Well hello again!

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Yes, it truly has been a while this time!

What I am about to describe is partially responsible for my silence on this blog of late. This recent experience demonstrates once again, yet again that I am right about everything I write on this blog.
1. Firstly character is everything in relationships. Character is also everything when pursuing a Christian life. As Christians, we should be giving our all to surrender our hearts to Christ, and to strive to be like Jesus

2. It makes sense to carefully and thoroughly evaluate people before you allow them into close proximity with you.

So here it is.  Now, crucially, I definitely do NOT want to go into details about this thing, I don’t want to spell it out, I only want to describe it in broadest, vaguest outline. But basically, someone came into my space and by virtue of being thrown into close proximity with this person I essentially found myself “married” for want of a better word for a while (I don’t want to reveal how long)  – that is a non-sexual, non-consensual marriage in that I did not choose either the person or the circumstance of being thrown so closely together. To be clear this person is female. All I can say is “Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness!” I’m honestly not exaggerating when I tell you that I am grateful to still be alive to write this post. The situation was so stressful that  – wow!  Ooh! To be fair, it was not all this lady’s fault. 70% of the stress was due to unavoidable circumstances and that would have been the same no matter whom I was dealing with.

So imagine you’re me.  You’re trying to live your life as best and quietly as you can, and mind your own business. Someone comes into your space.  And then they quickly start letting you know exactly what they think about who you are and how you live your life – and while I don’t want to go into detail, I think I can let you know that their opinion was not very flattering! Circumstances mean I cannot rant as freely and as frankly as I usually would, but if I were to be diplomatic I would call the whole thing a “clash of cultures”. Also, undoubtedly, a clash of values. My attitude though is “Well I did not ask you to come here! I did not offer my life up for your analysis!”  Furthermore, all this stuff does work both ways. So while you’re busily evaluating me and loudly giving me the benefit of your unsolicited opinion, guess what, my own mind and evaluation/analysis engines are also working away! Why do people never seem to understand that these things work both ways?!

So yeah, I’ve probably already said too much! I will say a little bit more just now and deduce from this an extra criterion for my future husband:

1. I’m sorry if this sounds extremely undiplomatic. However my husband has to be comparable to me in that he needs to be well informed about current affairs. Now the issue with me is that I basically live on YouTube these days. Because of this I am unavoidably clued up about what is happening, what normal people are going through in different parts of the world. I have a habit of scanning through all the videos (and yes I do mean *all* the videos!) on my YouTube feed, linking to the videos I would like to watch as I come across them, and then going back to watch the selected videos once I have looked through the whole feed. This is why I can tell you  that the feed on YouTube is not unlimited, as might otherwise be assumed. It does come to an end, and to get new videos you need to refresh, for anyone who is not aware of that! So then what that means is that when I look through the whole feed, I skim read all the titles.  So even with the videos that are not eventually chosen for watching, I still get a good idea of what people are saying, what they are trying to share etc.

Because of this, and because of the countless videos I actually have watched, which are themselves often compilations of other videos, plus the comments I read too, I can tell you with absolute confidence that many people, if not most working-class to middle-class people in the Anglosphere or majority White English-speaking world, are currently struggling financially. So that would be the UK, US, Canada, Australia, likely New Zealand too (I’m guessing New Zealand too, although I have come across just one or two videos from there). There is a significant cost of living crisis in all these countries, there is a significant housing crisis, people are struggling to find jobs. And yet it is not just the Anglosphere. It is also much of Europe: certainly France and Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Greece, Croatia, Portugal.   Some people are saying that this affects the whole developed world. In Japan and South Korea, for instance, the problems there are that people are not getting married, the birthrate is dropping rapidly, and there is a huge culture of overwork, which has tragically resulted in some people dying from heart attacks caused by overwork, or work-related suicides. In China, on the other hand, there are lots of ghost towns and ghost cities which were built to take advantage of a now dead property boom, many people have lost lots of money because they bought at the top of the market and now the property market has collapsed. If I can find it, I did once watch a video where it said that someone bought a whole flat for the grand sum of  – wait for this:  7 dollars USD. That is right, just seven dollars, as in 1,2,3,4,5,6,7. SEVEN. (Or was it 7 Yuan, the Chinese currency?! Which would make it even cheaper.) Not 70 dollars, mind you, and definitely not 700 dollars. Imagine buying a whole flat for 7 dollars?!  At a current conversion rate, that comes to £5.25 GBP. That is less than the price of a day’s unlimited travel on London buses! (It was about a year ago that I watched this video.) This property collapse has brought widespread financial ruin, and with it lots of strain to many marriages. It was so heart-wrenching to watch one particular video where a man was sobbing his eyes out, while his wife tried her best to comfort him. I hope that he was eventually able to get past it and not succumb to despair. In that particular case at least it looked like their marriage would survive. In other marriages, apparently the wife would just coldly walk away. Apparently there is even a saying in Chinese: “When money goes out the door, love flies out of the window.” (Or vice versa.)

