The Thread That Holds Us in the Power of Love

This is a personal story for those born into the spaces between worlds. These are the children of intermarriages—the outsiders who never belonged to any tribe. To those who’ve felt like mistakes, like intrusions, enduring the weight of invisible exclusion and the quiet violence of not fitting in.

It’s for couples daring to cross the boundaries of tradition. They choose love over convention. They dream of free, colorful futures together, unaware that may bring their children into a world unkind to difference. It’s a reflection on what those children might endure, the silent battles they’ll fight as they navigate identities too vast for the boxes imposed on them.

And it’s for the guardians of tradition, who hold the power of the collective—strong, insular, and unyielding. It’s a reminder to look closer, to see us, the seemingly insignificant individuals crushed without notice under the weight of your comfort zones.

This is not a warning but a call to understand. To embrace the power of unity without erasing those who live in its margins.

HOF – Young hearts fall in love all the time, recklessly and fearlessly. Love, in its rawest form, is blind and blinding—a force of nature that both builds and destroys with equal power. It shapes nations and shatters them, leaving lives and legacies forever altered. When we love, we surrender, losing the boundaries of self in the presence of the other. Love can unify tribes, establish empires, and reconcile enemies. Yet, it can challenge existing structures and fracture traditions.

Growing up in Syria, love was often the ultimate act of rebellion. In a society bound by tradition and restraint, it felt like the most forbidden of fruits. It was dangerous, transformative, and—most of all—frightening. For years, I dreamed only of turning 18, leaving Syria behind, and finding a place where I could love freely—not to escape politics or religion, but simply to feel safe in vulnerability.

Yet when that moment came, the path forward was blocked. My family, especially my well-meaning but overbearing aunt Zainab, urged me to stay. A promise to help me leave was deferred. Soon, I enrolled at Al-Baath University in Homs, with my aunt ensuring I had the financial support needed to pursue my studies. Homs, a city steeped in conservatism, became the stage for my collision with destiny.

It was there, amidst the stifling norms and whispers of what was ‘proper,’ that I met Sjena. She was unlike anyone I had ever encountered—a woman who embodied everything I didn’t realize I was searching for. Born in Yugoslavia, she had moved with her parents to Syria at the age of five when the war broke out in the Balkans. A Syrian-Bosnian raised in Hama, her very existence defied the rigid boundaries of identity that shaped our world. She carried the contradictions of her heritage with a grace that made her seem almost otherworldly.

She was beautiful, yes. But it wasn’t just her looks that captivated me. It was her intelligence and her elegance. She refused to fit the mold of what a woman in our society was expected to be. She didn’t wear a headscarf, a decision that spoke volumes in a place where conformity often dictated survival. Her aura was a paradox: she was at once an insider and an outsider, familiar yet foreign. And for someone like me, whose entire life had been an exercise in navigating between worlds, she was irresistible.

My identity was born of contradiction. My father, a Damascene with Bahá’í-Shiite roots, came from a family of Ottoman-era traders whose legacy stretched across continents. He opposed the Baath after 1963, was imprisoned for it, and wore his resistance like a scar. My mother, on the other hand, was a Sunni Baathist from rural Eastern Ghouta—a secular activist from a conservative background, and one of the first women in her town to abandon the headscarf.

I grew up between these two worlds—my father’s Ottoman nostalgia and my mother’s Arab socialist dream. Their arguments over politics and power were my first education. Summers with Aunt Zainab, a quiet Bahá’í who split her time between Jordan and Australia, added yet another layer. From early on, I learned to live among contradictions, to see identity not as fixed but as a mosaic of clashing truths.

It was perhaps inevitable that I would fall for someone like Sjena—a woman whose very presence challenged the rigidity of our surroundings. She, too, was the daughter of intermarriage, and she carried the weight of that duality with effortless strength. But in Syria, where love is often another battleground for politics and tradition, our connection was doomed before it even began.

