Mum Won’t Wait For My Student Lover…

Dear Agatha,  

I am a lady of 24 years of age in a two-year old relationship with a guy of same age. I am a graduate while he is still in school, 200 Level, to be precise, but the issue is that we’re so much in love with each other. His greatest fear is that someday I’ll become impatient and eventually leave him. 

My mother is against the relationship and she isn’t hiding it. Few weeks back, she brought up the issue again and made me realize that she won’t support it at all.

Agatha, what do you think I do? I don’t know how to confront this guy with the situation of things? I can’t afford to hurt him?

Please advise me on this issue before I take the wrong step.

Worried Girl.

Dear Worried Girl, 

First, he has to know the truth concerning your mother’s opposition to him and why she is against the relationship. There is no way you can continue to protect him from the knowledge of your mother’s hostility to the relationship. Telling him yourself would help him appreciate the situation, but if he finds out from your mother, it would only complicate things between the two of you as he would lack the necessary patience to find out if the resentment is against his person or the fact that as a woman, you may not have the time to wait for him to finish schooling, go for one year mandatory service to nation and get a job before he is ready for the challenges of marriage. 

To be candid, your mother’s worry isn’t misplaced. At 22, you may seem to have all the time in the world to wait for this man to be ready, but think with as much clarity as you can, having finished schooling, do you think it is possible to wait for him to finish studying and go through all the processes of being ready? 

The natural order of things is for the man to wait for the woman to be ready to have good start in the relationship and not the woman waiting for the man. 

One of the fears of your mother, which is justified, given the unpredictable nature of human beings, is the guarantee of this man keeping to his end of the promise. What if after waiting patiently for him he abandons you for a much younger person? What would be your fate especially as you would have forgone very credible and promising proposals?

Your mother needs assurances that her daughter would not be left high and dry. She speaks from experience of one who has seen it all. You may not like her stance on this issue, but be patient enough to reason with her. Unlike you, she is far from the scene, which makes it easier for her to take in the whole set at a time, because unlike you, who is only able to view the close up of a tiny segment of the entire stage. 

Your mother isn’t saying you cannot date the boy, but that the circumstances of dating him aren’t right. Had you being the one still in school, she may have no reason to be worried. 

Rather than retort her opposition, look at her reasons. Yes, you are definitely in real love to want to put your life on the hold for him, but you must be sure he is worth this sort of sacrifice at the end of the day. So that he won’t turn around to make you feel like a complete fool for deciding to wait for him to be ready. 

Though life has no guarantee, but you must make the efforts to work at securing your happiness. 

For now, it would do you both a world of good to keep the relationship open, no committal promises that might be difficult for you especially to keep. Being a woman, your life isn’t as elastic as that of the man, at whatever age a man desires, he can still marry and make babies with the same efforts he uses while breathing in and out. Not so for a woman, whose biological clock is fixed by the Creator to last but for a period (from menarche to menopause). Medically, you are in your best years when you are most likely to incur any risk at child-birth. By the time you are in your 30s, the alarms are up, ready to go off. This is the reality of a woman’s life, and no amount of love can change it.

So in waiting for him to be ready, you must get real. For how long are you expected to wait? Is it until he finishes his education, which barring any ugly incident, would be in two years from now, assuming he is studying a four-year course? The years would stretch to three years if he is lucky to follow the first batch of NYSC members, but if not, that is extra two years. Be honest, can you wait for the extra years of uncertainties generated by the need to work, make enough to set up a home and care for the family irrespective of how much you are willing to offer to the building of the home?

Both of you must sit to discuss this friends, it is the only way you can make something out of this situation. If you both insist on talking as a couple in a relationship, the sentiments of lovers would come to blind fold you both to the reality of the situation ahead of you. 

But when you two talk as friends, you help yourselves acquire the needed understanding to move on. 

Good luck.