Home Away from Home with Abi Adeboyejo
Email: abi.adeboyejo@yahoo.com Twitter: @abihafh
Your weeding cost your parents enough to buy four pieces of land in Kwara State. You and your husband took out a loan of £10,000 to finance this fiesta. You travelled home to Nigeria two weeks before the date armed with boxes of bridesmaid dresses, shoes, suits for the bridal party and souvenirs for about one thousand guests. You both look fantastic on the day. It was indeed a fantastic wedding.
Fast forward to London four years later. You wake up one morning and decide you’ve had enough. Now that you’ve put a ring on it, you realise that it isn’t as easy as it seems.
Alex didn’t think he would ever get tired of his wife, Titi, and she certainly didn’t think that she would ever consider leaving her husband. So, what went wrong? It seems that Nigerians living abroad are falling victims to divorce at a very high rate; almost at the rate of Europeans, and that’s saying something.
Living in a totally different culture is fraught with problems. The new trend making matters worse for many marriages is the craze for sharing personal information on the internet. I am not talking about posting wanted ads on dating websites – that, I think, is a good thing as it brings people from all over together. Love can be found anywhere. It’s chat rooms, blogs, Facebook and Twitter that seem to be the problem. A blog, by the way, is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video.
It seems that when some Nigerian couples living in the UK have problems and can’t or won’t find any reasonable person(s) to unburden their problems to and perhaps seek advice they resort to chat rooms and blogs. Titi fell into this trap and discussed her marital problems with strangers in chat rooms. She posted everyday updates on her blog. Alex found out about this and created his own blog where he pasted comments about how he felt about his marriage. Alex and Titi openly talked about their problems and opened their marriage to comments from all and sundry. They started taking swipes at each other and resentment began to build even faster. People left comments on these blog pages, often giving rubbish advice and taking sides. Things got worse each passing week, with Alex and Titi developing their own band of loyal supporters. They stopped communicating at home and sent insults to each other online.
Many of Titi’s supporters, mainly females and gay men, encouraged her to leave Alex and started a countdown for her. There were messages urging her not to be a doormat and to be an independent woman. Alex was advised by chronic womanisers and losers to cut the chains of his enslavement and enjoy his life. There were even women offering their company to this great longsuffering man who deserved better. I heard that Alex considered reconciling with Titi but it was too late. They had both shared very private details about each other with the rest of the world, including their friends, colleagues and family and too much water had passed under the bridge. It was all too messy and shameful for both parties. The divorce came through after a few months. Titi got custody of their twin girls and started life as a single mum. Alex started dating several girls at the same time, looking for another soul mate.
Relationships aren’t easy at the best of times and marriages are a mystery to most of us. In Nigeria, we all have a horde of parents, sisters, brothers, uncles, aunties and older friends to look up to or learn from their mistakes. Marriages in the Nigerian context are between two individuals and their families. While this might seem complicated, it actually gives most family members a say in the success (or demise) of a marriage.
Families play a fantastic role in making marriages work. Most Nigerian families have their own kind of ‘marriage counselling’ and I know of many marriages that have been saved as a result of numerous family meetings, advice sessions with uncles and aunties or even visits from trusted family friends.
The Nigerian family network in the UK is very weak. Alex and Titi’s case is a perfect example of how the absence of this network can affect Nigerian marriages abroad. Other factors contributed to Alex and Titi’s marriage breakup, but the fights they had in the public domain of online chat rooms and the comments made by other people went a long way in damaging an already fragile relationship. The continuous growth of information technology and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter makes it so easy to communicate with all sorts of people. Taking advice from people that do not know you is like assuming that everything you find on a dinner plate is edible. Just because some people have an opinion on an issue doesn’t mean that their opinion is right or that we should share our personal difficulties with total strangers and look to them for direction.
Instead of complaining about each other to anonymous people on the internet, perhaps married couples should spend time talking and listening to each other. Better still, they can surf the web and read of news articles and stories of people who are in bad relationships. Perhaps by so doing they will realise how blessed they are and put more effort into making their marriages work.
I also recommend that anyone in this situation should start a discussion in a chat room asking if anyone has seen, done, or gone through a hypothetical bad relationship. They may just find that they are actually very blessed but haven’t just realised it yet.
