Between Two Deserts — What My Heritage Taught Me About Love, Marriage and Commitment

Growing up between deserts

Cultural differences in marriage shaped me long before I understood what they meant. I grew up between two worlds, and for a long time, I didn’t fully belong to either.

In Montreal, I was the girl with the Tunisian parents — the one whose mother changed the channel when people kissed on television, whose father didn’t want her to have a boyfriend, whose family operated by a set of rules that made little sense to my Canadian friends. At school, we talked about boys openly. We passed notes. We had crushes and heartbreaks and all the messy, beautiful chaos of adolescence.

At home, none of that existed. Dating was not a concept. Intimacy was not discussed. There was an awkwardness around love and relationships that I absorbed like a second language — one I understood but was never quite allowed to speak.

So I did what teenagers do. I lied. I saw boyfriends in secret. I navigated between two realities, trying to honour both and never fully succeeding.

My mother, to her credit, bought me biology books. I was educated in school. But the conversations about love, about choosing a partner, about what a relationship actually looks and feels like — those happened in the gaps, quietly, without guidance.

I am not telling this story to criticize my parents. I tell it because it shaped everything — how I understood love, how I struggled to find it, and eventually, what I learned about what makes it last.

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The sacred union — what my Tunisian family taught me about marriage

In Tunisia, marriage is not a contract between two individuals. It is a sacred union — something far larger than the two people standing at the centre of it.

When my paternal grandmother asked for my mother’s hand, my parents had met only a couple of times. My maternal grandmother pulled my mother aside and asked her what she thought. My mother said: sure, why not. And that was how their marriage began.

To a North American ear, this sounds shocking. Reckless, even. But I want to invite you to sit with it for a moment before you judge — because there is an entire world of context behind it.

Marriage in Tunisian culture is sacred in a way that is hard to translate. It is not about chemistry or butterflies or finding your perfect match on an app. It is about commitment — deep, serious, unshakeable commitment — to building something together. To a family. To a unit where each person depends on the other for their survival, their wellbeing, their joy.

You don’t marry a person. You marry a family. And family, in this world, is everything.

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The runaway bag — and what it actually means

I want to tell you about the runaway bag.

One of my female family members — a woman who married a man she barely knew — quietly prepared a bag before her wedding night. Inside: some money, a change of clothes, the essentials. Just in case things didn’t go as hoped.

When I first heard this, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. It is both heartbreaking and incredibly pragmatic. She was not naive. She knew she was stepping into the unknown. She was not forced — she never describes feeling forced — but she was brave in a way that is easy to overlook.

The women in my family do not deny that the first year required enormous patience. That marrying a near stranger is genuinely strange. That adaptation, acceptance and compromise were not optional — they were the whole project.

But here is what strikes me most: she stayed. She built something. And that marriage — like most of the ones I watched growing up — was among the most beautiful I have ever seen. Deeply rooted in mutual respect, in tenderness, in a quiet understanding that this person is mine and I am theirs and we are going to figure it out together.

I am not speaking of conjugal violence or forced unions. I want to be absolutely clear: I do not support anything forced, anything abusive, anything that strips a person of their dignity or choice. That is not what I am describing.

What I am describing is something else entirely. Something that looks strange from the outside but holds a kind of wisdom that our modern world has largely forgotten.

This is what cultural differences in marriage actually look like from the inside — not oppression, but a different kind of courage.

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A note on judgment — and what we miss when we assume

I have had many conversations with North Americans about Tunisian marriage culture. And almost always, the same assumptions surface:

The women don’t get to decide. They are stuck. They don’t love these men. They were forced.

I understand where these assumptions come from. Seen through a Western lens, a woman who marries a man she barely knows looks like a victim. But that lens has limits. It flattens an entire culture into a single, comfortable narrative — and in doing so, it misses everything.

My mother never felt forced. It was simply how things were — the norm, the reality of her world. To impose our framework onto her experience is not empathy. It is a different kind of arrogance.

These cultural differences in marriage are not flaws to be corrected — they are windows into entirely different ways of understanding love and commitment.

Context matters. Always. Before we judge a culture’s practices, we owe it the dignity of understanding — really understanding — what those practices mean from the inside. Cultural humility is not about agreeing with everything. It is about approaching difference with curiosity rather than conclusion.

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What modern dating has lost

And yet.

I also grew up in Montreal. I dated. I lived the other reality. And I have watched modern dating culture closely enough to know that we are not doing as well as we think.

We have traded commitment for options. We have replaced depth with excitement. We have built entire economies around the idea that there might always be something better — a better match, a better connection, a better feeling — just one more swipe away.

Je veux le beurre et l’argent du beurre. I want everything and I want to give nothing up. I want to see you when I feel like it and disappear when I don’t. I want the highs without the work. The intimacy without the vulnerability. The relationship without the risk.

We ghost each other. We breadcrumb each other. We keep people at arm’s length while keeping them just close enough. And then we wonder why we feel so lonely.

The sacredness of the union — that deep, unshakeable sense that this is a commitment I am making with my whole self — has largely disappeared from modern dating culture. We treat relationships like subscriptions. Cancel anytime. No hard feelings. When I reflect on cultural differences in marriage, what strikes me most is what we in the West have quietly traded away.

But love is not a subscription. It never was.

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What’s better? The question worth asking

Cultural differences in marriage raise a question worth sitting with: which is better? Marrying someone you barely know, trusting that commitment and time will build something real? Or choosing freely, chasing the strong feelings, waiting for the perfect match?

I don’t think it’s that simple.

What I have come to believe is this: the success of a marriage has very little to do with how it begins, and everything to do with what both people decide to do with it. My family members who married near strangers built beautiful lives — not because the system was perfect, but because they showed up. Every day. With patience, with humour, with a fierce loyalty to the unit they were building.

And I have watched modern couples with every advantage — shared interests, physical chemistry, years of dating — fall apart the moment things got hard. Because nobody told them that love is not a feeling you find. It is a practice you choose. Over and over again.

The sacred part of a union — any union — is not the wedding. It is the ten thousand ordinary moments after it, when you choose to stay.

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Time will tell — my own story

I had my heart broken more than once by men who didn’t want to commit. It was a recurring theme — the non-committal, the almost-relationships, the people who wanted me present but not permanent. Modern dating culture at its finest.

And then I met Doug. In La Ventana, on Christmas Day, in the most unlikely place.

Doug knew. From the beginning, he knew. He was certain in a way I hadn’t encountered before — not desperate, not overwhelming, just quietly, completely sure.

I was the cautious one. Time will tell, I kept saying. Time will tell.

Here we are, six years later. Time has told us quite a lot.

What I know now is that commitment is not the absence of doubt. It is the decision to move toward someone anyway. To choose them not because everything is perfect, but because you believe in what you are building together.

My Tunisian family knew this. They knew it without dating apps or compatibility tests or years of courtship. They knew it because it was woven into the very fabric of how they understood love — as something sacred. Something you build, not something you find.

I grew up between two worlds, shaped by cultural differences in marriage that I amn learning to understand. I am still learning from both.

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