not love, its admiration. But I still find it difficult to take to them about my deepest problems, that’s what my girlfriends are there for!
Peace
Friends of the opposite sex are in some ways more "friendly" & true than friends of the same sex, or at least that has been the case with me & being honest with each other is key to the survival of such friendships. And trust me i know what you're talking about coming from a dhofari family, but seriously to hell with traditions life has to go on.
ReplyDeleteD Anonymous, sorry but that is rubbish! Not all men are sex obsessed. Some men value highly the different viewpoint of women....
ReplyDeleteD - No offense, but what utter rubbish! I am a married woman and I have numerous male friends who I have great times with. Never has our relationship been anything other than friends and I can assure you neither I nor them have ever thought about the other as anything other than friends.
ReplyDeleteMen don't have to be overtly sensitive in order to have a friendship with women, all they need to have is a personality worth knowing about. Men offer something else in a friendship that women can't in the same way that women play roles as a friend that a man can't.
My husband is Arab and I am Western and it does make me sad sometimes that my husband struggles to understand my relationship with other men. While he accepts - and is indeed friends with - my Western male friends, he believes that any man from the Arab or Asian world who wants to be friends with me is clearly trying to get me in the sack! This is a sad aspect of life and one that I think Nadia summed up beautifully when she told about the story from her colleague and how he desperately needed someone to talk to, but society stopped him from doing so. Surely having someone suffer from having no one to talk to or get the opinion of is much worse than *HORROR* a man talking to a woman without imagining her in her underwear (something that I think is entirely possible!)
We are here on this Earth as equals and I think people often forget that.
OB
D - No offense, but what utter rubbish! I am a married woman and I have numerous male friends who I have great times with. Never has our relationship been anything other than friends and I can assure you neither I nor them have ever thought about the other as anything other than friends.
ReplyDeleteMen don't have to be overtly sensitive in order to have a friendship with women, all they need to have is a personality worth knowing about. Men offer something else in a friendship that women can't in the same way that women play roles as a friend that a man can't.
My husband is Arab and I am Western and it does make me sad sometimes that my husband struggles to understand my relationship with other men. While he accepts - and is indeed friends with - my Western male friends, he believes that any man from the Arab or Asian world who wants to be friends with me is clearly trying to get me in the sack! This is a sad aspect of life and one that I think Nadia summed up beautifully when she told about the story from her colleague and how he desperately needed someone to talk to, but society stopped him from doing so. Surely having someone suffer from having no one to talk to or get the opinion of is much worse than *HORROR* a man talking to a woman without imagining her in her underwear (something that I think is entirely possible!)
We are here on this Earth as equals and I think people often forget that.
OB
Nadia, thank you for this post. I have been struggling to keep up a close friendship with a man. He is married with three kids and he loves his wife dearly. I am single. We're not physically attracted to each other, however we do have a very strong bond. We understand each other. I tap into his intellectual needs. He studied abroad for eight years, but his wife is a simple (and wonderful) girl from the mountains of Dhofar. He worships her, but she doesn't at all understand what his life was like abroad. He has come to accept that. We talk two or three times a week. He complains to me. I complain to him. We encourage each other. We're also colleagues, so we see each other a lot at work. Whenver he needs advice on women, he calls me. It's completely platonic. (PS He's also trying to find me a husband that HE approves of :)
ReplyDeleteF.
I have a couple of very good male friends. I can't discuss everything with them but they are closer to me than many of my female friends.
ReplyDeleteLovely post :) This has been one topic on my mind all of last month. True Friendship or rather the lack of it definitely alters the quality of life. Being an expat, it has been almost a year away from my girlfriends and not having them around/just a phone call away definitely weighs heavily on the heart. Not that you cant make new friends here, but in a foreign land.. it seems to take much more time and effort to build sturdy friendships..So though there are no restrictions on having friends of the opposite sex being an expat, it is very difficult to cultivate such a relationship and keep it natural.
ReplyDeleteGreat topic :)
I think it's less common than women like to think, but I believe it can exist if there is no sexual chemistry. Two of my best friends are men. One is gay and one is my ex-husband! God only knows how that happened.
ReplyDeleteI think it's entirely possible. My husband has several female friends here in the US and I don't think twice about him spending time with them. I trust my husband. If I didn't, I wouldn't be married to him and I certainly wouldn't be comfortable with him working in Oman while I was here in the US. On the flip side, after visiting Oman, I was actually more at ease when the men addressed my husband instead of talking directly to me. That's just my personal insecurities getting the better of me, though. While I don't think the US way of "anything goes" is the right way to do it, I don't think the complete separation of the sexes is the right way to go either. Surely there is a happy medium somewhere?
