Marriages are falling apart and that is no news. What is news is the way and manner at which the institution is breaking. Our forefathers clearly understood the purposes of marriage and placed optimum values on the marriage institution. These days, however, people have little or no respect for marriages.
I think people are more in love with the idea of getting married than the married life itself, and I stand to be corrected. Do you know the level of planning, excitement etc that women especially put into their wedding? The hair must be right, the makeup great, the outfits perfect, the venue wonderful, the food and drinks amazing, the music and entertainment outstanding. In fact, everything must be perfect. However, little or no plan is put into the marriage on how to face the expected challenges that comes with it. What often happens is that after the glitz of the ceremony, the day breaks and the challenges comes, you see the couple falter and give up even without trying.
Truth is, marriage is as hard as life. Life is hard, but you see us trying to survive and conquer all odds to be successful in life. But we hardly make such efforts to survive our marriages and conquer all odds to be successful at it. We give up and use every available excuses to defend ourselves. I will try to analyse the various angles to the recent breakup of the marriages of Tonto Dikeh and Ubi Franklyn, the best way I can, bearing in mind that there are three sides to a story, your side, my side and the truth.
Ubi Franklyn fell out with his acclaimed girlfriend Emma Nyra and went public with gory details about her, painting her black and him white. In the same process, he got engaged to Lilian Esoro and they went ahead and got married. Lilian Esoro was matured enough not to speak about Ubi and Emma Nyra’s controversy, but she married him because they were in love right? After their grand wedding, Lilian and Ubi would put up happy pictures and cryptic words showing them living their lives on social media. Meanwhile, there were were already cracks in the wall, and it finally happened few months after the birth of their son.
Lilian walked out of the marriage citing almost the same issues that Emma Nyra claimed she went through in her relationship with Ubi.
My question is, why make so much effort to show a façade on social media when it’s not the reality of that marriage?
Now, Tonto Dikeh got married to Olakunle Churchhill in a secret wedding that shocked everyone. While I gave kudos to her for managing to keep her relationship out of the public until they wedded, I was mostly impressed that she seemed to have turned a new leaf. What with all the inspirational and almost spiritual messages she would often post on her wall, her fans were ecstatic for her. I got a bit worried when she would post every little thing about her marriage on social media. She would write epistles on special occasions and eulogise her husband, calling him all sorts of nomenclatures and praising God for giving her such a loving husband. I felt that all was not well, and that it was a desperate attempt to cover up something and create a different picture from reality.
And suddenly the cookie crumbled, now Tonto is singing a different song. There has been accusations and counter accusations from both parties, the husband whom Tonto used to paint as a demi-god has now become the devil himself. The most funny of them all is Tonto’s recent claims that she lied on social media to paint her husband in a good light. That is absurd because we didn’t ask you if your husband was a saint or not, we didn’t even need to know if he was the perfect husband or not period!
A lot of responsibility of the marriage is placed on women, especially christians. This is because we are homemakers, we are builders, we are shapers. Remember that the Holy book says ‘whoever finds a wife finds a good thing’. It didn’t say a woman will find a husband. It is the man that will find a wife, and she will be a good thing to him.
Make no mistake ladies, we have roles to play in our men’s lives. We have the power and ability to build, shape and make our homes into what we want it to be. We shouldn’t give up on them just because there are issues, rather we should help them get the help they need as the case may be and if that doesn’t work we would know we tried our best.
Don’t waste so much energy displaying perfection on social media, and to the world… instead of building your home. It should be the other way round. Ask God for the ability to forgive all wrongs, conquer every challenge and survive the odds in marriage. Don’t live a lie; if your spouse sees your effort in making the marriage work, he/she will join you and you will both make sacrifices for the good of the home.
My 2 cents, see you next week.