Experience.

Don’t you just hate it when you tell someone your story and then you get told a story worse than yours…people just don’t want to lend credibility to your experiences. Then you get told that oh, it has happened to someone else and that person’s experience was a lot worse than yours; you had better not complain.
I listened to this younger woman tell an older woman about her husband’s indiscretions, and the older woman told her, oh it’s nothing oh. So he only cheated eh? You did not thank your God that he did not bring the concubine into the house to live or worse still, father an illegitimate child? In my own case, he went on and fathered three children outside wedlock and I could do nothing about it…blah blah blah
And somehow, it makes it sound as if society has condoned the man’s wrongdoing, simply because he’s not the first African man to have done it. As if there is safety in numbers.
My own question is, does it make it any easier to bear? An experience is still your own experience; you will make what you will out of it; you either cope better or you find it harder to bear compared to others.
It will not stop me from feeling like I’m the first girl to have her heart broken; it will not stop my impatience when I am stuck in situations I cannot help; it will not make me feel bad for voicing out my frustrations when there are others even more frustrated than I am. That all women go through labour pain does not mean it is not painful everytime... abi?
In Miss Spark’s words: No matter what you say about love, I’ll keep coming back for more, put my hand in the fire…sooner or later I’ll get what I am asking for. It does not matter that another has tried and found it impossible to find.

An ounce of experience is better than a pound of advice.