Thursday, August 15, 2013

This marriage thing....

I have never feverishly desired marriage nor have I admired married men except for when I am lonely and horny or both.

There is however one couple that constantly revives my faith in this institution and I don’t know why.
For better or worse, no pun intended, I am at that age in my life where marriage hangs over my head like a nimbus cloud, pregnant and heavy, full with the promise of good things but also promise of disruption.

The major champions for this endeavor in my life are my uncles and a few well-meaning friends. I am normally honest with them. Sadly my answers to their query seem to hide a past hurt or a cynicism that seems misplaced in the heart of a God fearing youth clinging onto scriptures like Jeremiah 29:11. But that is far from the case.

A relationship, ‘oba’ love, is a two lane road of emotion and logic. I seem firmly embedded on the logic side of the lane. You see nothing that has been promised me from the time I started listening to teachings about marriage seems limited to marriage. It either seems like a lot of work or just too fairy tale.

Of course those who are married make it look like they have ascended through a portal into a realm of good things that only those that have partaken of it can express or understand. This is well and good, but the other side of the coin seems true. The world is full of couples, born again I might add, that seem to be existing in limbo. Like when they were making the jump into that portal Umeme load-shedded and they ended up in some other twisted ‘horrorverse’.

I feel, rightly or wrongly, that all the ‘marketeers’ need to change their strategy. I don’t need to be married to have sex and enjoy it. Contrary to popular belief not all acts of fornication are immediately followed by catastrophic or cataclysmic planetary collapse and blinding or numbing guilt. The many Christians having sex can attest to that.

I definitely don’t need to be married to have babies. All the single mothers and fathers can also attest to that.
I don’t need a wife to wash my clothes; my washing machine is doing just fine. Yes my house may be covered in a layer of dust most times however when I do get around to cleaning it is a good job…sort of. I don’t need her to cook, I have lived on my own since my second year at university, I can manage a proper sensible meal for over ten people and I am not just talking about one source and one food.

Companionship, conversation and most other things can be got from without marriage. So what exactly is the validation for getting married especially when the statistics say being born again apparently has very little to do with your divorce quotient, sex is freely offered and pregnancy out of wedlock is not “that bad” any more, the number of domestically inept bachelors has gone down considerably and ladies believe that men are ravenous, cheating canines with the men claiming that women are nine tailed green eyed vixens.

Don’t get me wrong I want to get married, I want to have kids but at the moment, I see no good reason to.
But, this couple I speak of seems to have landed on the answer. They have not told me, they have not taught me, they have shown me. When I look at them, it’s like I have caught a glimpse far beyond the reaches of all the married people I have observed or talked to, it’s like for a brief moment, a brief instant I gazed into something more beautiful than the stars and as endless and mysterious as the galaxies in the heavens.


They may not have been married that long but for now they are my sextant, my rule, my campus…my north star on this thing called marriage. They renew my faith in marriage.