What Goes Wrong With Mr. Right?

1.6 Dating, Darting and Dumping ‘Ukujola’ is a Nguni term used in the African community circles. We think it comes from the English expression, ‘jollying’ around. It describes what often flirting relationships between boyfriends and girlfriends become. Most married people have been in these before they settled. These jollying relationships are driven mainly by three factors. These three factors are different between boys and girls or at least they affected them differently. If adults could share with the young their experience in these relationships, many youth would be helped. But that would be provided they do listen. Amazingly, every generation of young people seems to prefer to learn only from their own mistakes and hurts. We feel that the people that pay the higher price in flirting and jollying are the women. It would be helpful if they could let young girls learn from their stories. But those stories are hard to get out. Perhaps the sense of embarrassment with their past teenage foolishness and vulnerability makes it hard to share the experiences. The pain of scars born out of what usually starts as trivial adventure and hope for fun makes the stories hard to tell. Let’s explore why these useless and mostly hurtful relationships ever occur. Firstly, there is what often starts as a teenage inquisitiveness, exploration and adventure. Every young person at some point in their life will get visited by these inclinations to explore. Youth need to be taught how to manage them. There could be some hormonal drive, but most of the pressure comes from indirect socialization. The adventurousness is everywhere around them and it arouses intrigue and interest. But also, and building on this, we all remember how direct peer pressure came to bear on us. It is important to teach young people to work on their individual identity against the crowd. But they would rather prove themselves against their parents or any other form of authority. Secondly, many young people and especially girls become targets for the boys who are bowing to various pressures. The boys are socialized to date and ‘dart’ and they start looking for girl-prey or accomplices. There is a cunning baton that is passed among males through the generations. This is the baton of proving your manhood by invading girls. The girls then fall prey to all sorts of tricks that boys play on them. Not only that but girls that are ‘in it’ pressurize others to join the wave. They make them feel foolish. Worse still, they scare one another with stories that if you don’t have sex something will happen to you. Anything is mentioned, from having pimples to dysmenorrhea (painful periods). These stories have surprisingly survived going through all the generations. Perhaps if older folk talked explicitly to youth, the chain would have long been broken. There is a third explanation for these relationships. Jollying (Zulu - ‘ukujola’) tends to have a more ‘serious’ angle than the traditionally white (Western) term of ‘dating’. Dating generally has a spectrum which my daughter and I have coined.  Just socializing an opposite gender friend as you would a same gender friend. Here there are no ulterior motives or dreams. No personal intimacy comes into the picture. It is just a normal social interaction. It can be in a group or just be between two individuals and that would make no difference to its quality. This level of dating needs no privacy. Let us call it social or group dating.  Regular dating of the same person just as a friend for company and nothing personal. This may be resulting from what started as social dating. A personal friendship that is specific but not intimate or exclusive develops. Once there is a tendency to repeated dating of that very same person, certain relational dynamics set in. Even if this was not initially intended, intimacy almost always sets in. For distinguishing purposes we will call this selective dating.  Regular and personally focused dating of the same person with the intentional hope of exploring and building an intimate relationship. This we will call target dating. If the ‘target’ complies, then this dating graduates to the next level.  Exclusive dating of one person in an established love relationship. Here we have the setting of a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship. This level is, at least theoretically, exclusive and personally focused. It demands privacy. If one party is found to be dating or ‘going out’ with someone else, they get into serious trouble. Here they own each other. This last level of dating is one that produces a lot of casualties. Depending on undeclared but intense expectations of one party or the other, all the levels of dating can create a string of frustrated dreams. Exclusive dating however has the highest number and level of casualties. This is the level that practices what we have come to call mock divorces. The tragedy of these mock divorces is that they blunt people emotionally, or traumatize them into intense defence mechanisms that generally destroy the quality of their subsequent relationships. Even their marriages are subsequently seen through glasses tinted by those experiences. The spirit of divorce is founded in playful and careless dating. Insensitive boys fiddle around with girls’ emotions as they please. Most marriages are destroyed in advance, during the teen games. Mr Right truly turns wrong during his teen experiments. What wives see in marriage is only the hibernated truth. The root of any mess we see in children today is the frivolous experimentation that prevailed in the youth of their parents. Dare I say it is also to a very large extent a reflection of the bruises of their parents?