On Love and Marriage

I’m 31 years old. That means a lot. I’ve been a football fan for a long time, and I’ve come to that point in my life where most of the players that I watch and read about everyday are much younger than me. This has come as a bit of a shock, because for many years in my football loving existence, it was the other way around. These guys were grown up, established, full-bearded 26 or 27 year-olds with tonnes of medals, restaurant chains, and picturesque families, while I was just an adoring early 20-something. These days I’m 31 and they are just a bunch of kids who know nothing about life. As it is, no club would sign me up for half a million euros, and a guy my age would have such expressions as “past his prime”, “over the hill”, “declining fitness”, “no resale value” and “MLS” closely following his name.

How I stack up next to Premiership stars is not that important though. One thing that has shot up, from the months just before my 31st birthday, is the frequency with which the subject of marriage comes up whenever I’m around. Yes, it was always there, hanging around up in the atmosphere like bluish cigarette smoke in an air-conditioned room. These days though the topic has descended heavily upon and around me, densely filling every available space and leaving absolutely no room for escape.

Now firstly I want to say, I’m not trying to complain about this. Honestly, I was a bit startled when the talk started to come up everyday. It precipitated a deep-seated sense of alarm and an intense personal crisis which lasted several months. Every conversation lingered in my mind and was played back at night, robbing me of sleep, which of course affected my work-out routine and invariably dropped my self-confidence, but that’s another story. I stayed up at night asking question after question, going over decisions I had made in the past and feeling really let-down by my sorry single state. However, as is very often said, your problem is not the problem; it is your attitude about the problem. Write that down.

So as time went on, my view on the issue took a shift. This wasn’t a problem after all, was it? Why all this panic? Step back. Assess things. Breathe… And then, I actually started to like the topic. As a matter of fact, I came to relish and embrace the discussion. Not only did it give me an opportunity to revel in the fact that perhaps all these married people around me secretly envied my status, I also got the opportunity to take in and analyze a number of interesting perspectives on love and marriage. So as it is, I thoroughly enjoy the scrutiny, questions, harassment from all my married colleagues and church folk, the attention, and the phone calls from distant relatives asking when I will bring “her”. It feels good to be 31 and unmarried. I will squeeze all I possibly can from this moment, and just when the din is loudest, I will get married in a dizzying nuclear cataclysm of a wedding, leaving in my wake an utterly confused and decimated public, as I float away into marital oblivion with my arms around my blushing bride. Watch out.

Over the years, I have become rather obsessed with purpose, and I tend to boil every concept down to its “why” and marriage is no different. Amidst all of the questions and opinions raised in the numerous discussions I have had, I have tried to condense the issue to one thing. Why should one get married? Admittedly, the glaring majority of the stories I hear are not so good. Most people come at me like “Hey! Don’t marry a woman like such and such….” or “If you see this or that, you better run!” What I ask (not always out loud of course) is, why then did you get into it? Do you regret it? (some people almost sound like they do!). If you were better informed would you have acted differently? What exactly should I actually embrace then? What’s it all about, this thing? Do you really mean it when you say all men/women are the same? How on earth do you even know that? And above all, why, why, why should I do it? Because it’s part of the expected natural flow of events in the life of a normal Nigerian, like maybe when you write Common Entrance or JAMB? Or perhaps because I’m the right age (I actually am, right)?

It would be very entertaining to go into some of the postulations I have come across in this search for conjugal purpose, but really it would take all day and then it might not be so entertaining after all. I would have to talk at length on theories like “you have to marry someone who loves you much more than you love them” or “you need to have total control” or “your partner has to absolutely respect you or don’t get married” or “you think you know them, but you have no idea” or “make sure you handle all the money” or “they are all the same so just pick one”… These may well be accurate positions (frighteningly), seeing as they emanate from a rich tapestry of experience, of which I have none. In the light of that fact, therefore, my extensive contemplation on this subject and why one should do it at all, has led me to CAUTIOUSLY believe that it should be about love, companionship and help.

Love is the good old-fashioned sort, whichever belief you subscribe to, whether it is a feeling or a firm decision or a combination of the two. Companionship of course, is about that one person you would pick if you had to pick just one person in all the world to be with because everyone else was going to be wiped out by an alien force and you would both be left alone to re-start human life. I have come to believe that above and beyond other reasons, this is a very firm one. I believe in two people who would give anything and everything to be with each other for reasons that aren’t exactly logical, that maybe cannot be immediately coherently conveyed in words, but they just know beyond every sliver of doubt that they should be together and they absolutely love it. Such earnest and weird conviction might sound like the stuff of a teen Rom-Com, but sometimes the core concepts of life still boil down to the simple and seemingly juvenile ones. Helping, of course, implies liking another person and actively having their backs and wanting what’s best for them.

These days though, a lot of secondary factors get thrown in the relationship thought mix. They make the whole picture a lot more complicated because they lead to over thinking what should actually be pretty simple. Especially in the society I live in. Does he love me enough? Do I have enough control? Is he chasing me enough? Will she take me for granted or disrespect me? Does he have a good enough job or enough money? Does she have enough class? Is he going to leave me? These and many more throw in a whole lot of unknowns into the “thought mix”, drown out the blessed trio of love, company and help, and replace them with a lot of paranoia, tension and uncertainty. I’m guilty too, so I’m not judging. These serve up insecurities leading to heated arguments and ultimately to ultimatums, and nobody with a drop of self-respect in them likes having an ultimatum rammed down the front of their shirt; it’s not a particularly loving thing to do if you know what I mean. Especially when you’re 31. Like me.

Basically, I have come to conclude that while it is true that lasting love requires work to make it lasting, there is also the place for a very fundamental thing: two people who actually like each other and give each other love, exclusive company and help. Not primarily as a sense of duty or obligation, but because they actually desire to do just that for each other. I am beginning to think it really is that primal and simple. Other things are just unnecessarily twisty.Yeah, they might be important, but twisty.

Yes it might sound mystic, overly romantic and probably impractical. But maybe it isn’t. Maybe some things aren’t that logical. Especially things like love or marriage. I hope you find that sort of thing. I hope you get to spend the rest of your life with someone you truly wish to spend it with, and who wants to spend theirs with you, and not just because it was time and you had to pick a someone. And when you do, I hope you don’t get panicky or confused or doubtful. I hope you get to love it, enjoy it and be enthralled and excited. I hope you enjoy big, fat, lifetime doses of love, exclusive company and gracious help such that you know that every other person might just as well be whisked away by aliens. I hope you live to enjoy it to the fullest and never regret it. Because when you get to talk to a yet unmarried 31 year old, I want to hear you say “This thing is awesome! Everyday I’m loving it because we’re doing great and here’s how it happened, so relax cos you can have that too…..”

….There are three things that are too amazing for me,
four that I do not understand:
the way of an eagle in the sky,
the way of a snake on a rock,
the way of a ship on the high seas,
and the way of a man with a young woman….

_____________________________

This piece was written by (our very good friend) Michael Medubi. You can tweet at him here.

If you liked this piece please hit the recommend button which is the tiny little heart outline somewhere below. Also share the article and follow us on medium to get more deliciousness like this.

And don’t forget twitter. We are there, and we’d like you to follow us so we can have (mostly) funny intellectual banter.