It will take me some time to get to my point so bear with me. For quite a few years now I have been fascinated with understanding relationships. Even though I am still in the stage of life where I am pretty much a wholesale seed distributor, I have always loved to reflect on, study and understand relationships that work and work for a really long time.

Long Distances and Mashada

So, anyway, one day I ended up on the popular message board Mashada quite distraught. There had been two long distance relationships I had looked at and thought to myself:

They will go the distance those ones. They’ll make it.

Typically when people in their 20s show up in the diaspora and say they are in a long distance relationship, I think of it at the very least as a joke and at the very most as an exchange of physical pleasure and flattery every so often, though when apart from one another, everyone and everything is fair game.

But not these two. Allow me to explain.

Relationship Number 1

They were both in their late 20s. They had both long since put the fun and nonsense that is high school and University behind them (point one for them). She was abroad pursuing her Masters and he was back in Africa holding down the fort.

When she spoke of him one could see that they clearly had a deep friendship and their relationship wasn’t just based on some superficial attraction (point two for them). She is a woman and she is abroad, and so of course African men jumped on her like chaff on Velcro. For a good year or so, the two men who had put forth the most consistent effort were consistently being shut down in spite of their clear charm (point three for them).

A Small Crack in the Ceiling

But alas one of them one evening managed to get her in a room for a game of tonsil hockey which was unfortunately interrupted midway. As soon as the interruption took place, the woman sped out of that room and we all thought that was all she wrote.

Six Months Later

Fast forward six months later and both of these men got what they wanted from her in spite of the fact that she had a chance to go back to Africa and visit her guy.

Relationship Number 2

She was quite young, still of college age, but she was the quintessential woman of faith (point number one for them). She admitted that once someone had her, he had her for life (point two for them) and that was pretty much her intention with her significant other.

No one has come between them, but the fellow who is also pretty young (point one against) has ended the relationship by trying to let her down easy. I won’t go into too much detail, all I will say is it took me by quite some surprise just how quickly it ended.

Right Back to Mashada

So anyway I end up on Mashada and I decide to ask folk:

Do these long distance relationships ever work?

Now of course a lot of you already know the answer that 9 times out of 10, especially when we are talking about people in their 20s they don’t work BUT out of that discussion something came up that I thought was definitely worth discussing.

Are Family and Community the Cornerstones of Succesful and Long Lasting Relationships?

You’ve all watched the TV shows where someone takes their partner to their parent’s home and the parents totally disapprove of him or her. In a moment of defiance, the person will normally grab their partner tight, leer at his or her parents and say something to the extent of:

Well she’s not marrying you. She’s marrying me and I love her. So regardless of whether you approve of this marriage or support it, we’ll get married anyway.

And then they walk of hand in hand to face the world together: Just the two of them and their love.

Is that a Huge Mistake?

In Australia we have this tabloid type program that’s very popular called a Current Affair. Sometime ago they had a special on Indian arranged marriages where they were trying to explore why Indian marriages last so much longer than typical Western marriages that are basically like Russian roulette with a 50/50 chance.

One of the things that came out of that is someone said:

In an arranged marriage, one isn’t simply marrying a person, they are marrying their family (or clan or community).

That got me to thinking….weren’t traditional marriages exactly the same and didn’t they also have the ridiculously low divorce and run away rates?

Accountability and Committment

I am just speculating based on the limited information I have but I think what it ultimately boils down too is when you marry or form a relationship with someone’s family or community instead of just them you have made a committment and are accountable to a lot more people.

Compare this with the typical love relationship where one is usually not even answerable to their spouse but instead to their feelings. How can we possibly expect to build a long lasting relationship or commit to anything long term simply on the basis of how we feel when we are so damn capricious as human beings? (I have waited so long to use one of my favourite words, capricious)

When you marry a family you are answerable to a lot of people and this helps get you by when your feelings tell you that you don’t feel like going.

They Force You Back Together

When you decide you need distance from each other lest you kill each other, you retreat to a family/and or community which considers itself a part of your relationship and so will try to force the two of you together……….

Back to You

My mental exercise ends there. What do y’all think? Does marrying someone’s family and community make a difference? Is this a load of bollocks? Leave a comment and let me know.

Just trying to figure this whole thing out,

Mwangi

I am a strong believer in the idea that we are what we do, especially what we do repeatedly. With that in mind, I thought I would break down some of the places immigrants find themselves majority of the time. Take a moment and think about it; where do you spend most of your time? Does spending it there make your life better? Does it make anyone else’s life better?

Have a look at the list below and see where you fall. In descending order:

1) Place of Work: It doesn’t matter whether you are coming here as a student, on a working visa or through buying government bonds. We are a hardworking lot, most of us anyway, and we have an insatiable appetite coupled with great material ambitions.

Try and make your place of work as nurturing and positive as possible. You will spend a lot of time there.

2) University libraries: Lectures and tutorials are basically the tip of the iceberg. If you are here as a student, you will spend countless hours in study groups, study sessions and probably checking out your exes Facebook profile. Carry a lot of nutritious food and a great deal of patience and perseverance. It’s only a few years anyway….Enjoy it!

3) Drinking Sessions/ Fellowship sessions: Depending on which side of the religious divide you fall, you will either spend most of your “free time” getting plastered or you will spend it getting lost in the spiritual relm. Make sure that you have good people to hold your hand. You’ll need them for those dark moments (whether tough questions that crop up in the midst of your spiritual oddysey or through passing out)

4) House Parties and Get Togethers: Much more informal than the drinking and fellowship sessions. This is basically where you get your heart to hearts and get to spend hours talking about nothing but realizing that it’s worth everything. These will be the most rare of times especially because of the time taken up working. Cherish these moments.

5) Concerts, Parties and Festivals: Whether it’s going to a Malaika concert, or going to check out the rugby, these may be rare but you’ll probably talk about them long before and long after they are gone. Never forget though, it’s not about the event, it’s about people and what people do during the event. So perhaps do something worth talking about.

6) Worship: Some of y’all will be immaculate with your church attendance. Some of you will only stop by the church if sme1 has died or there’s free food and/or music. You will meet some great folk here who can really stand by you and make your life and world better when you need it the most. Contribute to this community.

7) Online: Well you’re reading this aren’t you? The Internet is a bit like a printer (bad analogy, I know but stay with me). It will only print out what you input into the computer. In the same way, you will only get out of your Internet experience what you consciously seek online. If you are simply in the market for empty sensations there’s more than enough of it online.

If you want to learn how to do JUST ABOUT ANYTHING the information can be found somewhere online. You have the power, please use it wisely.

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