Turkish Relationships

This semester I have started becoming friends with some of my students. The interesting thing is that they are mostly all male students though. I have attributed this to the fact that the males are more confident in their English and social skills than the females, so they feel more comfortable talking to me. And also because I am a young American female.

I've gone out to dinner with some, to cafes, to their homes, etc., alone and in groups. There have been no problems and I have thoroughly enjoyed getting to know these guys. Their maturity level would be about the same as 11th grade Americans, but they are really sweet buys and very nice to me. They also pay for all my meals and are excellent backgammon (tavla) players. I talk to them on facebook and I have given my phone number to some of my students so they text me, sometimes literally at all hours of the night.

I have yet to mention that most of these students have girlfriends. And over the past few months I have learned a lot about Turkish relationships. One male student in particular is no longer "allowed to talk to me" because his girlfriends has mandated it. I had invited him to my birthday party a few weeks ago and that was simply the last straw for her. He informed that he wasn't allowed to see me anymore or talk to me, outside the required time of me visiting his class. I was a little sad about this, since he actually is one of my favorite students, but accepted that I was becoming between he and his girlfriend. I taught in his class last week and after he wrote me on facebook saying it was nice seeing me and that he was sorry he couldn't talk to me more. I then visited his girlfriend's class yesterday. The game we are playing right now is similar to Taboo, in which students must write an English word on a paper, and then they draw a word and must describe it to their classmates who try to guess it. It can be pretty fun depending on the creativity and English level of the class. I look at everyone's words just to make sure they didn't write anything inappropriate and when I saw her word I literally laughed out loud. "fidelity." There is no way she knows what this word means and had to look it up in her Turkish-English dictionary. I just could not believe the nerve of this girl. Is she really this worried about me stealing her 19-year-old boyfriend? Don't worry honey- he's all yours. And although he still talks to me sometimes, he sure is remaining faithful to her.

Turkish people, men and women, are some of the most jealous I have ever encountered. I experienced this myself when I had a short-lived relationship with a Turk and he would become jealous when I talked to anyone or went out with anyone. I'm very curious as to where this lack of trust comes from, or if American men are just more used to the independence of American women. This is something I know I will unfortunately experience more over the next year, but hopefully I will also learn a lot more about it and come to understand Turkish people more.