RELATIONSHIP SCI-FY(Soaps) Too much television watching is not only bad for your productivity. It is even more dangerous for your relationships. That is a warning for the girls, because I would like to believe that men, African men to be specific, are naturally immune to watching too much television (replace that with “useless television”). They watch TV alright, but things like Discovery Channel, National Geographic, and Finance news. Those shows have no direct influence on relationships, and if they did, it would be positive I believe. On the other hand, soaps and reality TV shows are the exact opposite. They put ideas in our girls’ heads, and they are too taken to realise that not even those very actors and actresses put into practice what they are acting. That is why it is called acting. So, this girl I am dating decided she wanted us to be a “perfect couple”. And she had a few ideas on how we could become First, we would address each other by endearments such as “honey” and “darling” even when we were extremely displeased with each other. And no, we would not get displeased with each other, or let ourselves succumb to getting angry. We would identify the issue early enough and “darlingly” sort it out. I was already doing that, considering that on average, every day I had genuine reason to be mad at her. But she wasn’t done, and it was getting wild; we would always show each other how much we love one another, even in public. It sounds innocent enough but she was thinking of the television version of PDA, and things like that. I cut her short before she got any wilder, and asked her where on earth she had got those ideas from. And she said a few were from TV, and the rest from her friends, who of course watched the same kind of TV as her. Things get awkward I brushed it off thinking it was something that would pass within a day or two. But a week later, she was still true to her word. I almost died when she called me “sweet lips” in front of my friends. That was three weeks ago, but they still call me sweet lips. Calmly, since we were not supposed to get angry with each other, I gently pulled her away and said one word “stop!” She shrugged and I explained that I wanted her to stop everything she was doing. We are in Africa, in Uganda, in some suburb of Kampala, not at some exotic beach, spending our days surfing, sunbathing and sipping cocktails. Here, utterances like “sweet lips” had a way of coming off the wrong way, and worse, sticking with your friends, because those uncivilized apes only know romantic as a word in the dictionary. But she couldn’t understand what I was talking about and she seemed genuinely hurt. She wanted to know why we had to be like them, and on objective inspection, she actually had a point there; we didn’t have to be like them, yes. Only problem is, in a situation where almost everyone is insane, the sane man appears to be the mad man. We aren’t that kind of society, we aren’t that expressive of our feelings, and as much as women appreciate every gesture and display of love, we are bound by generations of machismo and “hardness” to the point that even telling my girlfriend, whom I truly love, that I love her means I have to brace myself for it. Television is good for bringing these things to us, but perhaps we need some sensitization first and perhaps a consumer’s manual on how to apply what we watch from over there to real life over here
Posted on: Sat, 24 Aug 2013 11:22:40 +0000
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