Why Generation X make better parents than lovers
Generation X grew up facing the traumas inflicted on them as children, watching their parents’ routine replace romance. Loveless unions that screamed, “We are only together for the children.”
What you need to know:
- In my social circles, the ratio of married to separated couples is at an alarming 1:3.
- The ones who have children prefer to co-parent, with its complexities and politics, while the ones who choose to stay in marriage, well, I don’t know. I am not married.
- Generation X grew up facing the traumas inflicted on them as children, watching their parents’ routine replace romance. Loveless unions that screamed, “We are only together for the children.”
Here are two things you can never learn in a club, especially one with an MC screaming over the music.
a) Don’t buy that piece of land on Kangundo Road. b) No matter what, don’t call your ex with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer, and ask her, “By the way, kwani what happened to us?”
I’ll tell you what happened. It didn’t work. Whether for nefarious reasons or, as someone’s daughter once told me, “I need to find myself.”
Ha! So imagine my shock when I saw someone, a rangy 30-something-year-old man, with a Mark X-type bad haircut and liquid courage, get down on one knee and ask for some woman’s hand in marriage.
The youngish lass, a couple of shisha smokes in and eyes lighting up from one too many shots of gin, looked risibly apprehensive. But after a few friendly, “Say yes! Say yes!” from the crowd, she said yes. I said no. Who said romance is dead?
Look, things don’t go wrong, they start wrong. And although Rihanna made that song, We Found Love in a Hopeless Place, she carefully never said that the love lasted. But I am an adult now, and acceptance of the inevitable, even of something you simply cannot understand, is a much more peaceful way to live. What’s that Socrates said? For to be wise and loved exceeds man’s might.
That’s the same credo I have taken into my relationships; a casual observer rather than a prying detective. And I have observed that our generation makes better parents than lovers.
I know this because a) there are more cases of deliberate co-parenting and b) it has been brought to my attention that I am a Bluetooth kind of lover, always away, much like our President. Navel-gazing aside, it is the former point that intrigued me.
In my social circles, the ratio of married to separated couples is at an alarming 1:3. The ones who have children prefer to co-parent, with its complexities and politics, while the ones who choose to stay in marriage, well, I don’t know. I am not married.
My theory is simple: Generation X grew up facing the traumas inflicted on them as children, watching their parents’ routine replace romance. Loveless unions that screamed, “We are only together for the children.”
Thus, modern man would rather not perpetuate a fractured childhood to their offspring. Plus, there is the potential upside of like-minded people who want to have a baby without the pressure of also looking for love. Isn’t this why Dedan Kimathi was shot? So we could have our cake and eat it too?
Granted, this is not some same-size-fits-all for most men. But some men seem to thrive in it. Take out your spreadsheet. In the plus column, this is different to traditional dating, where instead of candle lit dinners, you could spend your time discussing Junior’s CBC grades and whose turn it is to fetch a porcupine’s quill for this week’s practical homework.
Two, you can sync your calendar, knowing who gets to have Junior on which days, leaving you plenty of time to give Junior a (half) brother or sister, guilt free (this works both ways, therefore goes in the minus column too).
Or you could simply man up to your responsibilities, and live your best life, without ever receiving those dreaded three magic words: “Wewe, uko wapi?” I’m kidding. It’s, “I am pregnant.”
With the concept of family evolving (two out of every five babies are being born outside of marriage and civil partnerships), co-parenting is no longer the future, but the present. Millennial men are altering the basic structure of society. Polygamy, out. Polyamory, in. Or as my friends call it, free-range cocks.
The idea of the sexual revolution is that sex, marriage, and babies are separable from one another. Kudos. The stage that we now enter, after separating sex from marriage and marriage from children, is separating childbearing from sex.
For a long time, women wanted to have it all – the picket fence, the corporate baddies, the baby pink SUV, the liberated sexual being. Now men want it all too – the present fatherhood, the co-parenting specialist, the married bachelor.
Isn’t this why bookshelves are creaking with misery memoirs of damaged adults whose parents, in one way or another, weren’t “looking to get into anything serious with anyone”? But have you looked at the dating landscape recently? You have a higher chance of getting the President in a room. Okay, plane. But you get the point.
Nobody is saying co-parenting is the Valhalla when you are young. But my life doesn’t look much like I thought it would when I was a teenager and I spent too much time watching Tahidi High.
I simply believe most of our parents accepted the script handed down to them, unlike this generation that wants to be writers-directors-producers of their own lives, not settling for someone purely so you can rent in Lavileshwa, have a couple of CBC-trained children, a wine-red CX-5 because that’s what everyone else has and get divorced by the time the President lands.
Isn’t it better then to make the adult decision that when maybe you want a child, you look for a potential mother—but not a wife or girlfriend—who has also thought it through? I am not saying our parents regret having us, they may just not have thought about it. They drifted into parenthood.
Later I left the club and went home to wait for the news to pop up online where I could retweet and offer my armchair expertise, which is simple – proposing in a club is a no for me. The bar is low, wicked pun aside.
And I bet, if they do have children, when I look into my crystal ball, I say that in a few years they will regret buying that piece of land on Kangundo Road, and they will be separated and co-parenting. For real.
This all reminds me of that poem, Cake by Roger McGough:
I wanted one life,
You wanted another,
We couldn’t have our cake,
So we ate each other”
Maybe this is less about co-parenting and more about planned parenthood. What I do know for sure is, your child or children shouldn’t be the ones to anchor you. I didn’t see it then, but I see it now. Someone’s daughter was right. Maybe you too, need to go find yourself.
