Publicity, discretion, and secrecy through becoming a Moroccan couple

Women and men in Morocco keep out-of-wedlock relationships largely secret, whereas marriage, in contrast, allows them to openly become a couple. In this dissertation, I examine how people collectively handle publicity, discretion, and secrecy in creating couples’ relationships. Based on fourteen months of fieldwork in Morocco’s region of Skhirat-Témara, I elucidate how people value, contest, and embed relationships both outside and through marriage within their social networks.
The Moroccans in my research generally agree that sexual relations outside of marriage are shameful, sinful, and illegal—and therefore need to remain secret. Nonetheless, they also foreground out-of-wedlock intimacies as pleasurable opportunities and delightful tales to share. Furthermore, Moroccan men and women forge their out-of-wedlock connections with the continuous involvement of family members, neighbours, and friends. Together, they create intricate cover-ups in cooperative discretion. However, others also enact doubtful investigations in persistent efforts to uncover out-of-wedlock affairs. Modes of discretion and doubt, I argue, represent two divergent ways of productively dealing with uncertainty over what might be true about all of their social connections. While publicizing out-of-wedlock relationships may generally be undesirable, publicity regarding a couple’s relationship becomes essential when establishing a marriage. I analyse how people work with the conflicting and ambiguous realities of couples’ relationships; and collaborate, as family and alongside state institutions, to create recognisable marriages. Whether becoming a couple outside or through marriage, it is by collectively handling publicity, discretion, and secrecy that women and men figure out and refigure valuable connections and commitments throughout their entire social networks.