Issue 37: Surrounded by Love.

Friday nights are blessed. Around 6 pm, I close my laptop after sending a few, “Let’s pick this up on Monday” and one or two “I’ll add this to my calendar for next week.” It’s always a delight to know that the weekend is here and you have two free days to do as you wish. Saturdays and Sundays are for rest, it is known. But what do we do on Friday evenings?

Fridays are like the girls you never dated. They are neither here nor there. You’re happy to see them because they bring a good vibe and they remind you of a good time, of the weekend. But they are not exactly the weekend. They are still weekdays disguised as free days.

On Friday morning, you attend meetings where you have to defend your existence as an employee throughout that week. What did you do this week? How many bugs did you fix? How many pixels did you arrange? How many users did you get? This professional self-defence can go on for hours, depending on how fortunate or unfortunate your workplace is. By the time you’re done, it’s almost 5pm but you still have a lot to do so even though it’s 9-5, you actually do 9 to past 6pm so you can close out every task you’re working on and actually enjoy your weekend without any call from your line manager. You finally achieve this by 6:24 pm on Friday.

Outside, the sky is still bright. It’s evening already but darkness is held at bay. Your neighbour’s child is singing Baby Shakudoodoodoo in a way only children are ever allowed to. In the other compound across the fence, someone is telling a story of how they got robbed at Agungi. They swear the thief will not make it in life. One of the listeners who sounds like a woman in her mid-fifties says to not curse. The storyteller continues with more heavy curses, extending them even to the thief’s family and children [and future children in case he had not been blessed with children just yet]. It’s Friday evening. It’s the weekend but at the same time, it’s not the weekend. So what do you do?

When I used to work a hybrid role, Fridays were always exciting because I got to spend time after work with my colleague as we all drove home.

In the car, we would reminisce on the week but mostly, we laughed and played games and had fun and talked about mundane things. Perhaps an ongoing trend on Twitter, or a funny TikTok from Layi, or some company about another tech company shutting down. Friday evenings were for catching up on fun stuff with friends. My house was always the first we would get so I would drop off and often imagine them continuing the fun as they drove off while I went into my house to be welcomed, sometimes by my cat or just a quiet house filled with books. For an introvert who is obsessed with silence, I only need 20 minutes of fun every Friday to feel alive after which I can return to the solitude of my house and sleep, read or watch a movie.

This year, I started working fully remote and the exciting part of my Friday evenings vanished. Now, I close my laptop at 6:24 pm and I wonder, what do I do with myself now? I often long for those old conversations with friends on our way home from the office, the joyful ride and sometimes the spontaneous decision to just leave all our things in the office and drive to Hardrock for a night of fun and semi-debauchery. Now I often spend my Friday evenings taking walks, which is a good thing if not that the streets are busy with cars returning from offices. Sometimes I call a friend to catch up and they tell me they’re busy wrapping things up at work, or they’re done with work but they’re on their way home. The few friends I have who also work from home live far away. It’s Friday, the weekend has started but yet, there is something missing.

On most Fridays, I check online to see what’s showing in the cinemas and if there's a blockbuster, I just go around 9 pm and get lost in the movie till 11 pm when I return home and sleep. If there isn’t a fun movie showing, I have to make do with long walks around Ikeja or seeing a movie in the comfort of my room.

If you ask me what I think an ideal Friday should be, I’d say shutting down your laptop at 6:24 pm and spending the rest of the night with a loved one, or loved ones. Something doesn’t feel right about a Friday evening spent alone.

And I thought I was the only one feeling this until recently. Last Friday, a friend sent me a message:

“On my drive home last night, I kept trying to look for a friend’s house to go to. And I told my friend about how for the first time since I moved into this space, I was trying not to go home. And I realised it was because I felt I was just going home to myself, to nothing. And this, my friend, is why people marry. Some folks invited me to anchor an event next Friday, and it gave me so much joy. Just accepted the invitation.”

I spent the entire weekend thinking about this: “This, my friend, is why people marry.” - Because no one wants to go back to an empty apartment on a Friday night.

I am once again reminded of the validity of love, or romantic relationships, of marriage.

Over the years, I’ve always been curious about the institution called marriage. The very idea of it, this eternal partnership you enter with one person and commit to for decades until death do either of you apart has always been interesting for me to ponder. As an institution, I think marriage has many advantages and they are quite obvious. The most obvious to someone like me is that you no longer have to pay rent alone or at least, you no longer have to think through paying rent alone anymore. And you no longer have to forfeit a house you love because the landlord wants a married man [Hi Ama!] Minute in the grand scheme of things? Maybe not.

Lately, I’ve shifted my attention from marriage itself to love. Reading Natasha Lunn’s Conversations on Love and Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry at the same time have turned me into someone who is constantly visualising things from the lens of love, or romance, of eternal togetherness. Constantly visualising and constantly probing too. And it doesn’t help matters that in the past two weeks alone, two of my friends have told me they’re getting married, another friend sent me an invite just hours ago. On Sunday, I’m casually having doughnuts with a friend at a cafe when he says, “I’m also thinking it will be good to get a two bedroom apartment so I can have some space when I finally decide to move in with my babe.”

Love proves itself over and over again, solidifying and emphasising its importance as one grows older. Everywhere I look, I am surrounded by love and by people in love. Everywhere I look, there’s love and there’s a reason to love. To have a partner to pay rent with, to even be able to pay rent at all and the most important of all, to have someone to go home to on Friday nights.

I’ll close this with Orson Welles’ words: “We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we’re not alone.”

Here’s to creating illusions!

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I’ve been off here for more than a month. I was in a slump. One day, I will write about that. Until then, see you next week. And do tell me what you think…are you surrounded by love?

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Thanks to Ogechi Ezike for reading drafts of this.