Love, actually … isn’t all around

Post Reports

The Washington Post

Daily News, Politics, News

4.4 • 5.1K Ratings

🗓️ 29 December 2020

⏱️ 12 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A story of love and family — and deadlines.

For Post Reports producer Linah Mohammad, moving back in with her parents to weather the pandemic in Texas seemed like a harmless idea.

But then Mohammad, who is single, turned 25 — a milestone sometimes deemed “the cutoff age for eligibility” for Arab women to marry — and suddenly her parents’ involvement in her love life made things a lot more complicated.

So she decided to do something she’d never done before: let her parents arrange a date.

Mohammad’s piece originally aired on the “This American Life” episode “Twenty-five.”

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Transcript

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0:00.0	From the newsroom of the Washington Post, this is Post Reports.
0:06.2	I'm Martine Powers.
0:07.6	It's Tuesday, December 29th.
0:15.7	Recently one of our producers, Lena Muhammad, did something a little bit different.
0:20.3	She made a story about her love life.
0:23.2	The story actually aired a couple weeks ago on the radio show This American Life, and
0:27.7	we wanted to share it here, both because it's just a delightful story, but also because
0:32.6	I think the holidays are a time when a lot of us get awkward questions from our families
0:37.4	about our love lives.
0:39.4	So here's the story.
0:40.9	The next voice you'll hear is The Host of This American Life, Ira Glass.
0:44.4	Lena Muhammad turned 25 this July, and maybe the last place that she expected to be, back
0:50.2	at her parents' house in Texas.
0:52.3	She had fought hard to get out of that home.
0:54.5	Her parents passed in with traditional values and of the four kids in her family.
0:58.6	Lena is the only one to move out before getting married and without getting married.
1:02.8	She moved away to pursue a career.
1:04.8	Being independent is very important to her.
1:07.4	But then, COVID hit.
1:09.8	Lena explains what happened.
1:11.8	After two months in lockdown alone, I thought I was doing okay.
1:16.1	But when I did a story for my job at The Washington Post where I admitted to a former prisoner
	...

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