In this personal essay, the writer reflects on how the repercussions of the Ja’fari personal status code have intruded into the most intimate spaces of life. Through her own experience in love, she explores how sectarian legislation transforms the emotional terrain on which love itself must now navigate.

Before the controversy around the Ja‘fari personal status code, I had already spent years avoiding falling in love with someone from a different sect. Not because I believed in these classifications – I don’t, but I understood what could cost me. I knew how easily love could turn into conflict, and how quickly that conflict could threaten both my life and the life of the person I loved. 

I had seen this logic of division play out inside my own home. My family drew a clear line between my street cat—common, short-haired, born outside—and our other cat, a fluffy Persian breed. The first was seen as unworthy of care, a creature that belonged to the street, along with any offspring of its kind. They tried more than once to throw it out while I was away. At one point, they even threatened to throw me out with it.  

That distinction—based on origin and appearance, neither of which the cat had chosen—gave me an early lesson in how stigma works and in what could happen if I fell in love with a man from a different region, background, or religious affiliation. What kind of “shame” would I be accused of bringing home? 

To be born into a sectarian, class-stratified, or a regionally divided society is to have identities imposed at birth—identities not chosen, yet woven into every detail of your life. 

I learned to avoid emotional relationships with anyone whose background did not match mine. It became a rule I followed carefully. But love does not ask for permission. It arrives at the moment you are most distracted, most resistant, almost as if life insists on showing you the beauty you were trying to deny yourself. 

I still remember the day I first noticed him. His unguarded expressions. His constant laughter in every photograph. As always, my instinct was to try to categorize him, to find out his sectarian affiliation. But there was no trace, no hint. And asking such a question outright, especially as a secular woman, would have felt crude, even sectarian. 

I decided to take a risk. I told myself I would get to know him only as a friend. We spoke for hours, in conversations that drifted through history and politics, shaped by questions we had both been carrying for years. Then came the day I found out what his sect was. He does not see himself as someone who “belongs” to a sect, but that background exists nonetheless. It always does. 

To be born into a sectarian, class-stratified, or a regionally divided society is to have identities imposed at birth—identities not chosen, yet woven into every detail of your life. Even if you refuse to recognise them or their significance, society will force you to account for them. 

I tried to stop my heart from responding to his intelligence, his kindness, to the many qualities I had always imagined in the man I would love. But he was direct. He told me he wanted a serious relationship, one that would last “until the blood of the heart dries, but love does not.” 

That was when fear set in. 

Not only fear of my family’s possible reaction, but fear of the law itself. Fear of the Ja‘fari code. Even if my husband were Hanafi, the code my family followed, he could—without my knowledge—change the legal framework governing our marriage. A contract signed in love could be transformed into a fragile partnership under a legal system that does not respect my rights. 

How could I convince my family, when I was not convinced, to marry someone under a legal framework that could strip me of my children once they turned seven? I had fought to keep my cat. How could I accept the possibility of losing my future children? 

How could I live with the idea that a home I will build for decades of my life could be taken away from me without compensation? Or with the knowledge that the proposed code contains provisions deeply degrading to women, reducing partnership to sexual access and male consent, even at the expense of his wife. 

In conversations with friends, many of whom are getting married without even realising such a code exists, believing their sect offers protection, I kept hearing the same responses.  

“It won’t apply to us. It only targets certain people. I trust the man I love.” 

Trust? Am I supposed to hang my life, and my children’s future, on trust alone? 

Love on its own is not a legal safeguard. I don’t say this only because I am an anxious woman, but because even if I trust the man, how can I trust what life might do to him, or to us?  

The law should strengthen my trust in my partner. It should guarantee both our rights in the future. Instead, it makes me more sectarian, more fearful, more anixious. 

Even if the man I love reassures me, promising that we could marry under any contract that calms my fears, even a civil marriage abroad, as some Lebanese women have done. 

The law should strengthen my trust in my partner. It should guarantee both our rights in the future. Instead, it makes me more sectarian, more fearful, more anixious. 

How do I control these anxieties in the absence of a national framework that protects my rights? What about couples who cannot afford to travel for a civil marriage? What about women who fear losing the men they love if they ask for shared guardianship or a civil contract? I believe that a decent man would never force his partner to suffer for asserting her rights, but what happens if our paths diverge? What happens if those safeguards fail? 

And what about the women who are not given the option to choose the type of contract at all? Who are denied a choice from the start? 

This law does not regulate marriage. It reshapes desire, fear, and belonging. The road to love, once personal and uncertain in its own ways, has become something else entirely—more anxious, more conditional, and far more sectarian than it ever needed to be.