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"It's a big problem because guys are traveling outside Lebanon so the girls are not meeting the guy they want," says Mayssa Farhat, a 23-year-old wedding planner. This situation makes the Internet more appealing for mainstream Lebanese women, adds Farhat, who once tried an online dating network herself for a few months. She was 20 at the time, and quickly decided she'd be better off giving nature, fate or romantic destiny a little more time to do its thing.
Farhat says the majority of large-scale weddings taking place in Beirut this season are for couples who will soon follow the groom's job prospects to Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the United States. In staggering numbers, Dubai tops the list of immediate destinations for Lebanon's latest generation of newlyweds. However, Farhat stresses that most people still expect to meet their potential mate in the course of everyday life - in the workplace or on the street or, most common of all, at university. They are not, in other words, resorting to the conventions of arranged marriages.
But even the traditional ways of finding a husband weren't working for Melhim. Her parents were cousins and married when they were both 15. Her two sisters met their future husbands at university and at work, respectively, but Melhim never went to university and her work environment is populated almost exclusively by other women. Her responsibilities at home don't give her much opportunity to go out and cruise for potential mates. These limitations, she says, are further compounded by Lebanon's currently skittish street life. Due to the current situation, people are less likely to mix in public places.
"It's two summers in a row that there is a war," she says. "Last summer with Israel, and this summer is even worse. The men from abroad that used to come here didn't and those that did can't really go out."
The Internet seemed more efficient than trying to meet a man every Sunday, she says, and more discreet than being set-up by family or friends. The demise of a past relationship already cost Melhim one friendship with her would-be matchmaker. With an online campaign to find a man, she surmised, Melhim could set her own standards and cast her net wide. After all, the man who could meet her criteria would most likely be living abroad.
Melhim admits that she doesn't know much about computers, so she paid a graphic designer $200 to build her a web page and paid another $130 to advertise it internationally.
"For marriage purpose, I am looking for a serious Christian man, who is certainly not married or engaged, who has a strong personality, and who is intelligent, attractive, generous, ambitious, honest and caring," Melhim states on her now-functional web page entitled "Lebanese Rose."
"He should be a free man aged between 38 and 42, financially able to have a family, and should be looking for a Christian, mature, serious, loyal and romantic Lebanese girl, who would like to have a family of several children."
Melhim's virtual quest plays out against a growing cyberworld of romantic possibility. Just as social networking, dating and marriage sites like facebook.com, lavalife.com and match.com have become internationally popular, pan-Arab sites like qiran.com and arablounge.com, along with regional sites such as lebadate.com, have all cropped up in recent years.
In February, Solange Sraih, 44, launched "Pom d'Amour," which functions as a traditional matrimonial agency for Lebanese living within and outside of Lebanon but with a high-tech twist - it's a Web site. For a fee of $200 for a man and $300 for a woman, Sraih interviews her clients personally before partnering potential mates for a date.
Sraih says that most of her 150 clients are independent career-types who are looking for companions to share their lives. She has more women than men signed on to "Pom d'Amour." Her male clients are mostly Lebanese men living in France, Canada, the UAE, Qatar and Tunisia, among other countries. Sraih checks their documentation (to make sure they aren't married) and arranges dates for them when they return to Lebanon (usually somewhere casual, such as a cafe).
The service was a timely idea, Sraih insists, that wouldn't have worked before the war.
"People realize they are losing time. Many left, lost friends," she says. "Circles of friends have shrunk and everyone is working harder to make ends meet, so there is less time to meet people."
Melhim says that the idea of a virtual marriage proposal doesn't diminish her romantic dream. Life has taught her that she can choose who she falls in love with, she says. Life has also taught her that the qualities of the man she would choose to love for life.
The man that she would choose, as she states on "Lebanese Rose," should be a Lebanese citizen who carries a second passport for Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, the United States or a country in Africa. Melhim, it turns out, has hopes to raise her family abroad.
Her mother, meanwhile, says she's too picky. Melhim says that she just knows what she wants. A third lesson that life has taught her, she says, is that she can't have her perfect life in Lebanon.
In a report entitled "Insecurity, Migration and Return: The Case of Lebanon following the Summer 2006 War," Hourani and Sensenig-Dabbous found that the spike in Lebanese leaving Lebanon wasn't a temporary phenomenon tied to last summer's war. Rather, they concluded, the increase in emigration - among Muslims and Christians alike, among men and women alike - continued due to the events that followed. According to Hourani and Sensenig-Dabbous, it is part of "a distinct manifestation of a new political crisis in an already troubled land."
The study also noted that young, highly-educated men and women - the ones who could help turn things around in Lebanon - are the very ones most likely to leave - or to want to leave - the country. "Lebanon seems to be preparing to enter a vicious cycle of proliferating insecurity, accelerating brain drain and rising emigration," it concluded.
For her part, Sraih remains optimistic, insisting that even if some of her clients do want to leave Lebanon, they want to do so only temporarily. "They want to get married and have children and leave for awhile," she says. "But the dream is to come back here when things have improved." Forget nature, fate or romantic destiny. In all likelihood, only time will tell.
By Maya Khourchid and William Wheeler
Daily Star staff
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