Starting in mid-November and lasting until early April, it will rain almost every day in Zambia. It doesn’t rain the whole day – just long enough and hard enough to stop work and keep everything mucky. Life in the rainy season is usually chaotic and always messy… It actually makes me think of romance.
The parallel is probably not obvious to anyone but me, unless they too have tried to nurture a marriage relationship in a small Zambian village. But as Valentine’s Day approaches and I think about all of the challenges that romance has in this context, the grey-green hues in the distance feel like an appropriate backdrop.
Ten years ago, after our wedding, we returned to Africa in anticipation of continuing the Rom-Com already in progress. Our first home together was a cozy hut with a grass roof. It was perfectly romantic – like something out of an exotic, destination-honeymoon brochure. The idyllic feeling lasted a whole week, until the awkwardness of the paper-thin walls, proximity to neighbors and people knocking on our door in the middle of the night set in. We knew that the rats and snakes were watching us, and eventually learned that our neighbors were too.
After several months of marriage, when I still wasn’t pregnant, the women of the village confronted me on it. They were appalled that I clearly was not sleeping with my husband and felt like it was their business to set me straight. Putting aside the embarrassment of telling my neighbors just how often we were having sex, I also informed them that it’s possible to have sex and not get pregnant. They weren’t buying it and chose to send me for training. “Show up at the maize shed on Friday at midnight. Bring a chicken.” This was definitely not an optional event, so I went. I returned home the next day and spilled to Jeremy the details of the raucous sex-capade, rambling nonsensical about half clothed grandmothers wielding corncobs while chickens died in the corner. Let’s just say village life has never been boring.
Dampened only slightly by the living conditions and village gossip, we invested in our romance in many ways – carrying on the habits we had developed before we were married. We played cribbage, had candle-light dinners, and talked for hours under the mosquito net. As far as physical intimacy was concerned though, we resigned ourselves to the awkward sense of exposure and just kept going. Our love apparently has resilient DNA.
After three long, disapproving years, we made everyone happy and produced a baby, and eventually another. That at least quelled the rumors, but it wasn’t until year seven of marriage when we re-built our house to include proper windows and multiple bedrooms and door locks that we felt like the rainy season of our love-life might actually be coming to an end.
Nevertheless, while we enjoyed the safety of our new haven, we experienced other storms keeping us apart too. At times when malaria, diarrhea and fatigue have taken over our house, we’ve found ourselves in too much pain to be touched. In times of organizational growth, village drama and government threats, our minds were often too consumed to even think about romance. There has been more than one season when we just could not seem to catch a break. During one such time, things were so stormy that my hair was falling out and the days felt robotic. Out of sheer willpower, we made romantic gestures through heart-shaped pancakes or a sweet note on the mirror, but physical intimacy felt aloof. I looked longingly at Jeremy and asked, “When’s the last time we had sex?” Returning the gaze, he just said: “I can’t remember.” Occasionally, when it rains, it pours.
They say falling in love is easy and staying in love is hard work. Truth. Sex is not the only way to nurture or show romantic love and I’d argue that it’s not even the primary way. It is, however, a powerful unifier, and disembodied romance will usually feel incomplete. For many marriage relationships, sex truly functions as the barometer for the over-all relational climate – a theory we’ve seen proven in more marriages than our own.
The culture around us states that sex is a man’s right and that it is also a physical necessity akin to needing water or air. Tradition dictates that a woman’s submissiveness goes as far as putting herself in harm’s way – including HIV and black eyes. A sad truth is that we’ve taken multiple women into our home and put others on busses to get them out of extreme situations. And while not every woman is fearing for her life, most have been beaten and few expect fidelity. From the vantage point of the ladies closest to us, even those who are happily married, romantic, non-transactional sex sounds like a fairy tale.
This is the context in which our own, very public love story is playing out. The same women who taught me how to keep my husband from “wandering” have watched Jeremy honor my body for over ten years. Our closest neighbors may or may not have heard us have sex, but they’ve definitely heard us fight and then watched us make up. They’ve seen us drop hands after a cold word and grab it again after the apology. They’ve watched one of us leave to go sleep at the farm and the next morning kiss on the porch. At times, it’s been shame-inducing to be so on-display – but that vulnerability is also what makes it so productive.
As Jeremy and I have walked through the uncomfortable exposure of our own relationship we’ve been given a platform to say yes: love making/tending/deepening is never convenient and it’s usually messy; but the green growth that comes from cultivating the soil of connection on which the rain falls is more than worth it. The challenge of love in the rainy season might be very different in our house than it is in the house next door, but we all live it. While the consequences of Malaria vs. infidelity are vastly different, there is solidarity in acknowledging that forces outside of our relationships are actively working to rob us of connection. The desire for love is part of what it means to be human and the brokenness that keeps us apart – both sexually and otherwise – is a universal foe. Our relationship has always looked foreign to our community, but the honesty of our effort to keep love alive has also made it relatable. There’s not a single man or woman around us that doesn’t want to just feel loved.
For us, as people of faith, part of communicating the gospel is demonstrating God’s good and redemptive potential for every area of life – including romance. At camps and conferences, with small groups and individuals on our couch, without a hint of mastery or pride, we have shared our own journey. Sex obviously isn’t the only thing we talk about, but given its center-stage, high-stakes role in this community, it ranks right up there on the marriage-topic list. We want people to know that great sex is always possible for God’s people as relationships are restored and as our identity as soulful beings is more deeply understood. Our hope is – through the frank disclosure of our own romance – that we might make relevant “laying down one’s life for a friend… because God first loved us.”
Jeremy and I will probably not be having an overly romantic Valentines holiday. Only a handful of people in a five-hundred-mile radius know that this is supposed to be a lovey-dovey weekend which means we’ll spend time with people and I’ll prepare for school and Jeremy will get filthy at the farm. In short, it’s still rainy season. But I have no doubt that at some point we will pause to look in each other’s eyes and express gratitude to the other for braving the struggles that are as inevitable as mud puddles in February.
