I do not pretend to understand this on any sort of molecular level, or even a studied-it-in-books level.

But after 3.5 years here, it is plain that the dynamics of men and women in the UAE are … distant and complicated.

It stems from a society that separates males from females from the first day they go to school, and then on a more macro level past the age of, say, 15. Males and females do not spend time in each other’s company unless they are close relatives. Even at weddings, which are held separately — a celebration for men, a separate one for women.

How Arabs in this culturally conservative part of the world deal with the opposite sex, as adults and potential marriage partners, seems to be a tricky process.

But we have someone here who knows much more about it than I do.

Rym Ghazal is a female reporter and columnist for The National, and in today’s editions of the newspaper she has a provocative commentary that opens with the following sentence: “What do Arab men want?”

She continues: “Well, I spent two weeks asking every single Arab man I met that question. ‘So, what do you look for in a woman?'”

Her findings, certainly not scientific in any way, were nonetheless jarring.

The Arab men she talks to want a quiet, non-nagging woman of a fair complexion (and light eyes, preferably) with a great figure.

Eventually, Rym asked: “So, you want Barbie?” And records the men saying: “Yes.”

All of which is massively unrealistic. Emiratis, certainly, are expected to marry among their own, certainly for their first marriage, and the number of Emirati women with light hair and eyes is, from my unscientific observations, statistically irrelevant.

It gets more complicated. Rym notes that some of the Arab men she spoke with were “suspicious of women who lived on their own and moved out for a career”. They also want “conservative” women who are “educated … but not too educated” and a degree was OK, but not “if it came the cost of interaction with too many men and took her away from living with her parents”.

This is a country where boys and girls are separated throughout the school system. And one of the country’s leading universities, Zayed University, when opening its new campus, found it necessary to revamp the place to create separate entrances and common areas to cut back on “mingling” among the sexes.

It is all a bit mystifying to outsiders, and for purposes of cultural anthropology it is handy for someone who grew up on the Arabian Peninsula, like Rym Ghazal, to give us a sense of what people are thinking.