This paper examines the United Arab Emirates’ thirty year battle against citizen out-marriage. Though it has been an issue for all Arab Gulf states, the UAE is unique in terms of the intensity of the debates on out-marriage, the expansive role the Marriage Fund and women’s groups played in sketching the ideal of the national family, and the fact that out-marriage was never banned. Based on a survey of international and local newspaper articles from 1980 to 2012 and an examination of nationality and family laws, this paper demonstrates how the regulation of marriage is intimately tied to the Emirati state project. I consider how the problem of out-marriage was framed by state institutions and media, the ongoing battle against the rising cost of dowries and the many tactics the state pursued to control the practice. To discourage out-marriage among men, the financial burden of the mahr was eased through the establishment of the Marriage Fund, and a maximum for the mahr was set by law. Family Law was not used to limit men’s choices, though a total ban was socially debated and officially considered several times. Considering a three-decade long project of trying to reduce the number of citizen men marrying non-citizen women, why did the state never adopt legislation which could have ended the practice? I find the answer lays in the state’s identification of the Emirati nation as Islamic, and less overtly, as patriarchal. The Maliki tradition of Islamic law did not limit men’s choice, and thus such a ban found little basis and proposals were successfully rejected. Yet pursuant to the national project, women’s exogamous choices were limited by the state through nationality laws which were based on men’s nasab, and discretely through orders to the ministries. The intensity of the debates over out-marriage and the fervor with which the state tried to control it should be understood within the wider context of a goal to preserve the Emirati national identity in the face of a sharp demographic imbalance. Thus, Emirati women as reproducers of a nation threatened, became the target of a national project to conserve what was framed as the Emirati indigenous heritage.