April, besides being the Easter Month, is also a month of weddings. Some of you brothers tied the knot last month and are now newlyweds just from your honeymoon. To wed is a beautiful thing and I sometimes wish a marriage was all those good things that happen on the wedding day. Trouble, however, is that weddings last but a day while the marriage ought to be a ‘till-death’ thing. And it is not as fun as a wedding. It needs much more work – and resources. Whereas the wedding is only the first paragraph of a marriage story, most young couples think much more about the wedding than the marriage. A woman thinks about her ideal wedding gown and cake from when she is a girl, and sometimes confuses a beautiful wedding for a good marriage. And a man, driven by his perpetual urge to impress a woman, invests all his earnings towards a grand wedding and little for after the honeymoon. Haven’t you seen a couple calling a pre-wedding ‘harambee’ to fund a wedding? Others even take bank loans using their houses as collateral.
In my goings and comings, I have also learnt that society does little to help. Most parents’ greatest advice to their son or daughter is to “have a church wedding.” On the other hand, counselors during pre-wedding sessions usually talk about communication, finances and faithfulness as the ingredients of a long-happy marriage. These are important my brothers but I will tell you other facts about a marriage, which few people ever talk about. And these are what actually make or break a marriage.
THERE ARE PRETTIER AND MORE INTELLIGENT WOMEN THAN YOUR WIFE
This statement may come as a surprise to dating men and newly-weds. A man usually chooses a woman for her beauty and brains. Whenever he is with other men, he defends all her other faults by insisting on these two. And even when he meets and ogles at a woman who has a prettier face than his girl, he tells himself that ‘she could be only a pretty face with no brains’ or ‘brains without a pretty face to match’ if she is intelligent. However, this mindset is likely to end a few months or years after marriage when the man discovers that a certain female colleague is “a thinker” and also notices something special about her skin tone and lips that his wife would kill to have.
Sometimes a man will meet a pretty woman and wonder whether he rushed into committing to his wife. The irony is that this other woman’s husband might meet your wife and get the same feeling; that he too got a raw deal. The neighbour’s farm always appears greener. Why is what I’m saying important? Because many men jeopardise their marriages going after other women who they think are better than their wives. But after they have left, they realise leaving their wives was a blunder. In actual sense, it could be greener where they came from.
Every woman is beautiful and unique in their own way and the trick is to be satisfied with what you have. If you go chasing after women who ‘complement’ your wife’s flaws, it will be an exercise in futility. Follow a man who abandoned his wife for the brainy beauty queen and ask him whether he is now satisfied. It is highly probable that he is now eyeing the house girl who dropped out of class seven.
Moral lesson:
Love and cherish the woman you have. HER INTEREST IN YOU WILL VARY Now you talk and laugh with each other and cannot seem to stop. Time is too short for all the things you want to catch up on. You have almost everything in common including your liking for same movies, same music and same social joints. A year after the wedding, however, you discover that a lot has changed. She now prefers watching Mexican soap operas to talking and laughing. And on Sundays, she will hop from one chama to another rather than sit with you to watch an English Premier League game as she previously did. When she gets home and you are hoping to make up for lost time in the bedroom, she announces that she needs only two things: a hot bath and sleep.
Then a baby shows up and it looks and feel like you no longer exist. Your efforts to start a conversation will at times be curtailed by her one-worded answers. The day she agrees to spare some time she will listen with eyes half-shut with sleep. Taking care of the baby will take a toll on her to such an extent that you question how on earth such a baby is a “bundle of joy.” Are these signs that she is losing interest in you? Not really, only that the demands of life of a married woman by far exceed those of a dating woman, and she will need time alone, sometimes. Nobody tells you this during courtship and you must adjust as you learn. Moral lesson: Know that the time you had to just laugh and gossip will be eaten up by serious business. And that is a proper marriage. If you are newlywed and things seem like all honeymoon, prepare for when the honey is all licked and the moon is hidden in a dark cloud.
YOU WILL BE A KEY SUSPECT OF CHEATING
When women say men are dogs, know you are included. When they say men cannot be trusted, you are in there too. Maybe because of the hustle women go through while growing up or having to deal with numerous men – married and single – who want to prey on them, they have all concluded that a faithful man is a dead man.
If you are caught pants down, then you prove her right. And if you are never caught, and she keeps hearing about other men who have been busted, and she keeps meeting other married men who want to sleep with her; and she keeps hearing other women’s sob stories to Maina Kageni on Classic FM, she concludes that you are just good at covering your tracks but no different from other men.
Sometimes she will even tell you in the face that she knows men are all the same, and so advise you not to let her know of your philandering. Do not fret these things. Just do your best to be faithful to your wife and as advised, don’t give her a reason to say ‘I knew you are like other men’ – whether you are like them or not. Moral lesson: Building trust is a long-term project. You should confront these issues and even let her know that men too have fears about their wives. After all you know and she knows of women who cheat on their husbands. I have four more things nobody talks about before marriage and I will ask the indulgence of my editor to allow me continue in the next issue. Meanwhile, contemplate on these points and plan ahead to grab your copy of the magazine next month