Sjena’s father came from a relatively conservative family in Hama. Her Bosniak mother was far more approachable, though. Her warmth welcomed everyone into her orbit. Despite this, I knew that, as a suitor, I was destined to fail. My father’s background was complex and controversial. My mother’s political stance was Baathist. I didn’t have a clear allegiance to any one identity. All of it weighed on me, making me feel like an unlikely match—but I couldn’t help myself.

On my last day at Al-Baath University, as I prepared to transfer to Damascus University as a sophomore, Sjena came with me to the bus terminal to see me off. It was there, amidst the noise of departing buses and fleeting farewells, that I confessed my love to her. It was impulsive, raw, and heartfelt—a moment that marked the beginning of a long and daunting long-distance secrete relationship. Her eyes held both hope and hesitation as she waved me off.

As the bus pulled away, I felt the gravity of what I’d initiated.

To this day, I can’t untangle whether my inability to fully commit to her or let her go was a personal failure or a political one. Was it my own insecurity, my fear of defying the expectations placed upon me? Or was it the weight of a society that treats love as a challenge to order and tradition?

Sjena is long gone from my life, but the echoes of what we shared linger. In many ways, she represents more than a lost love. She embodies the spaces I’ve tried to navigate, the bridges I’ve tried to build between conflicting worlds. Loving her was like trying to reconcile the irreconcilable, to find unity in a world defined by division.

The political backdrop of Syrian society looms large over our story. The Assad regime has fallen. As a result, the perennial debate about ‘minorities’ and ‘secular values’ has resurfaced. This is opposed to the rise of ‘Islamism’, which is favored by many within the Sunni Muslim majority. Yet, it is precisely the interactions between these minorities and the majority, their ability to freely engage and build bridges, that offers the only hope of preventing a fragmented Syria, splintered along lines of identity.

Ironically, our parents’ generation was born in post-French Syria. They had more freedom to navigate these lines during the relatively liberal governance of the time. This was between the 1930s and early 1970s. But Sjena and I were members of a generation born under the Baathist Assad regime. While posturing as a protector of minorities, the Assads actually enforced conservative social structures and boundaries. This fostered segregation, mistrust, and fear among communities, dividing towns, cities, religions, and ethnicities. The conservative Islamism of today is not an organic evolution but the byproduct of a regime that hijacked minority narratives, turning them into tools of division rather than unity.

I still wonder what might have been if things had been different. If I had been braver. If she had been freer. If the world around us had been less rigid. But perhaps the lesson lies here: love, at its core, is never about ease or possibility. It’s about what it reveals in us. It shows the risks we are willing to take. It highlights the battles we are willing to fight. It forces us to confront the truths about the societies we live in and the selves we choose to be.

Sjena was my forbidden love, and she remains my ghost. In her absence, I am left with the question that haunts so many of us: was it worth it?

Perhaps the answer lies not in the love itself but in its purpose. Its power brings two people from different worlds together to create something greater than themselves. That something can be a family. It can be a community. It may even be the seed of a nation. Love’s strength lies in its ability to merge differences into a shared purpose.

Sjena and I once reconnected. We clung to the idea that holding on to each other could embody something greater than us. This happened at a time when our country was being reborn into a new dream. Perhaps we were wrong, betting on the wrong horse and the wrong dream.

Fourteen years after the Arab Spring, we find ourselves as fragmented Syrians in exile. I live in Germany; she lives in Sweden. Syria, across the Mediterranean and the heart of Europe, feels both distant and painfully close. We lost our country, and we lost each other. Yet, the love remains, stubborn and unyielding, for it is hard—impossible even—to fall out of love.

What are we to do with all that power, all that love? Should we direct it once again toward a lost cause in the hopeless landscapes of the Middle East? Or should we look for a new dream, right here, where we are?

If love is to have meaning, perhaps it must teach us not only to hold on but also to let go, to pivot, and to build anew—even if the dream we build is not the one we envisioned all those years ago.

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