What did our parents have that we didn't have? Nabil Shawkat ponders the trials and tribulations of modern romance I will call her Julia. She is 37 and holds a successful job in Cairo. She also gets job offers in Seattle, New York and places such as Fiji and East Timor. She has been dating Karim, an executive with a Swiss firm, who was posted in Cairo but his next promotion is taking him to Sweden. We have been sitting in her living room for an hour debating the significance of the move for their relationship. Can she find a job in Sweden? Is it time she just focuses on having a child and try to pick up with the career where she left it off, two or three years down the line? She shakes her gorgeous hair and leans back, turning her back on me slightly to get a better view of the sun stroking the river with a gritty harshness that escapes us in the air conditioned room. I move my eyes from the window to take in the sensuous lines of her figure, kept in shape by morning yoga classes with a top instructor in Zamalek. Julia has a simple but immaculate taste in clothes. The flat she lives in, although not hers, could be. She has a collection of fast-decoration objects. Rush rugs, framed posters, photographs she took herself (her ex-boyfriend is a famed photographer), and oriental-style lamps bought from a fancy but moderately priced shop in Al-Hussein. She has mustered the art of quick decoration. She lived in six different flats over the past 10 years. She has just had a new hairdo for LE300, but knows how to get mad at taxi drivers who try to overcharge her. She gets mad at me for not getting mad at them. I do, of course, get mad at them, but I do it at my own pace. For Julia, this is not enough. When she's mad, you have to be just as mad as she is. She's a tough woman. She can also be soft and sweet, particularly when her work schedule is not too busy. And, she knows how to stay in control, perhaps too well. I have known Julia for almost six years now. I have known many Julias over the past two decades. When you're with Julia, you don't try to please Julia. You don't make overt compliments, unless she asks for them, or she'll think you're a jerk. I have no problem with that, for I feel comfortable insulting people, except those I don't know (hard to guess what would hurt them most). She likes to flirt and I like to be flirted with. She often tells me how gorgeous I look, and I take it as a hint that she does not like my current girlfriend. In the normal course of events, my relationships frequently break, which pleases Julia. It proves she has always been right. In the normal course of events, hers too (though better planned, better choreographed) end. This keeps us close, in a link of romantic despair, a bond of matrimonial doom, a limbo of jumbled affairs. Julia walks to the kitchen, barefoot on a floor cleaned, twice a week, by a fat lady with five kids and an unemployed husband. She moves with the nonchalance of a hangover yet to come. I like her kitchen. The other Julias would have nothing but a tomato and a decaying piece of expensive cheese in their fridges. Not this one. Julia actually shops for groceries. I like that. It is reassuring that a friend can still make time to buy tomatoes and overpriced salad leaves. It means they are on top of their lives. It means they may, on occasion, pick up their phones before the answering machine does. In the three minutes Julia was in the kitchen I have managed to develop my ideas on relationships to a full-fledged, global- reaching, magnum opus, with implications for the jet set that could disturb the metre on their frequent flyer mileage scheme. I wait until she settles back on the sofa, takes her first sip of a tall glass, and I get down to business. "Julia," I said, "my parents stayed together for 40 years, in a marriage that, by your standards or mine, was not happy. They also lived in the same town, almost all their lives. They moved house once, and only because they were told that the Germans were going to bomb Heliopolis. Now, our friends change jobs every five years or less, live in the same town for no longer than three to four years, congregate with people of absolutely different backgrounds, and then wonder what went wrong. Nothing went wrong. Things changed. And we like it. We like it this way. We just have to live with the consequences." Julia did not contest the point. The evidence was all around us. Our set was all blown apart, periodically, repeatedly, by the ravages of travel and career. And, yet, it kept travelling, and falling in, and out of, love. It also kept blaming itself for the consequences. What did our parents have that we didn't have? Why are our romances so brief, so terminal? "Well," Julia started, "I can, I assume, catch up with Karim at Christmas, see what kind of arrangements he has by then. If I like it, I should perhaps quit my job and live on his salary for a while. It is just too risky. What would happen if things did not work out? What would happen, with me and the baby, once I decide to go back to work? If things do not work out, would Karim let me have the baby? And do I really want to be a single mother?" I could tell her that things actually may work out, but I didn't. She can be a romantic, but she's not dumb. Karim is a wonderful guy. He has a successful job in the pharmaceuticals business. He is solid and sane and loving, just the profile for a man who would make a good husband. He speaks four languages, including a Belgian one -- he told me its name, but I forgot it. He is a good tennis player, so good, in fact, that you don't want to play with him. He has an 11 year-old daughter from a previous marriage, but he is ready to have another one with Julia, and right away, which is an advantage. The marriage will last. It will. It will. For at least four years, perhaps more, I assured Julia. "Do it. You only meet someone like Karim once every six or seven years, when you're lucky. Do something with Karim now. You need a break from work anyway. You used to look like a wet kiss, before you got your last promotion. Since then, they have been trying to kill you. Work is a trap, marriage is a trap. At least change the scenery," I said. It used to be that when you wanted someone to do something, you enticed them with the greener grass on the other side. Now, you have to trash their lives first. It cheers them up, and it is fun. Julia's face lit up slightly, as she pondered the one or two years of freedom that she may get out of the new situation. Unless the future is job related, there is very little you can do about it, she probably thought, even if it is not in these very words. Will she ever be able to swap control for a new, unpredictable, life? Julia sat up, looked intensely at an empty spot in the oriental carpet, reclined, and said nothing.
