IN LOOKING AT contemporary Barbados, we hardly hear anyone using the term love anymore. The common thing is that you’ve either got a type of selfish, possessive relationship and not true love.
Partners seemingly want to mould and domesticate their mates into what they want them to be as though we are not individuals having our own personalities. True love is about commitment, sharing, caring, sacrifice and sensitivity and not blatant manipulation.
Many Bajan men are “mama sweet boys” not willing to take on their paternal responsibilities, especially with children to support. Many just do not seem to mature and this, coupled with the arrant machismo, leads to tensions. Many women, on the other hand, indulge in a continuous puppy love, falling in and out of love like perennial teenagers. Multiple partners can negatively affect growing children.
There are several women who have become callous, the result of broken relationships and dreams. Anyone coming along feels the full
invective of these women. Some will tell you they don’t want to get married, their first sweetheart has passed. This is their right, because marriage calls for commitment in order to stand the test of time and the ever-changing situations and circumstances. It is not for little children.
Women, especially, those who can, would prefer to get a child for a man with status, even if this involves raising it singlehandedly, hence the concept of the single parent. Men are there to sire their offspring and that is the end of the relationship. It is a manipulative syndrome, getting the opposite gender to do what they want, sometimes even beyond his or her wishes; in short, using them.
In these hard economic times both genders are suffering, especially women with children, and the easy way to get out is to get more children for these same irresponsible men, who like the males of every species like to drop around their seed. Look at lions and fowl cocks.
In many of the relationships there is no bonding, physical and spiritual, and when spiced with poverty, the problem is further accentuated. Herein is the spawning ground for several societal problems: juvenile delinquency especially, no good home environment with a loving atmosphere, trouble with authority figures, not being able to cope with school assignments, peer pressure; no nutritious food – a vicious chain of events.
Many men prefer to hang out in rum shops with the boys and not go home to their spouses and children. The younger men are obsessed with threads and material things and still would like to dominate their wives.
But alas, this situation is changing as women become more educated. You can’t educate and still subjugate them. The whole esprit de corps is the cultivation of spiritual qualities in relationships and the maturation of these relationships. Every year together should be a graduation.
– PHILIP HUNTE