By Reagan Nyadimo
reagannyadimo@yahoo
Have you ever wondered why most campus relationships don’t
work? When you take a walk around campus especially on Fridays and during the
weekdays mostly at night, you will see many students holding hands, cuddling in
public and even goes to the extent of kissing, oblivious of the presence of
other students. There is so much ‘’love in the air’’ to a point you feel like
if you are single, you are an outcast. You question, torment your ego, see yourself
as insignificant, inadequate and regard yourself as half human. It reaches a
point where you feel ashamed to walk alone in campus and remain indoors the
whole weekend to avoid emotional torture. But have you ever given these romance
ideas a second thought? If love is in the air as the situation seems to dictate,
then why are we facing so many divorce cases in Kenya nowadays? Why are so many
families headed by single parents?
Eckhart Tolle, in his book “The Power of Now”, gives us an
insight to this scary turn of events especially amongst people who are
struggling with identity. He argues that majority of young people need partners
to become whole and find fulfilment in their lives. He explains that most
people pursue physical pleasures or various forms of psychological
gratification because those things will make them happy or free them from a
feeling of fear or deprivation. This is the bracket where most relationships in
campus are built upon. A majority of students want to be with someone as a sign
of prowess and earn respect amongst their peers. Even if (s)he doesn’t love
the person, (s)he will keep the relationship running to avoid being called
useless or unworthy of any girl. While boys are busy taking pride in the number
of ladies conquered, the ladies on the other hand are looking for relationships
where they can have fun. They look for financially well-off men to spoil them
and take them to all those fancy places that they cannot afford with their meagre
pocket money. This explains the death of most of the campus lady students under
mysterious circumstances in the hands of wealthy men. The recent death of Moreen
Chepkemei Kakuko, a first year student at Kenyatta University who is believed to have
been drugged at a club in Thika Town and later pronounced dead upon reaching
Kenyatta University’s Health Unit in the wee hours of the morning when her
friends called in the health facilities as she couldn’t wake up.
Society expects men to be brave, confident and daring. These
attributes are not owned by many campus male students. Fear of rejection is the
main reason for this. This insecurity has pushed the young men to settle for
less than the best. They would rather die than approach that campus queen for a
steady relationship. However, to keep their ego from being bruised, they form
“convenient relationships” with ‘friends’ that they have been introduced to and
end up keeping them even with lack of emotional attachment. Ladies, in most
cases are spoilt for choice and feel embarrassed when suddenly they begin to receive
advances from their boyfriends’ circle of friends. The situation may worsen to
a point of physical altercation over one lady yet there exists thousands of
them in campus.
The campus and its
environs provide a fertile ground for socialization but majority of students end
up wasting this opportunity because of the fear factor and fear of rejection.
In the process, they end up wasting ladies’ time, only to dump them at the end
of their degree course.
Eckart Tolle warns that if students’ in campus continue to
pursue relationships with an aim of being whole, then every intimate relationship
they are involved in will be deeply flawed and ultimately dysfunctional in the
long run. They will seem perfect on the outside for a while but with time,
arguments, conflicts, emotional dissatisfaction and insecurity or worse
physical confrontations may arise.
It is because of these casual handling of emotions, not only
in campus but also in other areas of socialization that millions are now living
alone or as single parents, unable to establish an intimate relationship or
unwilling to repeat the insane drama of past relationships.
The writer is a student
at Kenyatta University Taking a course In Bsc-Statistics
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