Question: Hi, my name is Jessica. My Nigerian boyfriend goes mad when other men look at me. He said his ex-wife cheated on him but I don’t understand why he flips each time a man looks at me. It is not my fault that I look good. Or is it? Jessica, NY.
Answer: Oh, Jessica. His ex-wife cheated on him. Get that? It has become his big thing. Somewhere inside him, he feels incompetent. And the cheating has diminished him. And any sign of another cheating coming his way will make him wimp. In Nigeria where he comes from and where his head still is, it is the height of humiliation for a man’s wife to cheat. It is of course, okay for the husband to cheat on the wife. In fact, what you call cheating here is celebrated as a man’s display of prowess. So you lost out as soon as men began to look at you. You reminded him of a bad dream. A Nigerian proverb says that if a man is stung by a bee, he begins to fear even the housefly.
Question: Dear Love Guru, My name is Mary from D.C. I am baffled about this Kenyan guy my sister is dating. He moved in with her and my mother in such a small three bedroom apartment. I think something fishy is going on. What could it be?
Answer: Mary, I will be very blunt. The Kenyan guy who married your sister and moved in with her, and her three kids, and your mother, and maybe two dogs, three cats and an aged python in that crummy three bedroom apartment , is looking for something other than marriage. He will leave as soon as he finds what he is looking for. Your task is to find what he is looking for before he finds it and flees. An African proverb says that it takes ill-health, emotional, psychological or physical ill-health for one to abandon the elegant traditional church and join one of the mushroom prayer houses.
Question: Hi, I am dating this African guy for a year now. But he has never introduced me to his parents. Why is that? I am kind of feel that things are going on well between us. Betty in Dallas.
Answer: Oh, Betty Betty, are you fat? Ok, too harsh, too negative. Are you pretty? Are you thinking of marriage or suggesting that in subtle ways? Are you expensive to maintain? I ask because if you are pretty, you do not talk of marriage and you are not expensive to maintain, my African guy in Dallas will go out with you until he is ready to get married. He won’t tell his parents because when it is all said and done, you are of no consequence. Sad, but true. He will tell his parents when he meets the kind of woman he wants to marry. In the part of Africa where your guy came from, dating is seen as iti okolobia – “youthful exuberance.” Marriage is a different ball game. African men must wipe their eyes clean before they go into marriage.
Question: Dear Love Guru, I have been married to an Igbo man from Nigeria for five years. Recently, things between us have gone sour. There is nothing I do that seems to satisfy him. He says that I am not doing enough to be Igbo. I don’t get it. He wasn’t into Igbo things before. Now I am confused. Please help. – Annabelle in Portland.
Answer: The man is tired. Your man, I mean. He will leave you. And soon too. Here is what happened here. He is getting older and is beginning to think like his father. He has rejected his assimilation. Nothing can save your marriage. Not even if you wake up tomorrow and begin to act and speak Igbo. Of course, you can be submissive, lick his behind, but like an Igbo proverb says, you can cure a mad woman but you cannot stop the intermittent flapping of her eyelids.
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