There's a weirdness factor at play when you date an ex's relatives

We live in an era of a blitz of entertainment. Literally everywhere you turn, there is a new movie, a new series to watch, a new play – and there are multiple platforms to feed out leisurely delights. The biggest culprit for me, in my personal life, is Netflix.

If you’ve been paying attention – which I have – you’ll notice one thing: that the ‘Top 10 in Kenya Today’ list is rarely, if ever, any good. I don’t know if you’ve made the same mistake I have, which is assuming that simply because a bunch of people are watching it, it must be great, right? Wrong!

I made this mistake once for a terrible Christina Milian movie called Falling Inn Love. While I am, at heart, a jaded yet hopeless romantic, even the inner workings of self could not stop the tragedy that was that script. What in the world was that? And why were the accents so bad?

So you can imagine my apprehension when I saw there was another one of her movies out: Resort To Love. I looked at it, saw Jay Pharaoh and immediately ignored it. But then it came up on the Top 10 list. And there was the other guy playing her love interest, who serves as a wonderful bit of optical nourishment (Sinqua Walls, amen). Me and my soft heart were quickly sucked in.

Honestly, the movie wasn’t half bad. Anything is better that Falling Inn Love. But then I was once again, wondering at the plot point where – spoiler alert – Milian’s character starts falling or entertaining a romance with her ex-lover’s brother.

Now, I know there’s the guy code, and there’s the girl code, but what about personal coding? In the movie, Milian had been engaged to Pharaoh’s character, ready to marry him – and then he ran away and ditched her, in an insalubrious and cruel way. Like three weeks before the wedding! Are you telling me that someone in their right mind would then, upon discovering this man at your place of work, proceed to fall for his brother, fine as he is? It’s a no for me.

There are a lot of fish in the sea, yes, for sure. It would feel like there was no need to zero graze, but if you can’t find the other fish, you just perambulate with the ones in your pond, yes? I think it would take a preternatural sense of maturity to be able to pull off what they did in that movie, but there would be a lot of questions for me. Starting with, is the ghosting in your family genetic? Will this whole ditch me when we’ve already paid the wedding deposits happen again? Like if I give you my heart, am I going to regret it in an even bigger way? Then there’s of course the bedroom politics. When we were together, if you talked to your brother about me, are we now going to be comparing stories, or will someone be getting a little jealous? How are family gatherings supposed to go, exactly? Everyone in your family already met me when we were engaged. Should I now reintroduce myself to the family WhatsApp? Had I even left! How does your mom feel about my going through her sons like this is Game Of Thrones and she’s Cersei?

In the game of love, there are always losers. And truly, love can make fools of us all. But sometimes, I think we can avoid the foolery – if only by avoiding your ex, and his brothers, cousins, uncles, godfathers…unless of course, they’re distant enough that you won’t bump into them at family reunions, and only if they look and act like Sinqua Walls’ character. As an absolute last resort to love!

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