Photo by Elisabetta Costa

As soon as I arrived in my field site, I was told by my first informants that Facebook is often used to prove to other people that their life is happy, full of happy relationships and lived accordingly with moral codes, especially when these codes are not followed in ‘real’ life. I genuinely understood what meant last month when one of my closest friends, a 27 year old Kurdish woman who came to work in Mardin from a nearby city, told me this story: her landlord and friend started to flirt with her although he had already a wife and three children, and one secret lover with whom he was regularly seeing on the weekend when his wife was busy looking after the kids. The love of two women was not enough for him, and the man started to invite my friend late in the night, by sending her messages via SMS and WhatsApp. After three days of harassing invitations and receiving negative but polite answers from the girl, she blocked his phone number. Then the man started to call her from anonymous phone numbers; the girl stopped the second number too and the man stopped harassing her. After a couple of weeks, the man called my friend and ordered her to leave the house without giving her any explanation. In one week, she had to find a new flat and to move all her furniture and belongings into a new place. She was basically evicted from her house because she didn’t agree to have an affair with the landlord.

During those weeks I followed Facebook postings of the landlord who is my friend on Facebook, and I have been surprised to see the way he had completely changed his behaviour online. For the whole year, he posted pictures of holiday trips with friends, food and politics; and suddenly he started to post pictures of him with his wife and wrote romantic and sweet words about his love for her. For the whole month, he was only sharing pictures and poetry portraying his happy family life and his happy marriage.

Men who cheat on their wives and harass girls are defined as şerefsiz (men without honour) by people in my field-site; and being without honour is one of the most common and worst derogatory definitions given to men. As people here take Facebook quite seriously, this social media platform is used as an important tool to prevent others from negatively gossiping about them and to improve their respectability. The days after the girl didn’t agree to have an affair with him, the man’s main concern was to protect his reputation, to avoid the spreading of rumors about him, and to protect the relationship with his wife. And Facebook was the most appropriate tool to do it.

Photo by Knight 725 (Creative Commons)

One of the most surprising pieces of data emerging from the 100 questionnaires I’ve submitted to my informants in our Turkish fielsite regarding their use of communication technologies is the number of text messages (SMS) that teenagers and young people send to their lovers. Indeed some mobile phone companies in Turkey sell SMS bundles for very cheap prices: for example, 12,000 texts for only 10 TL (around £3 GBP) a month. SMS is the most affordable communication channel for young people.

Sending 300-400 SMS a day to the same person is not an extraordinary practice among teenagers and youth who want to communicate with a lover and have to do it far from the gaze and ears of their family members. They write messages during every single moment of the day, while on the toilet, eating lunch, at school, before going to bed and as soon as they wake up in the morning. It seems that SMS is the most suitable communicative channel to have a secret love relationship in a society where premarital relationships are not allowed.

Below is part of a conversation I had with a 23 year-old hairdresser who confessed to me that he sends his girlfriend around 12,000 text messages a month:

Hairdresser: “We communicate all day long and all night long by SMS. I do not sleep so that I can speak with her! I love her too much.”
Me: “What do you write in 400 SMS in a day? Can you give me some example? It’s so difficult for me to imagine it.”
Hairdresser: “We write to each other about what we are doing and with whom we are spending our time. We write our feelings. We write everything. And if we do not have time during the day we send messages to each other during the night. This is love! Yes, this is love!”

There are specific local cultural reasons, beyond the growing romanticism, that explain why young lovers send each other so many messages: until few years ago, women were not allowed to go out, there were no internet and not mobile phones, and men could control women much more easily. Now women are more free, and are more often secretly engaging in romantic relationships with men. The point is that those same technologies  allow men to have intimate relationships with women, at the same time depriving them of the control they had in the past. The main fear of a young man having an illegitimate relationship with a woman is to be betrayed. As many young men told me, they are obsessively jealous. They want to control their girl-friends; they want to know where they are and what they do in every-single moment of the day, and SMS texting is the best way to do it. SMS texting is shaping new ideas of love where romanticism is entangled with new ways of performing masculinity.