Why Does Every Middle-Aged Woman Think HER Holiday Seducer Is The Real Deal?
By Daphne Sullivan
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1294752/Why-does-middle-aged-woman-think-HER-holiday-seducer-real-deal.html

Knocking on my tour guide's door, brochure and notebook in hand, I was keen to ask him a question about our itinerary. But, as I opened my mouth to speak, he pulled me inside and tried to kiss me.

The scene was laughable, really - me, a retired estate agent from Sussex and him a young Syrian tour guide tasked with the job of escorting our group on an eight-day tour of his homeland.

'I must have misread the signals,' he said calmly, as though I had in some way suggested I was interested in him. I rolled my eyes in despair. The truth is, there were no signals - apart from me being a divorced Western woman holidaying alone in the Middle East.

The next morning, before I had a chance to relate my experience to the others on the tour, a lady I will call Sonia divulged that she too had visited Samir's room with a question about the tour the night before.

From the breathless excitement with which she spoke about the experience, it became clear that this time Samir's attentions had been met with a far more welcoming reception.

Indeed, by the end of the tour Sonia was hooked, returning to the UK on cloud nine believing that she had found her perfect match. But, when she returned a few months on, consumed by love, she found Samir indifferent to the point of actually ignoring her.

Having spent ten years living and travelling in the Middle East, this is a scene I've witnessed time and time again. Sonia's story is one of many such quixotic romances that I know of.

I've lost count of the seemingly sensible and middle-class British women I've met who have fallen for no more than a pair of flashing, dark eyes, a mouthful of white teeth and an endless stream of compliments.

My friends and I have even coined the phrase: 'My Mohammed is different', which illustrates the delusion with which each woman believes that her man won't hurt her and their love is genuine.

Each time another of our contemporaries falls for a young tour guide or waiter, we smile knowingly at each other and say: 'It's another case of MMD', knowing it's just a matter of time until another heart is broken. I hold my hands up - I've been guilty, too. I speak from bitter experience.

I fell for an exotic, dark, handsome man from Jordan on a trip to see the historic architecture of Petra that I had taken myself on to cheer myself up after my divorce.

In what now seems like a terrible cliché, Ali was my tour guide. An archaeologist, with an irresistible moodiness and aura of intelligence, he pursued me throughout the four-day tour.

Given his film star looks, it was hard to resist. Ali was from a high-class Bedouin family and was the son of a sheikh.

He made me feel special and important and I was completely taken in. We were both divorced and Ali, at 48, was only five years younger than me. I flattered myself that this was a relationship of equals.

Still, aware that the cultural differences between us were bound to impact on our relationship, I resolved to be as pragmatic as possible about our future. I was determined not to push things and so settled for a grown-up - but exclusive relationship - where we maintained our own lives, only seeing each other for a two-week spell three times a year.

We were together in this way for the next nine years. My three children were all in their 20s at the time. While the eldest two - though sceptical at first, came to like Ali, my youngest daughter refused to meet him, which, of course, caused family tension.

Nevertheless, this was the most passionate romance of my whole life. I hoped we'd be together for the rest of our lives. This was not to be. In October 2009, an American woman tracked me down via Facebook and revealed that Ali was a womaniser.

The lady, a former wife of one of his nephews, used the word 'player' to sum up the love of my life and urged me not to believe anything that he had told me. While part of me had always wondered whether Ali was faithful given that we saw each other so infrequently, having it broken to me in such a way was devastating.

Desperate for reassurance, I emailed Ali and the cruelty of his response still stings.

'I'm very fed up and don't want a relationship with anyone at all,' was his stark one-line reply. After nine years, I'd been thrown away like a sweet wrapper. I was forced to accept that I had simply not been as important to him as I had thought.

My confidence was shattered by my experience, but I was determined not to be put off from travelling in the Middle East. In January this year - a year after that email - I sold my house to travel throughout the region. It was then that I started to meet women like myself, many with tales far worse than my own.

In Syria, I met Sonia, 52, whose rash romance and ultimate rejection I described earlier. Sonia failed to learn from her heartbreak and went on to fall in love with another tour guide.

This one, unbeknownst to Sonia at the time, was married with two children - a mere detail he had neglected to mention.

A lady called Angela that I met in Egypt handed over £8,000 to her Arab lover of just two weeks to buy her a car. When he disappeared, she was confronted by the true owner of the vehicle who asked her for overdue rental on it. The papers she had were in Arabic, so she didn't understand them. Her lover had just rented the car for a couple of weeks, taking the £8,000 for himself.

Another lady who I met, called Pat, went on holiday to Egypt with her 16-year-old daughter and three days later agreed to marry the restaurant manager at their hotel.

Such behaviour was, by all accounts, wildly out of character.

Far from being a silly woman, Pat, 40, was a successful businesswoman in the UK and genuinely thought he was in love with her. Like Samir and Ali, her holiday romance was dark, handsome and charming. Shortly afterwards, she sold her home and emigrated to Egypt to be with him, taking her daughter with her.
The marriage, which took place in a car showroom, crumbled after just a year when her husband decided to return to his Arab wife and four children.
By then, Pat's fortune had dwindled. Her 16-year-old daughter had fallen pregnant by a local, and, unable to afford to return to the UK, their future looked decidedly uncertain.

Two years on and she and her daughter are still living in Egypt and raising the baby.

And I mustn't forget Fiona, whose Egyptian boyfriend - 30 years her junior - convinced her he wanted to marry her while constantly asking, in his smattering of English, for money to help his sick mother.

He was last seen visiting a Russian prostitute in the town of Sharm el Sheikh, while Fiona returned back home broken-hearted.

Given the preponderance of such sad stories, it's not surprising that my friends and I have grown weary of hearing of women like us whose forlorn hopes and dreams have been dashed all too predictably to the ground.

I have come to believe that such romances between Western women and young Arabian men working in tourist resorts have insurmountable differences to conquer.

To begin with, in Muslim culture women behave with a deep modesty, so to the men who work in the tourist trade the sight of scantily clad Western women, with purses full of money, is not only alien, but too tempting to resist.

It's important to remember that many of these men earn a pittance and have families they are trying to support. As for the women involved, like me, they may be intelligent, middle class and respectable - but many haven't felt the first flutter of romance in their chests for decades.

Being lavished with so much attention by someone young and good-looking sends them into a hopeless lovelorn spin. But the fault doesn't only lie on one side.

Time and time again I have been amazed at the behaviour of women towards men they have known for only a few days. I have observed with horror English women cosying up to market sellers and allowing them to nuzzle at their necks in a way which would scandalise a respectable Muslim woman.

I doubt they would behave in the same way with the stallholders of Petticoat Lane.

The exotic pull of the Middle East and the handsome men seems to impair the judgement of Western women desperate to escape their humdrum lives.
But to a worker in a seaside resort in a country like Egypt or Turkey, the endless stream of half-dressed, unchaperoned women appears like nothing more than a never-ending carousel of rich prostitutes, just there to be exploited.

In my own case, mine and Ali's relationship lasted longer than the average fling and I was astute enough never to give him any money (and to his credit he never asked for any), but the cold way he ended things was deeply hurtful and I have been trying to make sense of it ever since.

The simple fact is that I was never the one in control. The whole relationship was on his terms and I feel annoyed with myself for believing it could have ever been any different.
The Middle East is a fascinating place. The people have such warmth, culture and kindness - but when a middle-aged woman takes up with a young tour guide or waiter, questions have to be asked.

The truth is that the number of women happily married to the man they met on holiday are sadly outnumbered by those who have been tossed to one side with a broken heart.