In Montreal, I was the girl with the Tunisian parents \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u2014 one I understood but was never quite allowed to speak.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u2014 those happened in the gaps, quietly, without guidance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I am not telling this story to criticize my parents. I tell it because it shaped everything \u2014 how I understood love, how I struggled to find it, and eventually, what I learned about what makes it last.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Tunisia<\/a>, marriage is not a contract between two individuals. It is a sacred union \u2014 something far larger than the two people standing at the centre of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/em> And that was how their marriage began.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u2014 because there is an entire world of context behind it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u2014 deep, serious, unshakeable commitment \u2014 to building something together. To a family. To a unit where each person depends on the other for their survival, their wellbeing, their joy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You don’t marry a person. You marry a family. And family, in this world, is everything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I want to tell you about the runaway bag.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of my female family members \u2014 a woman who married a man she barely knew \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u2014 she never describes feeling forced \u2014 but she was brave in a way that is easy to overlook.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u2014 they were the whole project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But here is what strikes me most: she stayed. She built something. And that marriage \u2014 like most of the ones I watched growing up \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is what cultural differences in marriage actually look like from the inside \u2014 not oppression, but a different kind of courage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I have had many conversations with North Americans about Tunisian marriage culture. And almost always, the same assumptions surface:<\/p>\n\n\n\n The women don’t get to decide. They are stuck. They don’t love these men. They were forced.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u2014 and in doing so, it misses everything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My mother never felt forced. It was simply how things were<\/strong> \u2014 the norm, the reality of her world. To impose our framework onto her experience is not empathy. It is a different kind of arrogance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These cultural differences in marriage are not flaws to be corrected \u2014 they are windows into entirely different ways of understanding love and commitment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Context matters. Always. Before we judge a culture’s practices, we owe it the dignity of understanding \u2014 really understanding \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u2014 a better match, a better connection, a better feeling \u2014 just one more swipe away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"Baby](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/entredeserts.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/IMG_8965-1.jpeg?resize=1024%2C768&ssl=1\")
\n\n\n\nThe sacred union \u2014 what my Tunisian family taught me about marriage<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"Tunisian](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/entredeserts.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/IMG_6568-scaled.jpeg?fit=768%2C1024&ssl=1\")
\n\n\n\nThe runaway bag \u2014 and what it actually means<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nA note on judgment \u2014 and what we miss when we assume<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nWhat modern dating has lost<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"Doug](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/entredeserts.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/dougandrach-105-scaled.jpeg?fit=683%2C1024&ssl=1\")