Arguments With My Boyfriend, A War Refugee, Taught Me More Than Any Lecture About Privilege

When my partner and I went on our first (and last) holiday together, he was detained on entry, denied his phone, interrogated for hours and threatened with deportation. When we last attempted our regular Calais donations-drop, he was denied entry to France altogether.

By Mathilda Mallinson

UK

It's 2006 and we're watching Planet Earth.

I'm eating beans on toast in bed with my family, fighting off the Sunday blues with David Attenborough’s twinkling narration and Fenton’s orchestral score.

I'm in London, England.

But he's in Damascus, Syria and doesn't hear it, neither do any of the little boys sitting beside him. God's creation dances before them, silently projected onto the mosque's ancient walls, untainted by secular sounds.

I met my partner in the Calais Jungle while working as an aid worker.

It was a volunteering role I’d started with that wide-eyed, undefined determination to do good, but it became a vocation I could never walk away from. Today, I’m a reporter for immigration and human rights.

When we met, I was just a 23-year-old woman who only knew what she didn't want to do with her life. But he was a 26-year-old war refugee who knew all too well what he couldn't do.

I first realised that I could love this man when he grinned at me from under a pile of children, spinning pirouettes with four, five, six of them on his shoulders.

He’d come back to his old camp to lend a hand and we’d been entertaining the kids while their parents collected donations. Our ‘Jungle,’ as everyone called it, was one of several ramshackle camps littering France’s coastline, pitstops to the little island at the tail-end of the migrant trail. Our love was found in a hopeless place, but that’s the only cliché thing about it.

I knew that we’d have cultural differences, but it never struck me how demanding those would be, how deep we’d have to dig to excavate ourselves from layers of hardened ideology. I've learned more loving a man from another world than I knew I had to learn.

Actually, if i'm honest - I've unlearned more than I knew I had to.

Often (predictably) it's geopolitics. Sometimes he says something so unapologetically cynical, so provocatively contrarian - like "Assad would’ve been assassinated in a second if Western lobbyists didn’t profit from our war" - that my eyes roll before I can stop them. Look at Suleimani.”

Sometimes I say something so blindingly naive, so confident in smug Western moralism - like “bin Laden didn’t take a second" - that he just blinks at me in disbelief.

Worldviews are defensive structures hardwired to remain intact. When one brick cracks in the Jenga of our thesis, we risk a landslide entering our minds. That’s why trivial opinions feel like life-defining creeds when challenged by someone from a different ‘tribe’.

Most of our accepted knowledge is ideological - a constructed worldview not an objective reality - that’s what I’ve learned.

Sorry little girl watching Attenborough in bed, but Western democracy is just well-dressed corruption. My Syrian partner gets a good laugh a day from British headlines about corporate lobbying, crony cabinets and yet another Eton Prime Minister. “This is the great democracy you’re all so proud of,” he asks, “this is what entitles you to rain bombs from our skies?”

Privilege

Admitting that our knowledge is subjective can feel like conceptually belly flopping into nothingness. But it also gives us the most solid grounding of all, because without the worldviews that make us different, we’re all just people. Ones you might fall in love with, if you're lucky.

When our relationship was new, he and I were too scared to fight. Worldviews colliding, we knew the fallout could be catastrophic, so we’d keep our voices calm and tiptoe out of our trenches into no-man’s land.

Maybe we were a bit too careful - saying what we needed but not all we wanted - so the same issues kept resurfacing. It was months before I was allowed to see the pain he feels when forced to compromise his culture.

It was years before I hysterically admitted, to myself and to him, that his unfamiliar moral standards have made me feel judged and shamed at times. Our conflict resolution process is still in progress (we recently added sobriety to the rules), but one thing we’ve always known is that there’s no space for scoring points.

One thing we struggled with was my clothing. I should point out that his upbringing was exceptionally more conservative compared to most Muslims.

His sisters wear burkas but I don't.

READ ANOTHER 'LOVE' STORY FROM OUR SERIES

For them, covering up is control; their burkas give them final say over who gets to look at them, because no man is entitled to. But for me, covering up to stop men from staring feels like living my life in a man’s world, so I wear what I’d wear if the world was my own.

He never wanted to admit that he didn’t like that, but I started to work it out. Whenever I wore something really revealing, he'd go quiet and I'd see pain in his eyes.

Everything in my modern feminist schooling tells me never to adjust my fashion for a man. The mantra is ‘my body, my choice,’ but the unspoken message is that my choice could be wrong. That if I choose to wear something out of love for another, I’m a bad feminist, a traitor to the movement.

What this didn’t teach me is that oppression is a web of intersections of which my gender is only part.

That when this issue would arise, he hated his own feelings - he loves my style but can’t stand the thought of other men leering - and when he suppresses those voices it's a step away from a homeland that he never asked to leave. It's a reminder that he doesn't belong here, but everyday he's gone from Syria, he belongs there less and less.

To the outside eye, my compromises are small. I dress much the same give or take a few nipple protrusions, I’ve stopped stripping during drinking games (my friends volunteer as tribute), and I’m less tactile with men than I’d naturally be. Do I alter my behaviour for my man? Yes. But if these tiny shifts can ease the tectonic ones that he has to make every single day, I would make them again and again.

My man has made so many compromises that he must hide his new life from the people who raised him. He aches for his family - there isn’t a single country in this world where they can legally be together - but he cannot show them the amazing person he's become because it’s a step too far from the faithful one they raised. Sorry little boy watching Attenborough in the mosque, the price of your survival will be your soul.

The loss and cultural dysmorphia shouldered by the world's refugees is something the rest of us can never understand.

Of the tangible privileges I’ve been forced to confront (I’m white, able-bodied, well-educated, cis) my statehood had never occurred to me. I get visa-free travel all over the Commonwealth. If I join an expat community overseas, I’ll never be called a migrant and it’ll never be called a ghetto.

But when my partner and I went on our first (and last) holiday together, he was detained on entry, denied his phone, interrogated for hours and threatened with deportation. When we last attempted our regular Calais donations-drop, he was denied entry to France altogether. Apparently - although no one had cared to alert those affected - refugees lost visa-free travel during Brexit. My point is that the power balance in our relationship is defined by more than gender. So burka or bralette, it's my body, my love, my choice.

The days we spend in no-man's-land working to truly understand each other are the reason we're strong as steel. When there are no points to be won from winning, when what's at stake is losing epic love, you step out of the trenches and meet in the middle.

Today, it feels like society is ripping from the pull of political tribalism. We debate our differences as if we want to win, not as if we want to stay together. We grind our heels into ideological perspectives when there is truth in between and to believe otherwise is absurd.

If I never stepped out of the trenches for him, my world would be tragically smaller. I’d still be peeling bananas from top to bottom.