Proposals

So over the last couple of months, I've had a couple of Moroccan girls (yes, as best as I can tell, they were girls, meaning under the age of 18) essentially ask me to marry them. To get more specific:

So at the end of December, before I had started teaching English classes, I had started answering random, sporadic questions about English in what largely resembled tutoring. On one of those days in late December, some teenage girls asked me to speak with them, so we stepped into a classroom together. I assumed that they had some questions about learning English. But there weren't any questions about English. There was some small talk going on in the room, all in Arabic. Then, seemingly out of the blue, the following exchange occurred, all in Darija:

Moroccan girl: How long will you be living in Morocco?
Me: Two years.
Same Moroccan girl: When you return to America, will I be going with you?

Since I've been asked how I replied, I'll add here that I gave the diplomatic response, "I don't know." She seemed irritated at my evasiveness, adding at that point, "You don't know much." I just let the conversation dissipate, since it was not a dialogue which I was particularly interested in having!

Then, last month, in January, I was sitting in a classroom, actually about to start tutoring some Moroccan girls in English, when another Moroccan girl walked into the classroom, and asked me in Darija if she and I were going to get married. Right after she left the classroom, when I turned back to the girls there for tutoring, one of them said to me in Darija, referring to the girl who asked me about getting married, "She's a little crazy."

Some comparative commentary here: while my experiences with discussions of marriage, or insinuations thereof, have tended toward the humorous, many female PCVs in Morocco have had very different experiences. Notably, many female PCVs in Morocco have experienced unwanted attention which has made them uncomfortable. And, some female PCVs have received actual marriage proposals, and some female PCVs have received many of them. One female PCV in Morocco in the 1990s received 60!