You find yourself thinking about families as you wait to catch your flight to Lagos from Heathrow Terminal Five. Watching people milling around proves more interesting than the book in your lap. Those three running to their gate must be friends, they look nothing alike. The five eating spaghetti at the restaurant just past security must be a family, they have matching blue hand luggage. The woman with the boulder-sized backpack holding up a sign isn’t part of the group following, she is perhaps their travel guide.

You grapple with the mathematics of families as the flight safety video plays on the screen in front of you. What number constitutes the perfect family? At least two partners. Ideally, two parents and two children – one child identical to mum and the other resembling dad. Having three children would be best in the bid to go forth and multiply. Replace yourself and your partner with one more child as a charitable contribution to civilization. So one plus one should equal five for equity’s sake. The economics of it all – the groceries, car model that would exponentially grow with each new offspring, tuition and medical bills – would most likely lead to a tidy sum total of three people.

Others would tell you the perfect family has nothing at all to do with numbers. The same people would argue with you that trying to apply arithmetic to any real human traits is as illogical as using ethics to understand the mechanisms of a car. Eugenics has been discredited after all. Believers of this definition would most certainly be fans of Modern Family, the TV show you can’t seem to find in your in-flight entertainment catalogue. A perfect family would be one where the parents never fight and of course the children never do either. The siblings squabbling four hours into this six hour flight in the row behind you wouldn’t make the cut. But perhaps the couple across the aisle would. The hands that have remained clasped on the shared armrest between them suggest they are newlyweds. You imagine their future, conversing about anything and everything over dinner at the same time everyday. They are a close kin, giving birth to a pack of cubs that move around together against all odds. They are so in sync that much of their identity comes from being part of an inside joke only they understand.

Inadvertently, as you doze off, you think about the way you grew up, the only child of immigrant parents who were divorced long before you could voice your concerns. The captain announces the descent into Lagos and you get your first glimpse of the dark skyline dotted with yellow lights. The friend whose wedding you are flying in to attend speaks about this city as the reason for who she is, the family that influences her every move across waters lives here, the safety net you’ve never had. As the only one of her twelve bridesmaids from London, you’ve flown into Murtala Muhammed airport, your first time in humid, colourful Lagos, the night before the wedding. You were born Nigerian, but in your twenty-nine years on earth you’ve never made the trip until now.

At baggage reclaim, you cannot begin to imagine who is related to the other. People slap sweaty backs and shout a jumble of words you struggle to catch. Your friend appears. She’s with her mother, a woman who came to your university halls of residence bearing coolers of hot puff-puff. They laugh and pretend to be upset when you say they didn’t have to come get you from the airport. You’re family now, they say. That word again. A group of people strung together randomly, or if you believe in God, by a divine act. For richer or poorer, better or worse as your best friend declares in front of the congregation packed in the church’s wooden benches the next day.

Watching your friend walk down the aisle with her new husband, you try to imagine what role you would have played if your family were whole. Your friend is the big sister to two younger sisters and a brother. Even as the makeup artist touches up her face between the service and reception, she is asking for her siblings, checking that one doesn’t need a paracetamol for her headache, that the other’s heels are not too high to survive the many hours to come. This concern extends to her bridesmaids. She whispers to you, hoping you aren’t too tired from arriving so late the night before. You wonder if you would be so caring if you had siblings too.

It’s immediately obvious as you watch your friend glide from her father’s arms to her husband’s that your quest for love reflects your obsession with a family’s symmetry. Tears stream down your face as your friend kisses her husband over their mountain of cake –  they’ve had many fights, and almost broken up once, but here they are, choosing to cement their asymmetry. You want love to be the glue that holds this pair together. Her mother is in the corner, arguing about something with her son. Your friend says her parents are controlling, but you wonder if it is love that drives that control, and maybe some control is necessary to achieve an imperfection that stands the test of time.

As the afterparty dims you watch this family you have grown to know and love say goodbye to their guests, every departing family representing the wider society. You see now that every nation is a pile of family-shaped blocks filling the facade of life as we know it, the network of buildings that make up the world. Each block cannot be perfect, but surely we risk the demolition of all that we know if they don’t find a way to fit the spaces they hold as best they can. And as you shut your eyes, finally in bed, you cling to your hope that imperfect love will continue to define the concept of a perfect family.

The Talk of the Party is published by One More Chapter