Socien's Blog

At 19:00hrs, 15 September, a knock found me planning for the proceedings of a long night. I felt angry hearing the voice of the landlord summoning me for a briefing. An unknown had spoiled the bathrooms and it was the property owners’ duty to stop him before furtherance of his behaviours.

Three bachelors were in for a hearing. One, divorced, was considered a senior who no longer messed up. He was not to be opposed when he motioned his intention to eject himself off the session ten minutes after warming the landlord’s sofa. It was as if a plane had touched the tracks of an airport en route just to drop a passenger in need of immediate medical attention before returning to the skies. The landlord commented on his manners and good morals. By morals, he referred to his ability to tally with his conservativeness.

The remaining two passengers were me, a notorious bachelor in his late twenties and prime suspect in the bathroom issue, and another in his mid-twenties. With the bathroom issue solved, the landlord nose-dived into a new topic. His wife soon joined him as a co-pilot, choosing to sit on a sofa next to mine hoping to fire her words directly into my right eye. She raised her biggest concern with me —that of letting my girlfriend enter her property. Understanding very well that I was sleeping with her, the duo was quick to let me know that the seal of virginity I had tempered with, releasing the foil freshness my girlfriend once had, had taken off her girlhood. The duo’s conclusion was there can only be a girl, one who is a virgin, and a woman who is married or widowed. To them, my girlfriend was an unclassifiable case. A prostitute, the duo’s wordplay suggested, a category she shared with divorced women and unmarried victims of unwanted pregnancies.

As a champion of non-violence, I buckled up in my seat. I stayed in silence, humiliated by a way of seeing things that was the exact opposite. I have felt conservatism creating a small circle that leaves anyone outside it an outcast and a prisoner. My girlfriend had slept with someone before me, that did not render her obsolete to me and it didn’t change her ways of thinking or her ability to love. What could not separate an ideal girlfriend from a bad one was not the fact that she slept with someone. I on the hand, was exposed to sex at the age of nine. My parents were drinkers. Mom’s female friend would sleep with his boyfriend after a beer soaked party in my room on the floor. Midnight they would perform their sexual act in my eyes, thinking that I was asleep. We soon started to imitate this with cousins. But as I became a teenager, I got scared of sex or getting closer to a girl. I (28) would then sleep with my current girlfriend aged 26. I, however, never placed a premium on marrying a virgin. I don’t think it makes or breaks a woman to be one or not.

The duo did not have that script. It didn’t understand that me and my girlfriend were part of the few in the country spending more years attending universities and delaying marriages to make the nation work on our part. (It works for one marrying at nineteen or twenty-one to wait for it than one marrying at thirty). It ripened the stage to win a dogfight with a defenceless target, one that had no flares to justify its actions. It manoeuvred to punish me with persuasion, realising that I was now close to letting go of the Martin Luther King non-violence approach in me.

The landlady drew her body close, her spine supported with metal plates and screws limiting the extent she wanted it to go. She fired her words in my ears this time with a clenched fist hitting her open palm upon the utterance of each phrase. She pointed at the picture frames strategically positioned as trophies atop the chimney’s mantle which was as big as a single bed. Three of his four sons were at their wedding ceremonies with their wives in this exhibition. She convinced me to see the beauty of it—having something to show like this at the end as if it was impossible to show it after having slept with my girlfriend before marriage.

The landlord took the relay stick. He mentioned the non-conformity of his religious standards for sex before marriage. He strongly disapproved of my action, promising me that I would be thanking him later for following his disapproval as advice. Inquiries were made on the details of my girlfriend. I fought hard to tell them anything.

These are not my parents. They are just people selling a service, a room, which I am paying for. A month without a tenant in the room I am currently occupying can hit them hard. But my observations were quite telling. The tenants who endured the stay at the house were a kind that struggled to pay, often having two months unpaid behind. The good ones rarely stayed unless they were spending much of their days outside, driving across the country.

Instead of fighting them through an argument, I decided to listen to the story that was underneath the one I was hearing. The story “A” is some are in business but they forget to see it that way—especially when selling services. If a store would sell products to individuals only after knowing that their perspectives are aligned with those of the shop owner nothing would sell. The months I had stayed with these landlords made me appreciate a secular approach in business and other interactions.

Story “B” is warriors can defeat you if you give them a chance to be in a war with you as a non-warrior. After exhausting persuasive and confrontational advice, they cooled off and slowly started to pick my side, suggesting to me how this could work. They begged me to introduce her to them next time. The husband was particularly interested in playing a key figure in marriage proceedings in our traditions. I promised to deliver the “tender” to him.

Still I planned to leave.