At any rate, all of this is just to illustrate that I am quite well informed about what is happening globally, just by virtue of all these videos that I watch. Now imagine that there is someone who apparently does not watch so many videos, so does not know the everyday realities of life that someone might be experiencing, and then this person starts berating you with their “unYouTubed” opinions. And because I watch such a wide variety of things and spend so long on there (!) I can be confident that I have a general broad overview of what is going on, while this person is drawing on isolated anecdotes or extremely outdated information – like outdated by decades.  I cannot be dealing with this in my life longterm.  Rather because pursuit of knowledge is so essential to me, it is like breathing, I need someone who also naturally speaks that language. So I need to insist on this from my husband. This needs to be his native language, as it is my own! Which is not to say, of course, that he needs to spend every waking moment on YouTube.  I don’t need my husband to know everything about what is going on around the world.  Up until a couple of years ago, I myself didn’t know all these things. I only started watching YouTube like this approx 2 years ago. Even now, there are still many things that I am not aware of. However, I would certainly like someone who is intelligently informed about my own particular circumstances, or whose mind can easily extrapolate, or imagine.

Like for instance, someone might say “Well Tosin, why is it that you spend all day on YouTube?  Is it that you don’t have a job?!” This is what I mean about having a mind that can easily extrapolate.  If I told him a few basic circumstances, then hopefully the right guy would be able to “get” why I have made certain choices, and it would make complete sense. Whereas I can tell you from experience that other people would not be able to understand the premise to start with and – yeah, I can’t be putting myself through that! It is nothing short of painful to have to put myself through that.

Another example of this is the very question itself of being married. If someone was active on YouTube the same way I am, then they would likely have come across the sheer thousands of videos of women complaining about husbands and married life and “weaponised incompetence”. These issues are so commonly repeated across so many videos that a kind of shorthand or a verbal equivalent has arisen among people who engage in this space.  Off the top of my head, this shorthand includes terms or ideas such as:
-“weaponised incompetence” (as mentioned abov0e
-“married single mother”
-“That’s why women choose the bear!”
-“4B”
-“childfree”
-“70% of divorces are initiated by women”

So imagine you’re me. You exist in a space where people throw around these terms freely. And then you find yourself interacting with someone who apparently does not even know that this is a thing, that it is actually possible for women, yes, including women of African descent, to choose singleness, and there is a sizable number of women who advocate online for singleness. While I am still holding out for my own Mr Huggie-Wuggie, I am reconciled to the possibility that he might never turn up. I am determined to embrace and celebrate my singleness for as long as it endures.  I honestly can’t imagine how anyone could fail to be aware of all these voices online, but as I say I can’t be finding myself in this kind of situation on a regular basis in marriage, trying to explain things which are so unremarkable in my life.

2. To conclude, I also have to say that my YouTube viewing is not just education, I also unapologetically watch a ton of pet videos. Nothing makes me happier than to see pets living their best, mischievous lives, especially pets who have been rescued from difficult situations. I think that we as humans have so much to learn from how pets so easily forget their trauma, and how easily they get along with one another, and the love, empathy and kindness they often show to one another, as well as to their humans. Animals often wear their hearts on their sleeves so they are not afraid to offer love or ask for love while we as humans often play so many games. In all, I think I also need a husband who understands just how adorable these animals often are!