When you ‘just know’
When it comes to finding a husband or a wife, I have to admit to inwardly rolling my eyes any time someone says, “Oh, I just knew he/she was the right one for me”. Whether it be in a movie, on the television, out of the mouth of a friend, or from someone who has been married for 50 years, this kind of comment always provokes the same reaction in me: “Yeah, right”.
I'm sorry, but you just can't know. You can take the time to work out whether person x is someone you think you could live with and be married to, and you can choose them over someone you might be less suited to. But in the end, as someone older and wiser than me has said many times, you don't know they are the one for you until after you have married them. Then, of course, they are the one for you because you have committed yourselves to each other. That's what marriage is. This mystical feeling of ‘knowing’ he or she is the one for you is just that: a feeling. And to act on this kind of feeling without also using your brain to think through some of the more pragmatic issues is just stupid.
Take Corinne Hoffmann's story. Corinne is a Swiss lady who, while travelling to Kenya with her boyfriend in 1987, became transfixed by a Masai warrior travelling on the same ferry. When the same Masai turned up a bit later to guide her through Mombasa, she decided it meant something. “I had the deepest feeling I had to follow that man”, she says. So she did. She got rid of her responsibilities at home (including, presumably, the boyfriend) and went off to search for this Masai in Kenya.
So far, this sounds like a classic love story, right? Which is exactly how it is presented in the Sydney Morning Herald article which bears the title, ‘Lovestruck, she was determined to get her Masai’. Corinne has written a bestselling book, The White Masai, telling the story of what happened next. And like all good love stories, the book has been turned into a film which has just opened in Australia.
But this love story ends the same way that so many real life ‘love stories’ end these days: after marrying the Masai, having a daughter with him, and staying for four years, Corinne left. She now lives in Switzerland with her daughter, and has written two sequels which have also become bestsellers.
So just what exactly was that “feeling I had to follow that man”? Obviously it wasn't some magical foreknowledge of a love story that was going to end happily ever after.