Falling in Love as a Refugee

One thing that Exist West by Mohsin Hamid did for me that no other book about refugees has was open my eyes to refugee relationships, particularly those that are romantic in nature. When reading Refugee I noticed quite a bit of focus was placed on families and the bonds members of a family share, but I have not yet been able to explore the way fleeing a country might affect a couple, especially a more “fresh” or new relationship, like the one Nadia and Saeed develop.

I got to thinking about refugee romances, because surely refugees are not any different from anyone else, and I’m sure they crave the love, affection, and acceptance from a romantic partner that anyone else craves and quite frankly deserves. While I was searching for something for what it’s like to flee a country with a partner, I found far more about falling in love after having fled. I wonder if this was coincidental or if perhaps the stress of leaving caused couples to split, similarly to Nadia and Saeed. I actually came across an interesting article from the Irish Times about a German documentary program about two teenagers who fell in love. One is a boy from Syria, the other a German girl. In the article they talk about how the German girl would dress more conservatively and altered her diet in order to sort of stand in solidarity with her new boyfriend.

Another article I had found on refugees finding love was from The Atlantic. This was about a Iranian man who fell in love with his language teacher during his attempt to seek asylum in Germany (pictured below). What I found interesting about this relationship as opposed to the last one is that rather than her adjusting for his culture, he just kind of accepted most of the differences between them and acknowledged their cultural differences as something to accept and not change. I thought that was rather respectable.

After reading these articles, I don’t think I found any more answers to my initial question, in fact I think I had more questions than before. However, I appreciate the way this book and these articles have opened my eyes to what it is like (or what it could potentially be like) to fall in love as a refugee, whether that is with another person fleeing their country, or with someone met in a new country.