University Romance: What a Waste of Love

Once again, a little man has reminded us of the enduring truism in Ambrose Bierce’s words: “Love is a temporary insanity curable by marriage”. And with many married people practically going insane in toxic and abusive marriages, love, especially love in marriages, is effectively becoming a permanent insanity. So we expect 19 year old university students to stay away from love and concentrate on their books. At that impressionable age, love is built on immature emotional impulses, which unlike semester credit hours, would not count towards marriage.

Young, restless and stupid
Last week, when news filtered through about another student death on a university campus, I worried about the parents of the good-looking gentleman, not so much the boy. Parents never recover from these shocking moments. It is alleged the boy committed suicide when he learnt his girlfriend, another young student, was cheating. It is reported the youngsters had started the relationship shortly after they began their studies at the Winneba campus of University of Education. The young man had chanced on some unpleasant WhatsApp messages and videos on his girlfriend’s phone, and out of pain, had forwarded the content to his girl’s father.

In the same period, we had seen video snippets of another student at KNUST where roommates and coursemates were showing solidarity with their colleague who was nursing a broken heart, following the abrupt end of his love affair. Viral footage showed expenses the young boy had made on the girlfriend, including some GH5,000 squandered on a mobile phone. Meanwhile, the KNUST community has yet to recover from the death of Joana Deladem Yabani, a final year student, who was alleged to have been murdered by her boyfriend. In this case, too, a parent of the deceased had reportedly tried to end his daughter’s love affair with the boy.

It is concerning that in both murder cases, parents of the young lovers knew about the love affairs of the youngsters while on campus. It is also revealing that the Guidance and Counselling unit of KNUST had been involved in the case of Yabani and Tuffour, and had reportedly offered some professional services to the pair. You might think sex has suddenly become a staple on university campuses today, and is enjoyed as a compulsory course by all students. Like certified marriages, it is normal practice for girlfriends to travel from their hostels to cook and wash for their boyfriends in other halls. Sleepovers are normal and roommates make it work.

University PTAs
Strangely, we are yet to start any conversation on building maternity halls on our university campuses, to welcome babies of students. Thankfully, we have not heard stories of botched abortions on campus. Maybe our young students are not as naive as we think; they have been managing their sex lives quite well. University students today are very young and look immature. You wonder what they know about love.

University life is changing, and the signs are showing strong. We might soon need PTAs to help lecturers manage the behavior of tertiary students. If any more deaths occur on campus, the university community may consider developing a course for lecturers on how to control the sex lives of these young students, to assure their parents that their children will be fine in their care. The assumption that university is a community of adults who can take care of themselves, no longer stands. In high school, our teachers played in loco parentis (in the place of parents), watching our every step and issuing corrective guidelines to steer us in shape.

You see, I have been on this writing road since 1986 when my classmates used to rent my pen to write love letters to girls they fancied. They paid for my services with gari and shito, and sometimes shared the toffees that often came with the responses from the girls. In those days, the writing pads and envelopes were colourful and creatively designed to aid the transmission of the love messages. The ladies were mostly ingenuous (innocent) but they had ingenious (clever) ways of scripting their love intentions on paper handkerchiefs stashed in sweet envelopes that smelled like roses. These were byproducts of the exuberance of high school culture, and we enjoyed the exchanges–in the full knowledge that the romance was ephemeral. Very few of these relationships travelled beyond the school walls.

No good examples
In the 1990s and early 2000, university culture was a little conservative and boring. There was no WhatsApp. No Snapchat. No mobile phones. Only a few students maintained intimate relationships on campus. In my circle of friends who had girlfriends, only one led to marriage. Girlfriends didn't practice marriage while on campus; they didn't cook and wash for their boyfriends. Lovers related to each other like study partners who had set their eyes on something bigger than campus romance, which only promised fleeting moments of pleasure. We were quite mature and had the emotional resourcefulness to stay within sane boundaries.

What is the goal of university or high school romance, anyway? The young lovers who have been in the news for all the bad reasons, do not appear emotionally ready to build any meaningful relationships after university. More than a vocation, university education is designed to produce well-rounded graduates who would not only excel at their careers, but would also be able to manage their personal spaces without incident. Anybody who exhibits suicidal ideations betrays a serious lack of emotional and human tools necessary to navigate life. They will not make good managers, good civil servants or good politicians. Well, a filter leaves imprints on things it filters. Our children may not have found any good examples around them.

Kwesi Tawiah-Benjamin
Tissues Of The Issues
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