When Loving is Giving: Caring practices as ‘doing’ love in Jordanian and Syrian young adults’ intimate relationships in Amman

Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork among young Jordanian and Syrian women and men residing in the city of Amman, this thesis examines the entanglement of the notions of love, intimacy, and care in gendered couple dynamics. It focuses on the everyday relational practices of forming affective bonds, addressing both the romantic aspects and the negotiation of the gendered inequalities embedded in these processes. The theoretical framework incorporates elements of practice-oriented approaches to forming social bonds, Bourdieusian practice theory, and Suad Joseph’s theory of intimate relationality. The fieldwork was conducted in different districts of western and central Amman over several phases between 2012 and 2016. Jordanian and Syrian interlocutors alike were mainly university-educated and middle-class. Although some of them were already married, the key interlocutors did not yet have any children.

The thesis argues that, in young Ammanis’ marital and premarital relationships, mundane practices of sharing experiences and providing care are important elements in constituting love as an affective bond. Such practices are addressed here as performative ways of ‘doing’ love. For the interlocutors, deeply felt forms of love and intimacy are embedded in quotidian aspects of shared daily life, such as eating and sleeping. Equally importantly, they experience love as an interpersonal force that makes people do things for their loved ones, and they feel it through giving and receiving care (ʾihtimām), including its material aspects.

In the ideal Ammani marital dynamics, spouses do love performatively by engaging in daily caring practices that are inscribed by connectivity; at the same time, gender-specific household duties are a way to care for one’s partner. Wives do love by making coffee in the morning, keeping the home tidy, and cooking meals. Husbands express love by providing material wellbeing, bringing home everything that is needed, and taking the family out. Some of these dynamics are already present during the dating or engagement stages, especially in the rare cases of cohabitation. Given the importance of practical and material forms of care in the interlocutors’ experiences of romantic and marital intimacy, the thesis argues that making a strict analytical distinction between emotional fulfillment and pragmatic factors in their relationships is problematic. Moreover, unlike common narratives that address love in modernizing societies through emerging notions of the individual self, this study focuses on relational aspects of doing love, such as processes of shaping selves.

The study addresses agency by focusing on its skill-related modalities, as the interlocutors commonly shared relationship experiences and stories specifically in order to learn about relationships themselves, and a substantial part of the data was also generated through this practice. The various sets of skills that interlocutors used included skills in doing and channeling love, in controlling the power dynamic by regulating how much they gave, and in shaping their partner’s qualities and behavior. Skill-related agency enabled them to achieve their relationship goals as well as to negotiate gender-based authority structures and inequalities. Another significant factor in shaping the power dynamics of interlocutors’ relationships was love itself, which was experienced as a force that compels people to do things for their loved ones, including making compromises and sacrifices. This aspect of love had certain effects that contributed to shifting normative expectations regarding connective spousal responsibilities, but the interlocutors’ most extreme sacrifices for love rarely involved transcending normative gender roles.

This study’s detailed analysis of everyday affective relationship dynamics demonstrates the importance of practical dimensions of care in the processes of creating and maintaining love, which also contributes to explaining why many young people in Jordan and elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region believe that love can develop even within “traditional marriages.” The empirical analysis presented in this thesis captures conservative forms of love that align with both customary “traditional” marriage practices and normative gender roles and hierarchies but can still be highly romantic and passionate. Moreover, it dismantles the perceived divide between the intimate experiences of socially conservative and liberal young adults in an Arab-majority society by demonstrating that there are similarities in the dynamics of love and gendered caring practices in their relationships.