ABSTRACT
We hear many stories from the displaced young Syrians and Iraqis we met about struggling to stay connected. This chapter examines how they face these struggles and navigate disruptions to their intimate relationships. We argue that such navigation involves emotional reflexivity, a relational process of drawing on their own and other people's feelings to make their way through the world. While they usually have their extended family with them, their families have experienced forms of emotional as well as physical displacement affecting how the young people think about and do family. Questions of who can be trusted arise within Beirut's complex political landscape, and cousins emerge as important and often easier friends to keep than non-kin. However, spaces for friendship do arise with football being especially important for boys, while the girls seem more reliant on meeting at home to avoid dishonour, boredom and loneliness. Their sometimes passionate, sometimes measured responses to these obstacles, indicates a determination to find ways of doing intimate relationships through a pragmatic and emotionally reflexive navigation. Intimacy for these young refugees is not about a “natural” sense of ease of belonging, but something they reflect on and work at. The emotional reflexivity is relational, showing an often sophisticated awareness of others, their situation and the social, political, cultural and gendered obstacles they encountered. Their relationships are thus intertwined with and reflexively done according to their positioning within the specific structures of displacement in Beirut.
