I have a homeboy of mine from Gambia, Africa we were talking about a situation of his that he had decided to go ahead and commit to.
See his parents had picked out a wife for him, when he was 7, from this other family that had just had a new born daughter.
The young lady is now 19 and it is now time to get hitched.
His folks have been calling him from Africa nonstop expecting a date of his arrival back home for the marriage.
My man is sweating bullets and I be lying if I did not say that I was getting a good laugh out of this.
The young lady, who by the looks of her picture is a stone cold fox, is getting her education right now but is eagerly waiting for her husband to be to come home and make an honest woman out of her.
She and my man will call him Slim; have been keeping up with each other on the phone so they are not complete strangers.
But none the less with the exception of the pictures they have never seen each other.
Now Slim just got out of a marriage to an American woman who he neglected to tell his parents about, the relationship was a bad one so was hesitant about to get married again, African or no African.
His mother has different ideas about the matter, since he did not bother to say no to the plans all through his years growing up it is too late to say no now.
So he is going to bite the bullet and get hitched “in the near future”.
I got to admit Slim’s culture has got me thinking, his father, has 5 wives and over 19 kids with them, Slim being one of the younger ones, he says he does not know if he will take on another wife since you have to be pretty well off to afford more than one, (amen), and that’s why he is in America to make his fortune.
Could I go along with an arrange marriage? The practice is not uncommon in Haiti were my folks are from and I know my grandmother would be the one brokering the deal, so I would feel safe, but could I do it?
The rumor is that those couples who are in arranged marriages stay married and happily at that.
Now this is opposite to our pick em and leave em ways that we have over here.
So who ever she was, I would be stuck for life.
The thing is in most cases you are not really strangers you would know about each other and be introduced to each other under supervision, hell you may even be attending the same school.
Besides considering how couples over here know each other for years and still get divorced how much stock can you put into knowing some one?
I mean there are little thing that need to be worked out like virginity, education who is living where and so on and so forth, but the parents doing the arranging would be dealing with that.
Truth is I do not know what I would do but I have a sneaky suspicion that I would go along with it.
What I am positive about is that they would be only one, I see no purpose to bringing the gravedigger and the coffin maker along to your own execution.
