Pragmatism

“Well, if all else fails, we can always get married”

Immediately after speaking those words I turned to my boyfriend, expecting him to have an expression on his face that was a mixture of horror and panic, thinking of ways to make it sound as innocent as possible. In stead, he was grinning.

“I was actually thinking that myself”

Holy crap! No panicking? No frantically slamming the car brakes (and we were on a highway too, oops), no red-faced, stuttered objections? I found myself on unknown territory.

We had talked about marriage, true enough, but only as one of those “in the future” things. In fact, he had said once that he wanted to make a million dollars first and then marry me, which in my overly pragmatic European (Dutch…) mind is a bit like saying “I want to roller blade across the Sahara desert first”.

Either way, I think that short (and not entirely serious) conversation we had while driving down the highway to Beirut planted the seed of an idea in both our minds.

I was supposed to get a work visa that would be valid for a year. Before I moved to Lebanon I didn’t actively look into getting a visa, both because I was rather busy with my graduation but also because my boyfriend assured me it would be easy to get a visa once I was here and there was nothing to worry about.

As it obviously turned out, it wasn’t that easy at all. After only a few weeks in the country, we had been in and out of countless government offices that, to me, did not look very official or governmenty to begin with.

During the work visa application process, we found out that one of the requirements is a “down payment” of a sizeable sum of money into a bank account, which can not be accessed until the applicant of the visa leaves the country again. To me, this felt like having to be “bought” into the country, which felt incredibly stupid and wrong.

In stead, we thought, we might as well be pragmatic about it and admit that we’re madly in love anyway, want to stay together forever and have children (he didn’t panic at that one, either!) anyway, so we should just skip the whole visa thing.

We are getting married and I couldn’t be happier. Pragmatism rocks.