For six months, I let my fiancé and his family mock me in Arabic, thinking I was just some naive American girl who didn’t understand anything. They had no idea I was fluent in Arabic!

For six months, I let my fiancé and his family mock me in Arabic, thinking I was just some naive American girl who didn’t understand anything. They had no idea I was fluent in Arabic! And then they regretted it…

They believed that I was nothing more than a naive American who had fallen for a charming man from the Middle East. They called me “the silly blonde,” laughed at my accent, and made fun of my attempts to learn some Arabic phrases to fit in.

But they didn’t know the truth.

I had spent 2 years in Lebanon teaching English — long enough to master Arabic, from sweet expressions to sharp insults. However, as Rami introduced me to his family, something inside me told me to stay quiet about it. Maybe it was intuition, maybe curiosity. Therefore, I pretended not to understand.

Initially, their comments were subtle. His mother whispered to her sister, “She’ll never last a month cooking for him.” His brother joked, “He’ll come running back when he wants a real woman.”

I smiled politely, acting confused every time they laughed behind my back.Yet each word I heard cut through their polite masks — not because it hurt, but because it revealed exactly who they were.

Rami wasn’t any better. In public, he was charming, attentive, the perfect fiancé. But in Arabic, he’d laugh with his cousins and say things like, “She’s cute, but not too bright.” And I’d sit right next to him, pretending I didn’t hear a thing.Continue reading…