Sex Does Not Equal Love

I had dinner in front of a televison and caught 5 minutes of a Nigerian home video on Africa Magic. I do not know what the title is. It got me thinking.

Scene one:

Village setting. Young girl and young boy strolling though the woods/forest. He is obviously from the city whilst she is from the village. He uses fly words like "baby" and "yeah" walks as though he has great sores under both feet (bouncing) and has a fake American accent.

He says to her “My heart is yours, baby”

She says in a very Igbotic accent “Heart, kwa?”

"Yeah, baby” he replies, looking as sincere as a new born babe.

She looks unsure, he coaxes her some more and the movie cuts to a new scene with young boy adjusting his belt and young girl adjusting her skirt. He thanks her, puts N500.00 in her hand " buy yourself something!" and they both walk away in opposite directions. As soon as she is out of earshot, he whoops and shouts “YES!” He has scored! As he leaves, the watchers know that this boy is either going to disappear forever or show up again when he has an itch he needs scratched. The girl meanwhile, goes off in the other direction and we can almost hear the mechanical whirring of a machine as we imagine her she daydreaming about how she is going to move to Lagos with her new boyfriend, have a society marriage, bear him at least 3 children and come back to show her village mates how she is living it up!


This is something that constantly happens. I last went to my village about 7years ago (much to my shame because I love the place). The first thing I noticed was that a lot of unmarried teenage girls had fallen pregnant. On enquiring on what the heck was going on, I was told that there had been a lot of construction work done and the girls had been in “relationships” with the laborers that had come from out of town. They had been wowed by the worldly men who had traveled around the country doing manual labor for a living. It was cool to be one of the chosen ones as the men had “money” and were so knowledgeable about things beyond their scope.

Even in the “city”, we have our young ‘uns and even older ones being wowed by the sophisticated and debonair attitude of guys and on that basis of alone, enter "relationships" with them. The outcome is hardly never good.

I am not saying that there are no other reasons why “relationships” go wrong. I am just saying that if we could adopt the "Not everything that Glitters is Gold attitude" we may save ourselves a lot of trouble.

Like a fellow blogger said in a letter to her young self, " Sex does not equal love".

I'll talk about scene two later!