After six months of marriage, do you:
A) Find out “surprising things” about your husband (aka signs you chose to ignore while you were trying to trap him) and then wish you didn’t marry him?
B) Finally decide you can’t stand your in-laws (the ones whom you were kissing up to just to get the guy)?
These are some of the common excuses you here nowadays from young Nigerian women who have decided to walk out of their marriages while being newlyweds. In my opinion, a marriage of 5 years or less is very much new. This post was brought on based on the feedback I’ve been getting from those in Nigeria about the increasing divorce rate among young couples.
I remember when I was growing up; it was a thing of humiliation for a marriage to fail, especially from the woman’s point of view. Not that I condone this, but you would often hear the woman’s family pleading with her to be patient with her husband and just persevere regardless of how bad the situation was. No one really seemed to focus on getting to the root of why the marriage was failing; it was usually more like just-suck-it-up.
Fast forward to present days, a whole lot has changed since then. Women are definitely more empowered and refuse to endure what their mothers put up with. As a woman, I do support the notion that we shouldn’t have to put up with men who disrespect and demean us in any form. Having said that, I don’t believe getting quick divorces is the solution to marital problems either.
At this point, you might want to take a quick glance at the two questions I posed at the beginning of this post. I’m probably about to offend many ladies with what’s coming up next. Here it is: please focus less on the wedding but more on the marriage. Too many of us are interested in having the “wedding of the year” and having pictures of our wedding splattered across magazine pages, blogs and other forms of media. If you want to throw an elaborate party for yourself, just go ahead and do it already and get it out of your system; you don’t need to use a wedding as an excuse. Just have a fabulous party and even wear a wedding gown if you like (okay ignore that one, just trying to get my point across).
Also, many women are so eager to change their facebook status from “single” to “married” that they often fail to really get to know themselves and the man they choose to wed. Worse still, some ladies do “know” who they’re about to marry but either ignore the issues at hand or stupidly think, they can change him after saying “I do.”
I know this sounds cliché, but marriage is one of the most significant commitments a person can make. It requires lots of spiritual and psychological preparation before diving into. The high you get from the bling on your finger and your fabulous wedding won’t sustain you for long. All the hoopla wears off and in the end you’ll have to face your marriage squarely.
