There is a plague among the people of the African diaspora. It manifests as a gender war that is keeping some married people unhappy and single people single. When you scroll platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, you can find lots of discussions among creators seeking to further dissect this conundrum. It starts as an open invitation to state your position but usually ends up in a blame game. The blame is usually just regurgitation of the talking points that the most popular influencers have iterated some time in the recent past. As someone who has found myself trying flex his debate muscles on the issue, I look back with humor as I realize I was ignoring a very key dynamic at play. However, in order to spot this, I had to step away from the modern talking points of “high value” in men and “independence” in women. I had to avoid the game of the “patriarchy” vs “2nd wave feminism”. There is something more basic that has been plaguing us. And this extends to the members of the diaspora as well as the areas of the continent where these conversations are happening.

Two archetypes have emerged that I can no longer ignore. The undernurtured man and the underinstructed woman. I coined these terms not from a place of seeking to procure contest but from a place of seeking to attain a level of understanding and proper compatibility. I believe, with understanding comes compatibility. When the undernurtured man and the underinstructed woman get together, it is often a recipe for disappointment due to unmet expectations. But before I go further in my argument, let me define what these archetypes are.

The Undernurtured Man: This is a man who was not properly moved through his early stage of development that would involve acquainting himself with his gifts and temperament. He was not prepared for instruction. This often shows in his inability to survive the rigor of discipline, the inability to manage responsibility or more covertly, the desire for more power and authority than he knows what to do with. In relationships, the biggest obstacle would usually be his mother as he would often seen to be a mama’s boy. In what ways was he undernurtured? You might ask. Nurture, contrary to popular opinion is supposed to position a person into a more optimal self-perception. Nurture is about positioning a child to perceive themselves with a sense of what they are capable of and what they might want to attain. An example is when you see a young man or woman on a basketball court who wants to dunk but has not built the strength to. Someone stronger offers give them a lending hand for them to leap from. Nurture is like that lending hand that acts both as a cushion and springboard for the young jumper to gain confidence in their leap. However, the hand is also responsible for maintaining the balance of the jumper and steering them in the right direction in the air. The jumper will eventually be airborne and responsible for finishing out the remainder of the journey in the air to the basket and finishing the play. Too often, nurture has been perceived as the cushion but not necessarily the springboard. If a young man’s nurture did not come with a springboard they usually were not positioned to metaphorically finish the play. This usually leads to the inability to recognize or manage instruction if they ever get to it. Too much cushion, no leap. Instruction is there to serve the leap. Thus the undernurtured man can be highly gifted but either underdisciplined or highly unfamiliar with responsibility. The other end of this is the man who, though undernurtured, was able to arrive at a level of instruction that served him outside of his gift. This sort of man may not be living off his gift but he will be heavily reliant on a sense of instruction that protects his livelihood but is not connected to his gift. He may not live from himself but from a borrowed framework of orderliness. Both types of undernurtured men have a hard time with underinstructed women largely because they are not used to having woman in their lives that made them safe in their gift.

Underinstructed Woman: This woman shows up in two ways: the spoiled brat and the hyperindependent woman. This is often caused by the consequences of an absent father or a father who was not present enough in her instructional development even if he was in her life. Instruction in a women is how she gets to build trust with authority. It is also how she gets to trust or make alliances. When a woman has a proper framework of instruction. When she is granted the ability to recognize with detachment what adds to her wellbeing and what takes away from it. A bratty girl may have been the recipient of a lot of gifts as a child or young girl because her father always worked long hours or had business trips out of town. In those instances, he may be seldom around to help her navigate her social relationships from a place of solid structure as opposed to a place of emotional convenience. With a lot of women, their first bully is their unhappy mother which then grows into the toxic friend group in elementary or middle school. For some women they even become the bully to avoid dealing with the pain from home. Instruction is complementary to nurture. Sometimes with an underinstructed woman, she may even have been well-nurtured. She was set up for instruction but never got it so she develops a mistrust because she has to rely on her nurture to assess her environment. So her capacity becomes conditional. Once she no longer sees the need to seek instruction or rely on outside instruction, she may operate as though she truly does not need it but what she is really operating with a lack of trust. And this is not the lack of trust from the post-traumatic expression “who hurt you” but an operative lack of trust. It was never relied on so it must not have been necessary.

Nurture creates self-confidence. Instruction leads to positive reliance on others or systems outside of oneself. Unfortunately, using one to supercede the other never works. As humans, we were created to work together. We were built to thrive off connection. We are optimized by collaboration. However, we are works in progress. While it is important to maintain a sense of continuous growth, it may be equally important to remember we can only add to what is at the foundation of our upbringing. If one tries to building a column on top of where there is no foundation, do not be surprised when the column keep falling apart or ends up outside of the structure (relationship) entirely.

If this article speaks to you, please use it as a reference for reflection or at best compassionate correction. Something which the African diaspora has done a great job over the years is optimize their survival instincts to outlast a world design that may have challenged their role in it for generations. So we may have arrived at a point where sometimes our greatest pride is how much we may kept ourselves from falling into the abyss of economic insignificance. However, the next notch in our survival belt needs to be the promotion and maintenance of healthy family life. If we do not get the nurture and instruction chain right we end up setting ourselves back.

by

Julian Michael Yong.