In her analysis of women's legal strategies in the Middle East, Annelies Moors observes that "...women's legal claims may not coincide with what they expect to gain when they turn to court" (1990:160). Legal documents may aid litigants in achieving goals beyond or even contrary to their articulated purpose. This observation is borne out in my analysis of litigant strategies in Port Said, Egypt and uses of various legal documents including police reports, commercial documents, and marriage contracts. In particular, this paper considers how one type of commercial document, the 'honesty receipt,' is deployed to obscure the true subject of disputes and agreements related to marriage and betrothal. Honesty receipts enhance surety because, although they are intended as legal fictions, they bear potential misdemeanor charges for breach of trust. This allows litigants to make determinations about how the law shall adjudicate their problems. In the context of disputes over Muslim marriage contracts, either related to broken betrothal or to fulfillment of the terms of contracts, it is also possible to suggest that women in particular use honesty receipts to bolster their negotiating power. Scholars have noted that in the Middle East and North Africa, women are encouraged to view their rights as embedded in kin and community networks. As such, the circuitous deployment of legal documents to secure marriage agreements must be understood in the broader context of women's citizenship rights and the particular legal and social perils of betrothal. Hence, contemporary surety practices in Port Said are linked both to gender-based power differentials (reinforced by the gendered implementation of state services such as policing and social welfare) as well as to urbanization and socio-economic shifts that have made marriage negotiations increasingly attenuated. This paper is based on ethnographic research in Port Said undertaken in 2005 and 2007. It takes as a starting point a recent case from Port Said, but draws upon related data from Egypt as well as analysis of legal personhood and subjectivity in the Middle East in order to examine the intersections between legal documents and social relations.