I know this topic got you staring twice, like, what? There’s also internship for marriage? What a wow! Funny enough, I borrowed this term from my pastor in church. It’s his term for “cohabiting”. Lol. Internship is a short period where you work in a desired place and get to learn the nitty-gritties of the environment and the kind of work you have found yourself doing.
Co-habiting in this context means living with someone of the opposite sex when you are neither married, nor married. Yes, I repeated the word, married. This means that the only reason a young man and a young lady should be living together is marriage. It’s the only legal and moral reason, let’s even leave religion out of it. It’s now a norm in universities especially, to see two young people of opposite sexes living together. Most of the time, it’s the ladies who move from their own places to the guy’s place. Only on very rare occasions would you see a man move in to stay with his girlfriend or lover, as the case may be.
I’m not going to tell you it’s wrong because, well, I’m very sure that the subjects, social studies and moral instruction have not been completely removed from the educational syllabus and I’m also very sure that all of us got some talks from family and caring relations here and there while growing up. So, what I’m saying is, I’m not going to be trying to teach you things you already know as a person. However, I’m going to be telling you a little bit about what this co-habitation means using some examples of people I know.
Co-habiting means that you and your partner have to start being a couple. You as a lady gets to do the things that wives do and for the guys, you get to perform husband responsibility. You’d begin to see situations where the responsibilities are shared between them as husband and wife. So, the lady gets to cook, clean and take care of the man while he works for money and brings home. This is just a whole lot of madness if you ask me.
Sometimes, these couples have unprotected sex and they end up sharing infections and in some cases, the lady gets pregnant and has to abort the child. In some of these very funny situations, the lady also gets beaten up time and time again. So, you see, it’s not even as beautiful as these people like to make it look. Let me tell you about someone I knew about.
She and her boyfriend were living together from when he came into school in his first year. They were really in love with each other and while she was two years ahead of him in school, she decided to stay with him. She would clean up every morning, wash their clothes, go to the market, cook, serve him and his friends and when there was ever a fight, she got seriously beaten.
She didn’t use to come out of the house so, most of the lodge mates didn’t really talk with her. Many of us only saw what we were allowed to see. The guy would go out and drink with his friends. Sometimes he would come back home drunk and with a bunch of his drunk friends and she has to pamper them and make food for them and all those stuff. She finished from school finally, served somewhere in the east and still came back to his house to stay! Yes! I was so shocked when I saw her come back in her khaki uniform and resumed living with him. Long story cut short, he was to graduate this year and he had already paid for a new house in Enugu city that he didn’t tell her about. Next thing, his business got really bigger (like I said, a lot of us didn’t know what this couple did until they showed us, so, we didn’t know what kind of business he was into) and he started leaving the house to lodge in hotels.
Soon after, he finally packed out of the house he paid for in our lodge and he left an empty house for the girl. Only for him to send her a text later, saying that he had already seen too much of her and he was tired and she disgusted him by merely existing. Then, he told her that she should tell him how much she needed to be paid by him for all the years she spent with him. Can you imagine? Oh well, all these were told to me by my roommate who was like the only person that the girl talked to.
You see? Living with a man you are not married to isn’t advisable in the first place. Like I said in the start, its neither morally nor legally acceptable.
No rightly trained person would agree to co-habiting and for students who were sent to school to begin living with their boyfriends, a whole lot of excuses always come up. I’m here to tell you though that you don’t have any excuses. Thank you for reading.
