Women do not look to their husbands for companionship; still less do men look to their wives. It is taken for granted that there is no common ground for conversation. A man must never show affection for his wife in front of anyone else. When a soldier returned to the village after years of absence, his kin and neighbours gathered round to welcome and embrace him. The ceremony lasted for hours, as one person after another heard the news and hastened to the guest room. His greeting for his wife was left over till bedtime - she could not even see him until all the others had finished with him. When men left Elbashï on their way to Mecca, their sisters and mothers embraced them publicly and histrionically at the boarding of the lorry - but not their wives. Within the household, before close kin, the taboo on public affection is even stronger. Nobody talks about `love' except occasionally in cases of adultery and elopement. The relationship is limited to economic co-operation and to sexual intimacy. Women frequently said to my wife that they did not love their husbands - not only in specific cases, but as a general description of village life. Men spoke very little of their relationship to their wives, and when they did, it was of the common bed, of their prowess therein, and of their large families that they boasted. More than once, men remarked to me in jest: `We love our wives at night.'
Such a relationship between wife and husband permits a viable household to be built on any pair of the opposite sex who are each of them economically and physiologically efficient, and who can achieve a fairly low level of co-operation in the face of misfortune, interfering kin, and personal misunderstandings. Not all marriages are of this minimal type. In some cases a very real degree of mutual concern and affection may develop. One man who had left his father and was extremely poor had remained in the village as a herdsman instead of going off with the labour migrants because even after three children he did not wish to leave his wife. (It was she who told my wife of their unwillingness to part - I did not discuss the matter with him.) Eventually he did join