You can share a bed, but never a dream

Every week in my daily dealings, I like to find a proverb or saying that makes me think and evaluate my life. It is especially fitting when the saying has multiple meanings, or when people interpret it differently. This saying struck me out of the blue and I wondered what it meant for me. The wedding season has just ended and the start of the rainy season should cool down some lusty couples; Rwanda hasn’t changed in centuries, we still marry just before the rains. This coincides with the dry season and in Kigali it has been dry indeed, the lack of rain is reflected by dry pockets and parched accounts. You can attend so many meetings that you forget whose meeting it is and say something like “John and Jane will be very happy together” when they are called something Claude and Marie, so you ask “whose meeting is this and how much did I pledge?” Even my former house-girl was caught by the wedding bug and required a contribution, but my contribution ended up paying for the whole thing, she did her wedding for 30,000 and felt like a princess, she even hired a taxi to drive her to and from church. The funniest irony I find is when meetings occur at a bar and end up with a bill of 200,000 per meeting, so you can spend 1 million to raise 3 million; why not just pledge and save money? So, an old bachelor like me gets ponderous as wedding season ends; weddings are a sport in Rwanda, and I look forward to my turn. One can’t help feeling a bit jealous as your friends’ pair up and find lasting happiness but this proverb made me think. How many young couples actually discuss their dreams in full these days before even considering marriage? Most must think they will figure it out later, you know our saying “amaso akunda nta’reba neza” love is blind in vision and reason. You can share a bed but not a dream, you can have tremendous love and bonds, but that is not enough. The key to marriage is a common purpose, a common goal, and not just children, but a common dream. No two human beings will ever see the world the same; twins can have the same stimulus and turn out different. A dream is unique to a specific person; I would argue that two persons can create a dream but sharing one that has already been created is hard, but if one feels a sense of ownership in another person’s dream then it might be possible. The saying also talks of physical love compared to a higher love and values; values are hard to define – people confuse opinions and values. Values rarely change, but opinions do; a couple with different opinions but the same values will survive, but a couple with differing values will not last past a year. In this day and age we are more individualistic and goal-oriented; we have the problem of balancing personal goals and collective one. In modern times, marriage requires different sacrifices at different times; quite often it is the woman to sacrifice early on in order to give birth. This sacrifice must be worth it for the woman, the biggest cause of marital breakdown is when women feel sad to have lost of their dreams for a man who takes them for granted. Couples should always have a personal dimension and not always be defined collectively; you need something interesting to talk about in the evening when you get home. When two people with dreams join together then they give birth to a third dream; this dream is conceived, birthed and brought to maturity. That is why imagination is the father of invention and necessity the mother, and to quote a song from my childhood. “You gotta have a dream, if you don’t have a dream; how you gonna have a dream come true?” ramaisibo@hotmail.com