The dynamics of relationships will always be a point of feminist interest and discussion. In more recent times, feminist women have highlighted the dangers of grooming and older men going for younger and often inexperienced women.
Grooming can be explained as the act of an often older person preparing a younger individual for a relationship that is inappropriate and filled with power dynamics.
To better understand the dynamics of grooming and the feminist contentions of age gap Relationships, Urban Woman Magazine asked some women to share their thoughts and experiences.
Read their responses below.
AN
I have a personal experience of being groomed when I was younger. Although I don’t want to use the word “fast” in describing how I grew up, by the time I was out of secondary school I was coming into my body. I went from being a very skinny child to being very busty in my teenage years with a more rounder figure.
So, naturally there were a lot of older men chasing after me. But this is where it gets interesting. At the time, it made me feel on top of the world. Like when it was happening at the time, I felt on top of the world. If anybody had told me at the time that I was being groomed, I would have fought them and I think I did fight.
Because even years later when I was having a conversation and someone was telling me that I had been groomed, I was so against it. I was so vehement. I told them that did not happen to me and I knew what I was doing.
But for context. I was eighteen years old in a relationship with a man who was forty years old. At the time–and this is something common to being in one’s teenage years–it felt like I was riding on top of the world and that I was smart. It is easy then for older men to prey on that; especially if you were like me who’s coming from a home where you practically did not have love and you were love starved and wanted someone to tell you that you were beautiful and intelligent and all of that.
Then an older man comes and he is doing all of that and telling you that you are wiser than your age and that you are more sensible than your agemates. For me at the time it made me feel oh yes this is it. I was convinced that not only did I want this but that also what was happening between me and him in particular was something I wanted.
Even though, I had just turned eighteen, we had started talking before I turned eighteen and we got into a relationship that lasted two years. Now that I’m older and I can look back at what happened, I can see how terrible the dynamic was. I can see a lot of subtle abuse that happened in that relationship. It didn’t get to physical but I could see the toxicity, abuse and layers of grooming and how it was my own stubborn spirit that saved me from becoming a lot more victimized in that relationship.
Because by the time I was turning nineteen and twenty, this man was already saying that he wanted us to get married. If I wasn’t such a stubborn person who fiercely stood on not wanting to get married due to what I had seen in my parents marriage, I would have gotten married and I would probably have had kids and it would have ended in a divorce.
Or, I would have been involved in a case of Stockholm Syndrome where I would have just bonded with a lot of the dysfunction and the abuse and being like oh well this is what it is. Maybe I’ll be on the internet by now saying: “Oh I married my husband when I was nineteen and he was forty two and I kneel down to serve him food and those sort of things”.
So, by the time I turned 25, I had left that relationship and gone to date about two other older men; there were a lot of age gap relationships in my dating experiences. Between the ages of 16-24, I was dating men who were ten, fifteen and even twenty years older than I was. At the time I always felt that I was so smart and intelligent but looking back, I can see that I was a victim and perfect for them cause I had low self esteem.
I wanted love and I felt like they were the ones who could love me. It was such a terrible terrible thing for me; because the first time I had this conversation with another woman and she told me I had been groomed, I was like no it was a mutual relationship and we were in love. She was like my darling, you were barely legal and this man was forty, the first half of his life was already over. I fought her about it because it’s not something that is easy to accept initially.
It took me a while and took me sitting with myself and mentally going through all the relationships that I had been through to be able to say this is actually what this was and this is what has happened to me.
Now, I’m older and when I speak to younger girls, I tell them that due to the dysfunction we experience in Nigerian homes, there’s a phase in your life where you can be the perfect target for older men who claim to give the love that you don’t have from home.
Grooming is a terrible thing. After everything happened, I stayed away from relationships for such a long long time. Because it felt like everytime I was going into a relationship I was repeating patterns of being taken advantage of by older men.
Younger girls think they are mature for their age and it is such a vicious cycle because even when you speak to them, they assume that you are jealous of them. That’s another thing that men make them feel; they make them feel that any older woman advising them is jealous of them. They believe it and it’s not until ten years later that they realise how much they have been victimized.
At the end of the day, you have to stop it at the source, which is engaging more with teenagers and addressing the dysfunction and lack of love seen in most Nigerian homes.
CB
In all honesty, I think grooming needs to be classified as psychological warfare and a crime against humanity.
Recovering from it is near difficult and I say this because of cases of women like Annie Macaulay Idibia. It often takes the man who groomed them leaving them for them to even move on a little. And if those men come back, they go right back.
Most of the women who marry their groomers are often stuck in a mental limbo where they are still the teenagers seeking for love and respite and hoping he would be the same person who gave them love at that age. All that was part of the grooming process but they still seek it endlessly and hope he would go back. He hardly ever does.
That is why I say it is psychological warfare.
Angel Nduka-Nwosu is a writer, journalist and editor. She moonlights occasionally as a podcaster on As Angel Was Sayin’. Catch her on all socials @asangelwassayin.