Happy Valentine’s Day…for anyone celebrating!

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Well Happy Valentine’s Day to everyone celebrating.
I found myself in Morrison’s supermarket yesterday (Friday 13th Feb) looking for –  a metal mixing bowl.  It is a bit of a saga, but I have been wanting to make Nigerian puffpuff for months but I was lacking a metal mixing bowl. (Puff-puff= a kind of West African 2-bite fried dough ball, far less sweet than Western-style doughtnuts, ridiculously moreish.) Please note, what I was craving was to actually make them myself. Ironically there is some puff puff* in my fridge right now, made as a gift by my talented Sis, which I look forward to enjoying. But what I was truly craving was to make he puffpuff myself myself. Anyway, I could go into lots of unnecessary detail about that. Long story short, I found myself in Morrisons. And I, like everyone else, was  immediately hit by the Valentine’s Day display of flowers, cards, chocolates, gifts. There was even a “happy Valentine’s Day” banner on the entrance gates. I chuckled to myself thinking that no-one  (who happened to come to Morrisons) would have an excuse for forgetting.  The point I want to draw out here is that it did not touch me at all. It inspired the kind of polite disinterest that was literally like observing a display for a celebration for another faith.

And yet, here is the thing. I have made no secret of the fact that I would love to have a husband and that I also experience deep loneliness. And yet, it’s like the things represented by Valentine’s Day, the values it represents or speaks to, the feelings it acknowledges, encourages or speaks to,  do not intersect with my own relationship hopes or yearnings *at all*. Which is why it never remotely moves me, or triggers feelings of loneliness. It is like a completely foreign concept. And I was asking myself:  Was this true because of my current singleness?  Perhaps things might change if I ever do  find myself in a relationship; perhaps – like everyone else, surely? – my husband and I would pull out the parts that are relevant or meaningful to us?

And yet, I did find myself going on a Valentine’s Day “date”: with the aforementioned sister and another sister. And while there, I found myself playing Devil’s Advocate for Valentine’s Day, albeit briefly.  “Yes, you can show your love on any other day, perhaps your wedding anniversary. But perhaps there is something to be said for having a day that is collectively dedicated to romantic love…?” And then of course, by the end of the conversation, I was predictably back to bashing my usual bugbears about Valentine’s Day!

(In the course of writing this post, I am realising just how blind I have been all along.
I try to discover as much as I can about relationships. I watch endless videos, I read people’s accounts, I ponder, reflect and I ask myself questions. But there are still some things that are obvious that I don’t understand. It is not romantic love or displays of such that trigger me. Rather what consistently triggers a sense of sadness or missing out is displays of genuine friendship. All this time I have been looking for a husband, without realising or being able to articulate it to myself, what my heart has been longing for is not first and foremost a man to trigger those passionate sexual feelings, but rather a true friend. Duh!)

Well if Valentine’s Day and all it seems to represent does not move me, but I genuinely want a husband, well what does?
Well…
AS I was lying in bed overnight, I was remembering a blog post idea that off the top of my head I don’t think I eventually wrote into a post, and I was thinking through the whole concept once again. And here it is:
It occurred to me years ago that if marriage was a matter of just finding a good male friend to live together with, and build a life with, I could so easily do that. It would be the easiest thing on earth. The one immense complication in this is sex. There is no way I could bring myself to do anything sexual with someone for whom I do not have sexual feelings. And there is equally no way I could contemplate a marriage without sex – no way!
Something about me that people might find surprising is that I actually find it so easy to build friendships with men.  I am the kind of person who can effortlessly have men as best friends – as long as there is no hint of attraction between us. But then ironically, because I tend to be so close with these friends, (nothing dodgy sexually, to be clear!) the closeness between us can often be mistaken for romantic interest – if not by the men themselves, then by people outside. So if I were to just accept a sexless marriage, it would be the easiest thing in the world for me to just choose one of these friends. But there is no way I am going to do that.
So that is what occurred to me years and years ago.

However, while I was lying in my bed overnight (alone, of course!) that what I need to seek is a sexualised platonic marriage.  This might sound like an oxymoron, but I will try to describe what I mean:

Just a few days ago I was metaphorically pulling my hair out once again, right here on this blog, trying to understand the nature of love.  I equally do not understand how to incorporate/navigate romantic or sexual feelings in a relationship. I just don’t get it.  No matter how much I forcefeed my mind with Afro-Korean YouTube dramas, my mind just doesn’t get it.
And then it finally occurred to me:  why am I beating myself up about these things that I don’t understand?!  No matter how much I study them, my mind just does not inherently grasp these concepts. Why don’t I just play to my strengths, and stick within the boundaries of what I confidently understand, what my mind effortlessly grasps?! And what I confidently understand, consistently, is character, friendship and emotional intimacy.

So moving forward, this is going to be my approach. Instead of wasting yet more time trying to understand the concept of love and feelings, I am instead going to seek for a marriage built on friendship.  Never am I going to beat myself up again about love or romantic feelings as I simply do not understand these things and they confuse me so much. Rather what I am going to focus on is finding a man who is compatible with me with whom I can build a friendship, and then going on to build a strong friendship and also emotional intimacy.
I guess the complication and my confusion is that we have been taught that sex is built on a foundation of these mysterious feelings that my brain refuses to understand. But maybe what is true is that sex can reliably be built on physical proximity to a healthy and attractive body, plus emotional intimacy and the proximity can be built on such a deep level of emotional intimacy, mutual trust, vulnerability, respect and intellectual compatibility that we genuinely want to spend every waking moment together.

Who knows?! There might already be someone who appears to be quite suitable! If someone is oriented towards a more conventional “feelings” view of marriage, considering that women are “not supposed to make the first move”, how might I indicate that I am interested in him, but my view of marriage is very different? And yet I have suddenly remembered – yet again, that no matter how tempting it might seem to take matters into my own hands, as usual, I am going to leave this in God’s hands, for once.  I will contribute by praying and then I will leave it to God to act if indeed this is His will.

*puffpuff is like icecream, (ice-cream…ice cream?) in that I never consistently spell it the same way, usually because it is something said out loud rather than written about. So it could be puffpuff, or puff puff, or puff-puff -all are equally right, and I unconsciously cycle between the various variants at will!!1