Girls of Riyadh

Subject: The “Getting Over Them” Phase

A woman is like a tea bag. You never know how strong she is until she’s dropped into hot water.—Eleanor Roosevelt

Now, be honest. Haven’t you had enough of me after a year of e-mails? I’ve had enough of myself!

One day Sadeem read a news item on the society page, congratulating Dr. Firas Al-Sharqawi on the occasion of the birth of his first son, Rayyan. It had now been more than fifteen months since she and Firas had parted for the last time. Sadeem tried to think about their relationship, over nearly four years, compared to an engagement, contract-signing, wedding, pregnancy and birth with another woman that had occurred all in a little over a year. It seemed to confirm that Firas was not the extraordinary and discriminating person she had once imagined him to be, but just another ordinary boy, much like Waleed and Faisal and Rashid and countless others. Those claims he used to make about holding his life partner to absolute criteria were nothing more than a ridiculous attempt to flex muscles that were pretty weak in the first place. Or maybe they didn’t even exist at all.

Sadeem was in Riyadh for the celebration of Michelle’s and Lamees’s graduation, and the four girls gathered at Sadeem’s old home. As usual, they launched into their various complaints on the woes of lost love.

“Sadeem!” said Lamees, “how could you have accepted—even run after—a sweetheart who tramples you underfoot? You know what your problem is? Your problem is that when you fall in love, you lose your mind! You allow the one you love to humiliate you and you let him get away with it! No, even worse, you say to him, I like it, baby, give me more! This is the truth, unfortunately, and if it wasn’t, you wouldn’t have stayed with Firas all those years when you knew he had no intention of marrying you.”

Everyone was hard on her these days. They were blaming her for getting into a relationship that was bound to fail from the start. At the time none of them predicted that her relationship with Firas would end as it did; they had been as optimistic, basically, as she was. But now, naturally, all of them claimed to have known it all along! She had no recourse but to remain silent. At one point Michelle, who had gone through a similar thing a few years before, shot her a wink. Michelle, of course, had taken a firm and severe decision to walk away from Faisal the moment he revealed his parents’ position on their relationship. And so she had sidestepped the agony and humiliation Sadeem endured up until the bitter end, when her love finally drowned itself in a sea of emotional mendacity.

Sadeem did wish Firas had proven his superiority to the passive Faisal. She had wanted to demonstrate to Michelle that Michelle had made a mistake in letting Faisal go. She wanted to prove that she, Sadeem, a believer in the power of love who upheld the principle that she had a right to marry the person she loved, would end up smarter, more successful and happier.

It hadn’t worked out that way. Having refused to sacrifice her love, she had received the stunning blow that her beloved had sacrificed her. And Firas’s deception had run deep: he had hung hope’s sparkling pendant around her lovely neck and taught her to recite love’s anthem of struggle and persistence long after he himself had stopped reciting it.

“The luck you’ve had, Michelle—you don’t have to constantly see a photo or read an article in some newspaper about the guy you were in love with. The worst thing is for a girl to fall in love with someone famous, because no matter how hard she tries to forget him, the whole world keeps reminding her of him! You know what I wish sometimes, Michelle? I wish I could have been the man in this relationship. I wouldn’t have let go of Firas, I swear I wouldn’t have let go.”

“See? So you haven’t lost a real man, have you?”

Her friend’s sarcastic comment made Sadeem more disgusted than ever with Firas. Did that selfish man even realize the rough treatment she had received from society, on top of the way he had mistreated her and then had abused her further by walking out?