For six months, I allowed myself to be mocked in Arabic by my fiancé and his family.

They considered me nothing more than a naive American woman who had fallen in love with a charming man from the Middle East. They called me “the dumb blonde,” laughed at my accent, and mocked my attempts to learn a few Arabic phrases to fit in.

But they did not know the truth.

I had taught English in Lebanon for two years—long enough to become fluent in Arabic, from sweet expressions to sharp insults. But when Rami introduced me to his family, something inside me told me to keep quiet about it. Perhaps it was intuition, perhaps curiosity. So I pretended I didn’t understand.

At first, their comments were subtle. His mother whispered to her sister, “She won’t last four weeks cooking for him.” His brother joked, “He’ll come running when he wants a real woman.”

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