Conjugal Coaching and Culture

Traveling to and fro in various parts of the world took Vivian to places where she encountered all sorts of cultural attitudes towards womanhood. Sometimes, she did not know whether to believe what she saw or heard and was tempted to leave. However, because she was on a fact-finding mission, she stayed her course.

In one locality where she stayed for two weeks, she met a young girl of sixteen, who did not have the chance to go to school, because her parents and their community as a whole; did not believe in educating girls. She was a beautiful girl who seemed decent in her manners.

The best anybody had done for her was taking her to a tailoring shop, one hour a day for three months. She learned to operate a treadle sewing machine on the shopkeeper’s veranda and mend clothes for the villagers. She did not acquire any skills cutting or using patterns, but if new fabrics were cut for her, she could join the seams and hem them without doing the finishing touches.

Anyhow, she was being forced to marry a man more than three times her age. The man had been divorced several times and had several children.

Perhaps she would have preferred a young man who had never married, so as to start afresh with him in all aspects. Maybe, she would have liked to fall in love with someone before getting married to him. Maybe, she would have liked to find her own man of whatever status and in whatever manner. Maybe, she was waiting for her type of Mister. Right to come along and find her.

Unfortunately, she was not given any chance to decide. Under the circumstances, someone had already been paid the bride price, and her only option was to comply with the decisions made for her against her will. The worst of it was that she had to undergo some detestable training session about how best to gratify her husband. Basically, she was to learn how to gyrate suggestively.

A woman in her seventies came for the young girl every evening at about seven o’clock, to take her to the ‘gyration school’. She cried miserably every day because she hated this ordeal, in addition to despising her husband-to-be. She went without dinner every day because of her disgust with the whole affair.

The old lady knew of her aversion to the issue and to her husband-to-be, so she treated her harshly. She was all but dragged out of the door to go to the training sessions. She usually came back after midnight, as miserable as when she left. Sometimes, she went crying and came back crying.

She did, however, get married to the man, but it never lasted. That had been her plan. The marriage was for him and them, not for her. She ran away within two months. Her life was ruined and her youth tarnished. She concentrated on her tailoring career and supported herself with the little she earned from it.

The idea of marriage could not settle in her mind again, because of the bad taste her first experience had left. She had not been ready when it happened. It was their greed for money that counted, not her plans for a successful marriage some-day. Maybe in the future, she would find her own man or he would find her.

The next part of her journey took Vivian to a place where schoolgirls, at a tender age of early teenage, were looking forward to learning adult sexual games from old aunts and grandmothers. Schools would close and girls would be shipped, for about two weeks, to places where they would be shown the tips and tricks to satisfying men.

The girls loved it, including the wearing of beads around their waists, and other tactics they were trained in. Some of the girls became escorts after finishing high school or college. Others found gainful employment in more conventional fields, though for some among them, the training led to a scandalous part-time job that afforded them a higher standard of living.

At Vivian’s third destination, she found a culture where girls who had reached puberty, were not allowed to sleep under the same roof as their parents or enter their bedrooms, even when their parents were sick. They slept in old ladies’ houses, where they were instructed daily about married life.

They were told to keep anger out of the bedroom, however bad the cause might be and never to go to sleep annoyed at their mates. These were ways of fostering forgiveness and compromise between themselves and their husbands. This culture believed that anger management was the secret to happiness in marriage.

Ultimately, Vivian found very interesting, the individual and communal life threads that cultures weave for women.