And for most of us who have grown up in African families, we find ourselves in somewhat difficult situations in love.
You see, in most of our settings, feelings have not been brought to the fore sight. We grow up with fathers who never spare time to explain how stuff works to us or how to handle our feelings, mothers who expect us to learn from our fathers, and uncles who believe we shall know things somehow. Before we know it we are thrown into adulthood and we gamble our way through it all.
We now have to start looking for money in ways we have not been trained in sometimes, we take on responsibility of taking care of females when we don’t know how to take care of ourselves yet, but because our bodies are now yearning for them, we gamble through taking care of them somehow.
What this does to us is that we do not get a moment to understand ourselves, we do not get a chance to voice our fears and frustrations because we are trying to be seen as men who know what they are doing, while secretly wishing someone actually showed us what to do and how to deal with our feelings. We become scared boys in big men bodies trying to put on big men attitudes and barely managing it all.
Then come the females who have spent their growing time being exposed to feelings by their mothers and they have mastered how to handle themselves and are now looking up to us to lead them like their fathers led their mothers.
We get a conflict here because we are not comfortable with exploring feelings in depth like they do, and that’s when the crises arise. We are accused of not loving them and when it gets too much for us, we think the next female might be easier to handle so we fly on and find another. This may go on and on until we have a string of them, not because we love collecting women but because we are looking for that particular one who will be easier to handle and make it easier to not explore our feelings because we are not comfortable with them.
Sometimes we are badly damaged by our growing up environment that we have deep shame and fear that no one would love us truly if they got to know how we feel deep down, so we put a limit to how much of ourselves we can give to the females in our care. This has been one of the reasons love has been hard for us.
In the next post we shall continue on this topic and we shall look at how we can have emotionally healthy relationships despite our experiences…
Let’s buy some cake for now. Check out our shop and order a delicious treat for your loved one.
Hamona. We love. Love