ReplyDeleteI think the friendship with a man though platonic may be being balanced over a thin line.. it is tough. I am an Indian living in Oman and I prefer this culture for myself. I dont know if people are frustrated inside for not being expressive, I feel very safe when men dont look at me when I am going alone.Recently I traveled from Oman to my native place and the guy who sat next to me started a pleasant conversation about my life in Oman. Acted friendly but later on started misbehaving. I then wished I was an Omani woman, who with her respectable dress code would demand more respect.
ReplyDeleteOman is yet to accept that for centuries it was desperately poor and was not civilized at a pace rest of the world. Looking everything from the prison of last four decades impairs proper perspective. This idea is largely because of typical identity crisis Arab world undergoes.Friendship is a civilized concept and therefore it is almost an alien concept here,even among same sex.
ReplyDelete’Men in Black’ was true after all - there are aliens living among us right now. Just as a matter of interest, from which planet do you hail?
DeleteHere on Earth, friendship started some time ago, several million years before the advent of so-called civilization. Have you never observed the strong bonds between say horses or camels, not to mention among dogs, cats, rats and mice? Please tell your galactic superiors that your earlier reports about humans were seriously mistaken - we do understand the “alien concept” of friendship.
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DeleteIt's clear that with posts like this, you need to be posting more often! Keep them coming, Nadia.
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, of course men and women can be very good friends (and without any sexual attraction!).
Kudos to you for throwing the "accepted norm" aside and reaching out to the man in your humanity!
Honestly, I have had male friends. I mean, I veiwed them as friends. Don't anymore because I don't think you can know what is going on in someone's mind. I was not attracted to them. But that wasn't how the majority of them veiwed me 100% of the time, as oblivious I was to it with my Western background. I DO believe men and women who are mutually unattracted to eachother can balance a friendship. It may be close in some personal matters, but not others. I don't think any woman or man can judge this on their own though. As circumstances in life change, what you once veiwed as impossible may become possible or something you disliked valued ect. Just for that reason, I like to keep my relations educational or professional in purpose to avoid unwated proposals or someone getting mixed signals. It is just safer. I mean, it isn't always the case. But if you're a pretty girl even slightly, or super sweet, the majority of time what you veiw as a friendship will change with time to a man to a thought of something more even if it doesn't occur to you or he never tells you. Arab men aren't alone in this. In my non-Or vice versa. Muslim days my entire highschool crew were boys. only one of them to this day didn't admit to me that he'd had a crush, or been sad when I got married, or had loved but never told me ect. And I was good friends with my book editor and he went all psycho and ripped up my address book when he found out I was getting married first time round. I NEVER had ANY idea before that he thought I was more than his friend (this was a French guy). All we talked about was work ect. So, it is hard to balance. Maybe it is just my personality men find misleading (and not all of them) but I have a difficult time guaging. I let my husband do that for me beyond the written, school, and work realms.
ReplyDeleteBTW, saying what I said in my last comment, if someone looks serriously upset I don't think it is overstepping any Islamic bounds to let them talk about it or giving advice to help them or just helping by listening. I don't think that's forming a 'friendship'. Friendship is with those I let my hair down with and have fun with, and know the worst about ect, and still love. I think what you did wasn't being a friend. That takes more. It was being human. It is only culture that ever made being human shameful.
ReplyDeleteYes I have a few male friends. One who has been my backbone through divorce. When the opp gender know their limits then there is nothing wrong with a friendship. It's only the narrow minded, backwards cultural people who accuse others of bad things. Salalah's culture needs an update.
ReplyDeleteIn my experience, friendship between the sexes is a fraught business - at a superficial level it can be easy, but if it progresses to anything more profound, then it becomes a minefield. 20 years ago, my then wife walked out, leaving me with our two young daughters to bring up. I knew a very nice woman - the wife of a good friend - and I used to pour out my troubles to her when things got really bad. Eventually I found a new partner, and I told her about it. We were sitting in her garden, in the dark, and I suddenly saw that she was crying - our relationship clearly meant a lot more to her than it did to me. Although we are still ‘friends’, things have never been the same since. I could quote other examples where, at a certain stage, things got ‘awkward’, but suffice to say I’ve come to the conclusion that it is well-nigh impossible for men and women to maintain deep friendships without, at some point, for one or the other, a physical attraction developing. I don’t think either side is to be ‘blamed’ for this - it’s the way we’re wired up. Nature divided all creatures into two sexes for the sole purpose of reproduction, and it is about the most powerful instinct we have. I have no problems with friendships - at any level - with men, but if I am being totally honest, the only woman of whom I can say that (and she is my closest friend) is the one I love and who loves me. From every other female, I’ve found it’s best to keep a respectful distance.
ReplyDelete