After the elections, Saloth Sar was at a loose end, and Loth Suong and Chea Samy were worried that he had no job. Sar’s friendship with Khieu Ponnary probably became more intense during the campaign—when they both worked closely with Keng Vannsak—and they were married in a quiet ceremony in July 1956. By then Ponnary was in her mid-thirties and had been a schoolteacher for several years. Although deeply respected by her students, some contemporaries found her commitment to her career, her politics, and her austerity unsettling. She was small, neat, even elegant; but she wore no jewelry or makeup, she cut her hair in an “old-fashioned, Chinese style,” and she preferred somber clothes. Many Cambodians found her hard to fathom. They called her “the old virgin” behind her back. Lim Keuky, a student of Ponnary’s at the Lycée Sisowath in 1956, has recalled that in the months before her marriage to Saloth Sar, the “old virgin” began to wear “lipstick and a little jewelry.” For a time, she seemed warmer and more accessible. “She seemed so happy,” Lim recalled, “and we were happy on her behalf.”18

No information has emerged about the couple’s courtship or what drew them to each other. Their marriage seems to have taken their mutual acquaintances by surprise. Few Cambodian men marry older women, and women of Ponnary’s social class, at least in the 1950s, seldom married men with so few prospects or attainments. Perhaps she and Saloth Sar were drawn together by their shared commitment to utopian politics and the idea of working in secret to transform their country. Perhaps they hoped to team up with Khieu Thirith and her husband, Ieng Sary, soon to return from France, to hasten the revolution. More prosaically, Ponnary might have been charmed by Saloth Sar, like many others before and since, and agreed to share her life with someone whose ideals seemed higher, more integrated, and more exigent than those of most men and women in her circle. Sar, for his part, must have been impressed by Ponnary’s intellectual distinction and her elegant demeanor. Chea Samy recalled being delighted by the marriage; she hoped that it would encourage Saloth Sar to settle down.