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Dating in the 80s: When finding love was a much simpler affair
The three building blocks of all unions are closeness and care, power and control, respect, and recognition.
Are people nowadays unnecessarily making it hard to find a soulmate?
We, who fell in love (and sometimes in lust) in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, remember a time when love was tender in its simplicity. It was direct. It was brave.
I read a post recently, written by a corporate baddie, as young educated working-class women call themselves nowadays, saying that they have no time to date and no men to marry. I thought Gen Zs are just overcomplicating intimacy.
In our time, it was not this complicated. I think. A man who liked a girl would send a messenger—his sister or a bold friend—who would approach the girl and say, “Omondi anakutaka.” [Omondi wants you.]
The girl might look away and mutter a soft, ambiguous mmh, and that was enough. The message would be relayed: “She said, ‘Mmh’.”
And somehow, that mmh held all the promise of tea and mandazi in the market the next day. The most sophisticated men would buy Susanna pomade. That was how love began.
There were village discos during the school holidays. Someone would bring a boombox and put up walls using mats made of papyrus reeds, and for Sh1, you could dance under the stars. Many marriages—and many babies—were conceived from the rhythms of those nights.
There were also the boys who waited. The waylayers. In this era, a waylayer would be called a stalker.
The boys who waited would lie quietly along the paths girls used to go to the market, river, shamba, or kisiagi [posho mill].
And if the girl was alone, the better; he’d walk with her to wherever. If her mother was nearby, the boy would simply wait. One day, he knew, she would pass by alone.
Sometimes, there were girls from other villages on a visit. Among the Luo, Tero ndaria was a time when the sisters or cousins of the bride went to make merry in the bride’s new home. It would involve singing and dancing. The young men from that village would be encouraged to join in.
There was also matchmaking, meet-ups at the village open-air films or in church camps, what Luos called kiche.
We rarely fell in love because of wealth. Men and women dated in penury.
Yes, it was easy to get a wife in the 70s and 80s, despite a man being poor, but that is not to say hearts did not break.
A colleague who grew up in Kakamega remembers Khadija. Because he was too timid to face the woman then, he asked his cousin to help.
They would wander near Khadija’s fence. She threw sticks at them at first. Girls did that then. We were taught to play hard to get.
We also feared boys. A cousin who travelled to the village from Nairobi once caught malaria and was throwing up yellow. The first sentence out of my aunt’s mouth was: “If you’re pregnant, you will swallow that baby.”
She didn’t even have a boyfriend because in that era we feared that if you uttered a romantic word to a boy, you’d automatically fall pregnant.
Back to Khadija, the heartbreaker.
One day she got tired of throwing sticks at my colleague, who was persistent in sauntering outside their home. “Ok,” Khadija said.
Little did he know that Khadija had also said okay to three other boys in nearby villages. She was seen in another village a few months later, married.
He was so heartbroken.
“It hurt most because she had given me a letter, powdered so that it smelt nice, and she had drawn many hearts pierced by arrows. It was signed off, ‘You’re my only one,’” he said.
The joys of dating in the 70s, 80s, and 90s depict the simplicity of life. Today, love is louder, yet less clear.
There has been a transition from landline telephones to video calls and a shift from powdered handwritten letters to WhatsApp.
I asked a young woman why dating seems so hard now. She looked at me as though the question were naïve.
“I can’t date a man who doesn’t know he should gift me a period care package, often. And if we’re going on a picnic, he better come with snacks in a basket and a picnic blanket. I don’t sit on grass. I’m a girlie-girl.”
I smiled politely. I wanted to say love used to find us even without gift baskets or curated aesthetics.
In Nairobi, we used to meet at Wimpy. It was loud and sweet and greasy and unromantic, and yet, there was magic in it. We used to begin love with a mmh. Now people begin with doubt or a wad of cash.
Caroline Njun’ge’s column resumes on May 11.
