Matchmaking and my well meaning friends and family

I am 30 going on 31 and in our dear society since I am not married or on my way to the altar (yet) I must require help hooking up with a guy. To all my friends and family, I know you mean well and I love you all, thanks for caring.

(Sniff)

Matchmaking is something I try to avoid doing (indeed I have never done it) and it has never worked for me. I think the issue really for me is that in the enthusiasm of the matchmakers they usually tend to forget to ask a pertinent question of themselves - how well do I know both parties? It doesn't help if you know one party very well; the key to success is to know BOTH parties as well as you know yourself! Precisely, you need to know what they want out of a relationship. Seeing that time is going (asiko nlo) and there is such a large pool to sample from, being a matchmaker your job is to like sample the pool as if you were the person looking for a partner; so instead of one person sampling, u have two almost identical people sampling. Let’s assume I am the person who is looking for a partner. Once my concerned friend feels he/she has come upon a good prospect, he/she calls me up and may say 'girl wear that black top that does good things for you and come to my house to watch the Arsenal game'. I will be going over to my friends’ house knowing at the back of my mind this person has been checked out. Of course I will still carry out my own assessment, but you know this person has some kind of advantage (you met through mutual friends). I think it’s this advantage that causes the problem. I find people tend to labor on in relationships they have no business being in either because ‘my well intentioned friend hooked us up and really there must be some gold here, I just need to keep digging’, or ‘I owe it to my well intentioned friend to make this work’ (this usually happens to Yoruba people). Before you start making a relationship work based on the facts that you met through mutual friends and that no one person on this earth is perfect, and that diamonds in the rough are not attractive, etc, also ask yourself an important question – how well does this friend know me? Has this friend interacted with me on all facets of my life? Do we only ever hang out once a month on Fridays? Or do we only see in church on Sunday when I have worn my holiness alongside my hat/scarf/gele? Do they know where I stand on issues – abortion, infidelity, religion, a woman/guys role in a relationship, bringing up children, previous marriages, etc or for that matter do they know those issues which are dear to me? Have they seen me when I am angry, sad, broke, happy?

Sometime last year, I recall it was a Friday, I was headed home dreaming of just taking a warm shower then getting in my bed and just sleeping till noon the next day. Power plays an important role in ensuring the viability of this scenario, so I was on the look out for its availability from the gate of my estate. Okay the main gate has power, if we are on a ‘load shedding’ schedule we might not have power on my street. Imagine my joy when I turned into my street and there was power and a good healthy current to! I honk for my mallam to open the gate and I just see wires hanging almost to the floor! PHCN has struck!!! They have disconnected me for not paying when I have not been presented with a bill!!! Worse it just my house (4 flats) that’s without power!!! Its like 6:30 pm, if I am quick I can still catch the PHCN guys at their office in my estate, so I put the car in reverse and speed down my really bad road ( a friend describes it as a river bed) to the PHCN office. They have power by the way and their air conditioning is on full blast (it’s a really humid night). I politely (you have to be polite, even though they are at fault, they are still doing you a favor) state my case. I met a woman there who had the same compliant and thankfully she lived on my street as well. So we banded together and lobbied to be reconnected. Just as we were sealing the transaction (no we weren’t offering a bribe) a guy walks in also with the same complaint but he lives in another part of my estate. So who will carry the ladder? I drive a 3 series BMW (1992, 6 cylinder, 2 liter engine, manual transmission), the lady had a Rav4 and the guy a 5 series BMW (correct!). The lady says she can’t carry the ladder on her car we all promptly asked her how she thought her power would be reconnected with carrying the ladder. I am like put it on my car; let me get this over and done with. So it’s off to my house. As soon as I got to my place, my mallam made to go call my neighbors I am like ‘omo to ba try e’, let them reconnect me and then you can call whoever, I don’t want anyone coming here and wasting all my effort. Unfortunately my neighbors see the guy on the pole and all come out and one of them in particular took it upon herself to rain curses on the PHCN guy, so that one vexes and just drops my wire and goes off to the next location to reconnect the next person! To say I was mad would be an understatement!!! I was furious after all the work done (drove to their office, drove back with a ladder, toasted and toasted when I wasn’t in error, risked messing up the paint job on my car) I just entered my house and slept. I got them to reconnect me the next day sha and the guy from the night before apologized for not connecting me, he said he just started having a bad feeling with the woman raining curses on him as he held live wires then pictures of his 7 children and 2 wives flashed before him and he just had this feeling he might just get electrocuted on that particular pole! I don’t blame the guy, my Christian neighbor really cursed up a storm that night! Anyway the guy in the 5 series ended up carrying the ladder and I loaned him my foot mats to protect his paint job. He took my number so we could hook up and he could return them the next day. That’s how I met ‘AO’.

Many phone conversations, text conversations, msn/yahoo chat sessions later I like to think we are not just acquaintances. He is very intelligent; we flow on so many levels (arsenal, bmw). He knows I am not seeing anyone, and he has a cousin who is looking to settle so he hooks us up. So now I call him ‘AOM’. Initially I was like sure I’ll come over and watch the Arsenal game at your place (Arsenal/Chelsea, Chelsea beat us, that alone was a sign in itself), but later I thought about it and I was like does this guy really know me? Does he know me enough to be risking his cousin? In the end it didn’t work out (he was a little to quick for me and I felt he probably had something to hide, and I was right; a wife and two kids he was divorced). I am happy this incident doesn’t seem to have affected my relationship with AOM though, I spoke with him the other day and he is extending greetings from his heart broken cousin! And by the way, my bill finally came the following week, as at the end of November, I owed PHCN a grand total of N 538, imagine!!!!