Theoretically, it wasn’t supposed to be a date. I had a Field Study paper to write about class dynamics in Morocco, and I rationalized that it was easier for me to ask a cute, English-speaking, Moroccan acquaintance about the “Moroccan Dream” over coffee rather than asking the same questions of a stranger on the street.
It was dusk when I set off to meet this friend near my school, not too late to be out alone in the medina—or so I thought. As I walked through a dim alley I heard “Ca va?”
“Ca va bien,” I replied without thinking. A young man immediately fell in behind me. Damn. Flustered, I began walking quickly to our meeting point. I rebuffed the man’s advances without turning around, but he kept reappearing. I stood outside the locked door of my school and looked furtively around for my friend.
“Come to the kasbah with me,” the man said quietly. Gripping my phone hard, I pulled up my Contacts.“Come to my house,” he said leaning closer “come make sex at my house.”
What? I could hear my heart pounding against my sternum. “NO,” I said forcefully, “LA. NO.” He turned around and shuffled back into the gathering darkness. Seconds later my friend came around the corner. My breathing slowed.
Up until this point, I hadn’t truly grasped that I was, indeed, going on a date. This revelation first surfaced as I settled into his passenger seat and Taylor Swift was playing. Huh. I feel like I’m on a date. For a second I thought deeply about my unwashed hair, nonexistent make-up, and the fact that the first question I had asked him after “how was your weekend?” was “what are your feelings on the Syrian conflict?”
Clearly, I was putting him through a test worse than driving through the streets of Rabat which, for those of you that don’t know, is a little bit like playing Gran Tarismo with one hand tied behind your back. Still, he seemed unfazed by my questions or personal appearance.
“I’m a Government major,” I explained.
“You’re lucky to be able to choose what you want to study.”
During the Cafe portion of our date our conversation ranged from an explanation of American hook-up culture (relying heavily on the movie No Strings Attached for context) and the quest for summer internships. “Your father has to know someone [to get an internship],” he said. I nodded knowingly. Apropos of something I don’t remember, I took a brief interlude to explain the concept of “sarcasm.” Perhaps this should have been the first thing we touched upon. Luckily, though it’s not called “sarcasm,” the practice of wryly congratulating others for their failures also exists in Moroccan culture.
My date asked me what I wanted to do next, and I admitted I was hungry. Though he had had two pizzas for lunch at 6 (Moroccans eat later than Americans), for my sake we went to a restaurant that we’d been to with friends once before. I ordered a huge cheeseburger with an egg on it—appropriately called an “Egg Burger”—and cautioned him not to watch me eat it.
Running out of stories, and very much enjoying my french fries, I regaled him with the time my host family fed me a liver sandwich and I hid it in a sock. He wouldn’t tell me what he was thinking about. “My thoughts are stupid.”
I insisted on paying for my dinner, but he wouldn’t let me. “Next time you can pay,” he said.
“How do you know there will be a next time?” I asked.
“I hope there will be,” he replied.
The next day a female friend and I stopped by my date’s friend’s sandwich shop. He suggested we all go out that night–so once again I found myself nodding along to American music as we swerved around pedestrians. After pizza and calamari, we watched Barcelona beat Madrid at a bar. I leaned back against my date’s arm. My friend split a bottle of wine with the sandwich man. The night dragged on and the popcorn bowl in the middle of our table slowly emptied. A couple of times my date held a kernel in front of my mouth and swooped in to kiss me when I tried to eat it.
“I’m trying to watch the game,” I teased.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“So you talk to yourself? Are you crazy?”
“Yes, I’m crazy.”
“I like that. I’m crazy too. I talk to myself in the mirror for hours.”
“Ok,” I said, laughing.
It was past my friend’s curfew and my eyelids were heavy when I finally said “Yalla (let’s go).”
We pulled into a spot in front of a club.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“We’re at the club that we said we would go to earlier.”
“Oh no, we need to go home,” I say. My friend chimed in from the back seat:
“I have to get home, I told my host family I’d be home half an hour ago.”
“Just 15 minutes, just 15 minutes,” he said.
My friend and I reiterated that we needed to go. Her companion started talking in Arabic from the back seat.
“He wants to stay here and dance,” the driver explained. “Just 15 minutes? She’s already late.”
Suddenly, it hit me: all of the frustration of the past four weeks. Not being able to leave the house without being harassed, the zen of a jog interrupted by men pulling over their cars to proposition me…the loss of my independence. My mind leapt back even further, to any one of various dorm rooms an ocean away:
“Come on, I promise you’ll enjoy it.”
“Come on, I can tell you’ll be good at it.”
Come to the kasbah with me. Isn’t that where all roads eventually lead? This guy was nice, he had been a perfect gentleman for the majority of our time together, and he seemed to be attracted to me despite my various quirks…but he was still a stranger in the driver’s seat of a car in a foreign city…and I am a girl that prefers being in the driver’s seat.
“Take. Us. Home. Now,” I said through clenched teeth.
“Why are you mad?” he asked later, as we wound our way by foot through the medina.
“I don’t feel safe here,” I explained, “When I say I need to go home and you argue it makes me feel unsafe. Do you know what it feels like not being able to leave the house after dark?” He corrected me: “not being able to leave the house alone.” Two cats ran by. “There are some things about Morocco that you have to accept. Even the cats follow each other.” Not the boy cats.
He tried to frame everything that happened at the end of the night as a misunderstanding, and perhaps it was, but I was grateful for an excuse to do what I knew I needed to do all along—decline to pursue things any further. Enjoy life without waiting for a text message. Get over my last fling for once before rushing into the next one. Hang out with my new girlfriends. Throw myself into my writing. Find a way to make peace with the gender climate without compromising my sense of self. And, when I was comfortable, explore the city rather than the inside of somebody else’s mouth.
Ultimately, our problem had little to do with a difference in culture, and more to do with an acute awareness of the vulnerability of my position.
“Goodnight,” I said, and closed my door.
“Can I have my hat back?” he asked.
I had forgotten that I was still wearing his baseball cap. Having been the person on the other side of the door, knowing that I had probably wittingly and unwittingly sent cues that I was attracted to him, I felt a wave of guilt coming on—but I also knew I didn’t owe him anything. Just go upstairs and go to bed.
I squeezed his hat through the slot in the door.
“Just like that?” he asked through the glass.
Just like that.