Love Limbo 

ˈlɪmbou: an intermediate, transitional, or midway state or place.That period you find yourself in between an unresolved relationship and a new one. Here you are, having a fight of destiny with someone who loved you and whom you have loved for some time. 

The moment of destiny comes, in which you have to go with him or her or go by yourself. You get a visa and you have to choose whether to travel and leave her alone or dump the journey and go with her. Or you go visit her parents and they don’t approve of you, she tells you to wait while she resolves the issues but you decide to honour her parents and walk away or you have a fight and you both in anger tell each other you are not interested in the relationship again. You both know it was all emotion and the next time you see each other, you will most likely just smile and hug and forget all about it but while you were both cooling your hills and answering to your egos, you met another girl he or she was waiting for you to come and say you are sorry so that the relationship could continue, but you have moved on leaving him or her in limbo.

 I know of such a case, guys dated for several years and had an argument. The guy leaves for school without writing or calling, the babe does the same, holiday came and the guy rushed off to the flower store to buy her some gifts to say sorry. 

When he got to the babe's house, she was with her new boyfriend he had been left in limbo! It hurts. That anticipation that ends in an anticlimax that makes you feel like running through a wall. The fact that he or she can move on so easily while you were pinning and hopeful hurts too.

 If you were the one who moved on, you will be fine until you are confronted by the one you left in limbo. Somehow you will have your explanations for what happened but you will know at the back of your mind that the one in limbo is hurting and he or she has a right to hurt.  If you were worth waiting for, he or she should be worth waiting for too, the one who waited feels like a fool the one who didn’t wait feels like a mean badger that limbo effect tells on the soul of both. This is why some would advise that after a relationship, the individuals in it should take some time to heal before jumping into another relationship.  It is because the emotions of the previous relationship sometimes are so strong that it can bring the people in it together again and again unrepentantly and if they had moved on to another person, he or she might find themselves in a crossfire.

 Of course, love does not always work out that way. Sometimes you move on deliberately, knowing that if you don’t do so the other party will just keep wasting your time and offering you conditions you know you do not want for your life. A boy wants to marry, he meets a girl and they start a relationship he asked her to marry him she said she would rather they remain as they were without any form of marriage. He didn’t understand it, women usually would insist on a ring, on making things formal. This lady refused the ring, yet she was a wife to him in every sense of the word he thought about it long and hard and told her he was uncomfortable with their arrangement.

 She felt he had everything a woman could ever offer him apart from tying the knot, why couldn’t he take the win?  Marriage has always been overrated and she didn’t want the shackles that could keep her from walking away if things turned sour. He asked her to think about it just before he travelled abroad for a six-week training.  His plan was to either get a yes from her after the time apart or to call the whole thing off.  Six weeks flew by He returned to her and she insisted she would not be marrying him but she would happily live with him and be his babe for as long as he wanted her. He said he was sorry and called the relationship off.

She left in tears but told him to consider the fact that since they started dating she had given him peace, he had made progress in all his endeavors and she had treated him with the utmost respect.

There was nothing else a wife would offer that was better than that, he said okay. She left promising to call him later that night he then went to see a friend just to have a second opinion on the relationship dilemma he found himself in.

 At the friend’s house, he saw a lady. The way she looked at him from the moment he got to his friend’s house was a tell. She was into him, his friend introduced the friend as his cousin they all went out to dinner together the friend, the friend’s fiancée, the friend’s cousin and himself. They talked and had a very wonderful time.

 Sometime during the evening he went on a stroll with the friend’s cousin and realized he liked her. This guy practically just officially broke up with his babe of almost two years. That he and the babe loved each other was not in dispute but he couldn’t ignore the obvious issues that they both couldn’t compromise on. He wanted to get married and she didn’t. Every time he bring up the topic, she comes up with one reason or the other why he is not the kind of guy she wants to settle down maritally with but she did not mind them being lovers indefinitely.

 So he asked the friend’s cousin out and she said yes, he asked her if she was the marrying type and she said so. The next morning, he called her and asked her to meet him at the mall when they got there, he told her to pick any diamond ring of her choice, she did then he took her home.

 They picked a date for the wedding she was as shocked as he was but she adjusted, she kept the ring in his apartment while she went home to break the news to her folks and friends. As soon as she was gone, his ex-girlfriend showed up at his house she said she forgot some things in his apartment and she would like to pick them up.

He let her in and stayed in the sitting room so that he would give her all the space she needed to pack everything she could have left behind.

 About an hour later, she walked into the sitting room crying he asked her what was wrong “Who did you buy the ring I saw in your room for?” She asked he didn’t know how to answer her, Should he be blunt and insensitive or should he just lie to her so she can leave him in peace? He told her the ring did not belong to him but to a colleague of his who was planning to propose the following weekend. 

She then asked him who the owner of the “strange” earring she saw in his room was for. At that point, he told her to move on with her packed bags and stop interrogating him. They were no longer together that much had already been agreed upon why then was she demanding to know what was going on in his life as if it was her business it was a Limbo problem. That point where two people had parted ways and yet each expected the other to respect them enough not to move on so quickly as if they were so insignificant that they would not be missed.

People deal with heartbreak in different ways, some prefer to break up in bits, so the process takes almost a year, and by the time they are through they feel no pain. Some would break up and makeup so many times to the point where even while starting to see other people they will still be unsure if they were still an item or not this takes the sting off the pain when they eventually pull the plug on the relationship. Some prefer it to be sudden, they cry and hurt for a few days, process it out of their system, and then become whole.

 Some just shut out that memory and the person involved out of their lives completely while trusting their minds to heal the pain over time. Limbo is that period in between a breakup and the two parties moving on to other relationships. It is that fragile moment when the pain of the inevitable is mixed with the anticipation of a possible change of direction.

 Sometimes two people who had broken off a relationship and knew there was no path forward for that relationship would still sneak around for some time before finally moving on due to the effects of limbo. Limbo is all about the emotion, sensitivity and vulnerability of the moment in between the past and the present. 

When you find yourself in love limbo, know that it means you can only control what you do and how you act. The other party will only do whatever is best for them too, just as you must.

 You are not weak, you are not a victim, it is part of the process we call life and living.

 PS: I wrote this in response to a question sent to me by a lady who found herself breaking up with her fiance because he chose to travel abroad for his Masters, she had assumed he would never return to Nigeria and felt he was using the journey as an excuse to break up with her. As soon as he announced that he had secured the visa, she broke up with him. He travelled he did not write or call, she did not write or call too. He graduated and returned to Nigeria a friend of his whom she spoke to once in a while informed her he was returning home to work with his father's company. She had waited for him and couldn't bring herself to date anybody else for the two years he was abroad. 

His friends and family members organised a welcome home party for him she dressed up and attended hoping they would make up and move on from there. When he showed up, he did so with his fiance a Nigerian lady he met in the United Kingdom and had set a date to marry she said she almost fainted when he introduced the lady he had been in limbo for two years daydreaming, hoping and praying only to discover it was all for nothing. She wanted to know the definition of the state where she found herself I called it love limbo.

 -GSW-