My father met my mum at a party when she was 16 and he was 27. He had come from Lebanon on a scholarship to study Engineering in Communist Russia in the 1980s. They dated for a couple of years, got married, and conceived me. Then he had to return to Lebanon to pay back the government for his scholarship, just after she gave birth to me.
When my mother visited Lebanon later that year, she found out his family were farmers in a small village, and that the whole extended family lived together in what she saw as primitive . . .