Love is not always worth sacrificing yourself for

Young love is interesting. It's what you'd get if you mixed fire and stupidity then added ignorance and fantasy and then jumbled it all up in lava and then had two young lovers jump in. It's the kind of thing that made the Romeo and Juliet script sound romantic. What part of it was romantic? Juliet was 13 and Romeo was a grown man. Friar Lawrence came up with the hair-brained scheme of faking death instead of just telling them to get their randiness and teen angst in check it tragically ended as a double suicide story. It's a tragedy without a moral lesson, just stupidity all around.

But that's the folly of youth even today. It's the age that young men elope with girls they met weeks earlier and decide to get married. An online conversation came up which brought up yet again why young people need a lot of intermittent fasting, meditation, and voodoo chanting. A Professor, Rita Orji talked about how she got an email from a 22-year-old lady who had gotten a fully-funded admission for a Master's degree overseas. She was conflicted because her boyfriend had told her to make a choice between the masters and him. 

After laughing for a good couple of minutes I realised I had to look at it through the lens of a 22-year-old. If you ask me to choose between my Master and you, I won't just book the window seat for the flight, I'll ask the pilots if they have space in the cockpit so I can help him with the take-off and I'll even serve them tea and crumpets.

I don't know what audacity this brother had in trying to force her to pick between her own career progress and the prospect of marriage with him. The audacity of men like these should be studied. It's not only women who fall for this foolishness though. 

I remember a classmate of mine who changed his university selection from Mombasa to Nairobi to be with his girlfriend even though it meant that he didn't have a place to stay and had to do menial jobs just to survive. He had to switch from the course that he wanted to pursue so that they could share a campus but also classes. You can imagine how he felt when he was dumped a few months later, yet he had sacrificed himself while she lived her best life. A different friend got a marriage ultimatum when he was going to study for his master's as his girlfriend made it clear that she wanted to get married immediately and that if he left, she would find someone else to marry her. He decided to stay and marry her. They have been divorced for five years now and he's without a Master's degree.

Men, don't be stupid. There's no kinder way of putting it. Put yourself first always. Love is exciting, without a doubt. Love makes you feel like you can change the world and that there's nothing that you can't conquer but it's also the reason for a lot of foolish decisions. You hear of people giving up promising careers to make space for a chance at love and then you see the same men regret it years later when their relationships break down and they're left with nothing.

You're going to give up on opportunities and when it all falls apart you'll have either less education or career prospects. You'll be that man who will be seen as having no ambition or direction because you blew up your chance at success. No one will write about the romantic overtures or sacrifices you made because romance is considered nice, in addition to everything else not as a core aspect of who you are. If you ever sit at a gathering and tell them about how you gave up grand opportunities for the prospect of love, they'll laugh at you. Not with you. At you. Because they would expect you to have common sense and a dash of intelligence.

Only you can forge your future as a man and it will take more grit and perseverance than inspiration and motivation. You know love can always wait. If it can't, set it aside. For the first time, I will admit that my high school teachers were right; there will always be another person even when you think of the one you have is the moon. 

If the love that you have is holding you back from opportunities, drop it, without a shadow of a doubt. It will always be worth it. You will always be worth it.

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