Entertainment of Friday, 2 January 2015
Source: myjoyonline.com
Silky voice musician Rebecca Akosua Acheampomaa Acheampong, known on stage as Becca, is noted for her music. But Friday, January 2, 2015, she was a counselor, passionately sharing valuable lessons on relationships on Joy FM’s Super Morning Show hosted by television icon, Gifty Anti.
The topic was how not to fall in love in 2015 and the discussants were Becca, renowned counselor, Reverend Tetteh Djangmah and musician, Rev. Mary Ghansah. Gifty Anti asked her panelists to advise listeners on how to deal with the emotionally traumatizing experience of a breakup.
In her rather eloquent submission, Becca said, “Gifty, I was doing a search and I came across this and it is is my advice, “we are like onions, with each breakup we scrape off a layer to become a better version of ourselves which inevitably will attract the best version of someone else.”
She said getting into a new relationship whilst the wounds of the previous breakup are still festering is dangerous and counter-productive.
Becca narrated how someone she knows who “was a beautiful relationship with this girl that he really loved so much and after seven years they broke up. When they broke up he was fine until she got married to someone else.
Then as soon as she got married, he got into a relationship with another woman and just after six months he got married to her and he just broke up with her because it was rebound kind of thing.”
Becca spoke passionately against pressurizing people to get married, insisting societal pressures have pushed some young people into difficult relationships. Reverend Tetteh Djangmah said persons dealing with breakups must allow themselves to heal properly before venturing into any new relationships.
“You are supposed to go through a phase of your life to convalesce, to recover, to pick yourself up, to make an appraisal of the previous relationship and find out what must have happened that things went down; was it something that I could have done that I didn’t do or was it all at the other end; you have to clear yourself of any emotional pain; you do not marry to take a swipe at the other person; it is your life, it has nothing to do with the other person,” the counselor counseled.
Commenting on whether age matters in relationships, Rev. Djangmah said, it depends on the individuals involved and the age difference. He said it matters if the age difference is so wide that it becomes a burden on the relationship. Why should age matter if the overriding factor in a relationship is love, host, Gifty Anti asked.
“Love is necessary in any relationship but it is not sufficient; tomatoes are necessary if you want to cook a dish but not sufficient, so you can’t say you have stew when you have tomatoes so love is an ingredient, it’s just one small ingredient in a relationship so we do not isolate love and look at love alone,” Rev. Tetteh Djagmah replied.
Love is patience without which a relationship cannot be sustained, he preached.
Relationships generally, Rev. Djangmah said, “Enthusiasm without persistence leads to frustration; enthusiasm makes you excited, you are delighted about something, you are zealous about it but you must not be oblivious of the fact that you will face some challenges in the way and you need some tenacity, some ability to follow through in order to get to the expected end.” Rev. Ghansah advised against rushing into relationships on the basis of first instincts.
She said even if you have genuine love for someone, it is still of critical essence to ask yourselves some critical questions; “where is he/she going? What does he/she believe in and so on.”
“Sex alone cannot be the basis of love,” she said, expressing regret that women “often fear that if I don’t give myself to him, he is going to leave me or he is going to turn his eyes to someone else.”
She said people must listen to their instincts and not stay in abusive relationships with the hope that things will change.
Gifty Anti who presents relationship programme, The Standpoint, on Ghana Television brought her experience to bear on the discussion, moderating it seamlessly and with such admirable dexterity and professionalism.