Loving In Arabic Is Different To Loving In English

Dalia Al-Dujaili explores the beautiful yet complicated ways in which she expresses love in both Arabic and English.

My phone buzzes. I read the text; “Don’t worry my love, take your time <3”. It’s from my cab driver; he’s waiting outside. I’m in Amman and the text is in Arabic, so I don’t think anything of it. But as I receive another love heart emoji from him, I come to realise how strange this would be if he was texting me in English. You see, “love” in English is different to “love” or “حب” in Arabic. 

A friend of my father’s who I’m interviewing for a piece and whom I have never met voice notes me, opening with “habibti, binti”, meaning “my love, my daughter” – again, this is common in Arabic, it’s simply a sign of respect and civility to refer to someone as your love and your relation or family member. This is by far my favourite part of Arab culture, when strangers speak to me as if they’ve known me for years, when they greet me as if greeting a close relative of theirs. I have English friends who I’ve actually known for years who I still feel awkward in telling them I love them because for some reason, it feels so much more weighted, so serious and bound to commitment. This British awkwardness and coldness makes every social interaction seem so staged.

In Arabic, love is given and received liberally and perhaps in its most innocent state. To tell your waiter or doctor that they are your love and your life is simply to be polite and show respect and gratitude. In English, although love is spared for those who have truly earned it, I have always felt removed from it. Love here, in the West, is packaged and sold as an impossible dream, as the (now outdated) film “(500) Days of Summer” tries to tell us. Love can be bought and can be sold in films, songs and greeting cards. Is it real? In my English tongue, love is often reserved for romance and not much else – or if it is something else, like platonic love or familial love, it is not as divine, valuable and sacred as romance. Love in the Middle East is free and not treated with such preciousness. Tenderness towards your fellow human is what is expected; it’s as if the person sitting next to you in the cafe knows how much you’re going through, or what you’ve been through, and wants you to go easy on yourself.

In the West, love is earned through hard work and one must be deserving of it. I wonder if that’s because of our consumer-driven society, we’ve all become so accustomed to being so hard on ourselves all the time for not being rich enough, skinny enough, cool enough, and thus love becomes a product in itself, to be earnt and not given unconditionally. When I visit the Middle East, I am both an outsider and an insider, both foreigner and local. This existence, which is by no means unique to me, gives me the most remarkable ability to view interactions both objectively and subjectively. So when, as a British-Arab child, I would enter a bakery in Amman and my mother would ask the baker for a box of ka’ak (an Iraqi biscuit) and he would reply, “t’tdelaleen, habibti” (“you deserve to be spoilt, my love”), I would find it both strange and familiar. It would feel so comfortable and natural, but also very surprising; the bakers in England don’t speak like that, I would think to myself, they just say “Sure”. You see, the tone doesn’t translate into English as it is intended in Arabic. Feelings are felt entirely differently in Arabic to English. So when you are familiar with both languages and cultures, and both feel like home, it can give you a strange association with the sentiment of loving. 

Arabs are masters in expressing their love. We’ve written some of the world’s most epic love poems. If you think Shakespeare or John Donne was being intense, you haven’t heard Nizar Qabbani’s or Al-Mutanabbi’s verses. In addition to the infinite (okay, not quite infinite, but well over 50) ways to express love, like “rou7hi”, “3youni”, “3omry”, “hayati”, “7hoby”, “galby”, to name a few, there are also 14 stages of love In Arabic, each progressing in its intensity. Try to explain “love-bombing” to an Arab and they will stare back at you blankly. We have multiple words for the way in which we obsessively love our partners. “Gharam”, which almost translates into being so devoted to another your life is indebted to them, is one my mother uses often when explaining how two people have fallen in love. But others are “wasab” and “istikana”, which both mean different things but similarly attempt to express the excruciating pain of deep, romantic love, perhaps an unhealthy amount of love. My own grandfather, before he died, casually told me, ​​يزيد جمال وجهك كل يوم ولي كبد يذوب ويضمحل, meaning, “The beauty of your face increases every day, it makes my liver weaker and decay”. 

Of course, it’s a double-edged sword, and having grown up in a very British environment during my formative years, I’ve come to resent how romantic love and sexual love are riddled with shame in Arabic. In Arabic songs, it’s considered “3ayb” (“shameful”) for a male singer to refer to his female love because this would imply a sexual relationship, so in many cases, they use the masculine: “habibti” becomes “habibi”. Because we Arabs do irony so well, we’ve made it so that when discussing deep and intense love in ways which would sound bizarre and borderline obsessive in English, we mustn’t outwardly acknowledge that there is a recipient of that love; no, that is “3ayb.”

This notion of shame is widely discussed amongst today’s Arab diaspora, especially women who are almost always the subject of this shame. As children, we spoke of our teenage romances in hushed voices at family gatherings. There would perhaps be nothing worse than someone’s auntie finding out that you had kissed a boy or talked to boys because that was “haram” (sinful) for young girls. Luckily, my own mother attempted to shield me as much as possible from this mentality, so I was able to some extent to tell family members about my boyfriends, but it was certainly still not the “appropriate” thing. Last Christmas, when my uncles and aunties were introduced to my English boyfriend at the time, they of course showered him with love, warmth and generous hospitality, as any Arab will do. But some part of me did wonder whether I was being a “good Arab girl” by implying the fact that I have sex and I date men. 

As a child, I would recoil from Arab displays of affection. I’m still not entirely comfortable with how expressive my family can be, with how abundantly affectionate they are. The polite, reserved British child in me still finds the adoration and adulation of Arab love head-achey, repellent and distrustful. I’m still not entirely comfortable with the overindulgence of hugs and kisses of relatives and their hyperbolic love for me. It’s even caused huge issues between my mother and I – she doesn’t understand why I would find this often overbearing, sentimental behaviour frustrating, and I don’t understand why she always insists on telling me how the light shines from my eyes, how I’m the most beautiful flower she’s ever seen, how madly she loves me. But, instead of fighting this difference in receiving and showing love, I’ve tried to embrace both ways of loving. 

How I give love and receive love will change depending on which language I’m speaking and which context I’m in and, whilst that can be confusing and tiresome, I think it’s also beautiful.

Being both Arab and British is like wearing different skins and experiencing love in more than one way, seeing love as a multitude of things beyond other people’s comprehension, in a way many people cannot experience. In this way, my mixed and conflicting cultural identity has been the greatest gift of love I have known.

Read the other stories in our LOVE edition.