When You Fall in Love with Your Parents’ Hate
Love is a beautiful thing and blessed is the man who finds it at the right time and in the right person. Generally, love can be found anyone irrespective of tribe, language and profession.
In fact, unless you are raised to find reasons why certain people are not good enough to fall in love with, you are very likely to fall in love with someone who your parents don’t like or even hate.
Now, if you fall as flat and deeply as I have fallen for BrojidBae, it’s generally difficult to hear when your parents start talking about the fact that your lover is from a forbidden tribe, town or in the forbidden career.
However, whether you hear anything or not, the truth is that your parents will most certainly hala you when you fall in love with someone they don’t really approve of. It’s because of this reality that I am writing to share with you what you could do when your love is your parents’ hate.
Don’t Fight; Reason with Your Parents
One of the common reactions when parents reject our choice of spouse is to fight them. But don’t! You see, it’s very very rare in life to start such a fight with your parents without leaving scares that take time to heal, if they ever heal sha. Fighting them may lead to more troubles between you and them instead of producing any positive result.
So, don’t fight them, don’t insult or talk down on them directly or indirectly. Don’t also pack your bag and go and live with the man they hate or bring the woman they hate to live with you. Reason with them, at least, for now.
You see, as much as you think your parents to be less educated, less spiritual and outdated in their thinking, truth is that they, many times, they are a custodian of wisdom that is capable of saving us from troubles in the future. So, sit down and hear why they hate the one you love.
When you talk with them, they may make sense or no sense; but you will never find out until you make up your mind to listen to them with an open mind and hear whatever they have to say and objectively evaluate them.
When Your Parents Don’t Make Sense
When their opinion doesn’t make sense, you have to reason with them. You need to help them see clearer than they have seen or clear whatever is preventing them from seeing clearly the powerful in-law they are trying to push away.
For instance, when they say good spouses don’t come from your bae’s town, ethnic group, point them to the numerous examples of bad spouses that come from the village they want you to marry from. Just mention one bad spouse from your village and ask them if they would want you or their child to marry such a person.
When they point you to a richer or more handsome person, help them wealth and beauty are not the cardinal points in the choice of a spouse and always look for apt examples to drive home your point. Sometimes our parents are so poverty stricken that they look up to a spouse for a breakthrough, instead of God Almighty. Or they belong to a social class and believe that their child shouldn’t marry from the lower class.
Just make it very polite and when possible present your point as a question which their answer to them will show they don’t have any point. For instance, when they say that women married from outside your town turn the heart and wealth of their husbands to her family and prevent their husband from caring for his family, just ask them: How about Mr Clement’s wife (a bad wife) who is the right home town?
When you have considered their concerns and have a way around it; yet they don’t see reasons with you, don’t give up yet. Still, stand your ground and give them your reasons. Refuse to fight them in case they start saying an annoying thing about your love; if you do, even God won’t be on your side. If you can’t stand listening to them without speaking or acting wrongly, avoid them as much as possible.
Another thing they may try doing is getting other members of your family to talk sense into you, emotionally blackmail you and even threaten you. If you are convinced that Taiwo is your husband, refuse to be worn out. Do your best to politely trash their unfounded concerns,
Stick to your guns and while you wait for them to get tired of hating your love and give consent to your marriage, spend more of your time working with your love on how to make your marriage really work so well that they will wonder why they ever objected to your union.
Meanwhile, present all their fears and concerns to your would-be-spouse and figure out how to deal with them so that when you eventually get married, they won’t look back and say, “Ikenna, did we not tell you?” Until you deal with them, you will be walking into danger.
Now, before you get the impression that I’m encouraging you to marry that fellow against your parents wish, listen. When your parents have valid reason why you should not marry someone, pay attention to them; otherwise, you will walk into perpetual bitterness.
When Your Parents Make Sense
The truth is that sometimes we get clouded with emotion which we call true love so much that we don’t see red flags in relationships or lie to ourselves that we can change the fellow or that they will change when they marry us because they love us. It takes your unbiased parents or uncle to wake you up to your senses.
Usually, you can’t really know what someone will do in every situation in future; however, when you consider their viewpoints and actions today, you can easily predict their possible reactions in future. It takes an unbiased person to see that the words of that fellow reveal the evil that he or she can do.
That unbiased person could be your parents or even your uncle and you should listen to them. Listen to them and do the needful. It’s always better to have a broken relationship than to have a failed marriage. Once you can see clearly that the fellow is the wrong person to be with, find a way to quit the relationship without hurting the other person very deeply.
Just by the way, breaking up peacefully is not always easy; but I will help you with some tips from my experiences in my post, How to Quit the Wrong Relationship. Watch out for it on Brojid Lifestyle before the end of the month.
Personally, I have not fallen in love with someone with my heart first. It’s first with my head and then my heart follows. That allows me to examine the person thoroughly and be sure that I am not under the influence of her intelligence, devotion to God or even love for me, but have considered her fit to occupy the office of MrsBrojid.
We all can’t really do that; we often fall first with our heart before our head. That’s why we may be wrong; thus the need to listen to your parents. (Check Brojid Lifestyle for, Falling in Love with Your Head or Your Heart?)
When your parents bring valid points for objecting to your choice of spouse, please think through it before you disobey them. Your parents may not have read all the relationship books you have read or seen the four walls of the university let alone acquire the Master Degree you have; but they have seen things in their lives and they have heard countless stories about marriage. That should let you know that they may have some lessons from experiences to share with you.
Their experiences and stories they have heard have empowered them to smell a bad spouse from afar! They have seen many people like him or her and they wouldn’t want their child to suffer the consequence of such a person.
In this case, their hatred for your love is not because they don’t like him or her; but because they are trying to protect their baby. They haven’t lost their protective nature; that nature still makes them cringe at the thought of seeing you suffer while they are alive.
So, when they really have valid point to make, please don’t ignore them. Critically think about it closely and be sure you have a way around their concern or you are ready to live with it the rest of your life.
My point?
When you fall in love with someone that your parents don’t want or like, it’s a difficult thing because of you either succeed in convincing them to accept the person or you face the difficult job of quitting the relationship you may have had for years. Don’t fight them; start by listening to their reasons.
If it doesn’t make sense, use your persuasive prowess to get them to see reasons with you. However, if they make sense, please don’t allow stubbornness to drive you into hell-on-earth marriage. Q-u-i-t the Relationship! I know you may cry; so feel free and cry for some days, weeks or even months so you won’t cry forever.
You can read more of this kind of post on our Brojid Lifestyle Magazine, every Friday. For quick tips we share with youths every Monday, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Linkedin @BrojidWorld. You can equally subscribe to our exclusive contents here.
