Divorce: Learning To Love Again..... (1)

"Where are all your single friends eeee!!", I saw on my messenger out of the blues and chuckled. It was Ikenna*, a very close family friend of mine who lives in the US. He quickly called me and we chatted for over an hour and caught up on life in general. I really like Ikenna, more so because he is an open person; I know you can argue that "open" is not really a good thing to be in the present world today but I still find it refreshing to talk with a person whose honesty shines through, whose sentences are not peppered with uncomfortable pauses whilst they weighed their words, whose stories/gist/tales do not run like a maze: there is a blockade at every point and a confusing retraction- I really hate speaking to people who make a simple conversation seem like a game of chess!

Anyway, I told him I knew A LOT of really nice, lovely and independent ladies in Nigeria who were single and would make a great match for him- he said he wasn't cut out for a long distance relationship and wanted someone in the US. I could barely think of any- I knew just about three ladies and they did not really seem right for him. Then he asked me an odd question, he said: "Ok, so the ones in Nigeria, if you say they are nice ladies, WHY are they still single?". LOL!

"Well", I said, "because they just have not met the right person! There is absolutely NOTHING wrong with them; they aren't runs girls, neither have they got attitudinal issues- nothing of that sort at all- they just have not met the right person!". He paused for a while and I couldn't help but wonder why it was that men think that any goodlooking lady who was still single at a certain age must have an issue- while I do agree that this is true in some cases, I do also know that a lot of single, lovely ladies are single because they just have not met the one. Then he asked if it would be possible to peek at the profiles of a few of the ladies I had in mind. I showed him a few and just when he was going to "make his pick", I asked about him.

The thing is, Ikenna had been married for a few years and is now divorced. He had married an American and had realised a short while into the marriage that their cultural differences simply could not mesh. She slashed tires and bashed cars when she was mad, broke household furnitures and dishes and was no push over: if they had a fight, she took their child over to her mom's and went out clubbing all night with her friends. Not a very Nigerian thing for a "wife" to do you have to agree. The thing is, in the course of our gist, I got that Ikenna was really a person who hated to be disrespected (a typical "Igbo man" trait) and tended to count and hold on to wrongs done to him- which he would re-hash to you when the issue was long forgotten. I did tell him the instances where I thought he had not handled things well and explained that, in love, forgiveness is really a constant and you don't hold unto wrongs your partner has caused you- I also thought that there could have been more understanding on his part seeing that his ex and himself were coming from totally different cultural settings. There had been a pause from him after I'd said this to him: I wasn't sure if the pause was because he had not expected that I would find any faults in him from his narrative or if he just did not like me telling him where I thought he was wrong.

Anyway, I asked about him and asked where his heart currently was. He didn't really understand and I carefully explained that I know that divorce, a lot of times, tends to make people jaded and distrustful- it seems this is especially true for divorced men who didn't have a good experience with a woman- they tend to be be cynical, bitter, guarded and unwilling to really be open- can't say I blame them in any case. I told him I needed to know that he was serious about love, about wanting love and being willing to be open to whoever I was going to try to match him to and not make it an uphill task for the person to get to know him. I said this because I knew he had gotten into what had seemed to be a serious relationship in 2014/2015 and that had somehow packed up- I needed to know that he wasn't the one bungling things because his heart wasn't open.

(Conti...)