I grew up in a much messed up society. As I was growing up, I don’t remember seeing one functional family unit: Our next door neighbor would almost kill his wife (a different one every year) around bonus time. He would smash up all his house windows and pack off the ‘wife’ back to wherever she came from. Across the road, the petite wife who couldn’t take the years of abuse anymore took a machete and almost chopped off her husband’s head; we saw him staggering down the road with blood dripping from his head before the ambulance picked him up.
My mother would openly declare that the first marriage never works out. As if there is some unseen, all powerful hand that picks out a rogue partner for you. But even for her, the second time around wasn’t exactly working: I guess she couldn’t admit that the second time can be a disaster as well, even worse. I guess she stayed in that marriage because she was the first born child in a large family and she was the only one who had what everyone thought was a good marriage: Her young sisters were train wrecks. In retrospect, I now realize she was the economic pillar of her household, so her reasons for staying in a dysfunctional marriage that eventually killed her was not economic. Does society place too much of a burden on people? For you to be a respectable woman, you need to be married, even if the marriage kills you.
I continue to see a lot of dysfunctional marriages and let me hasten to say, not because of the small house phenomenon: I have seen a lot of guys without small houses, who are absolute monsters to their spouses.
I think the main reason why there is a lot of misery in the world is that we never stop to question why we think we need the things we think we need. Okay, marriage is good for the proper upbringing of children. But why do we need marriage? Before it becomes good for our children it has to be good for us. Marriage is supposed to make us happy; it’s as simple as that. Forget the nonsense about the woman needing a man to take care of her, because honestly in most cases the women who think they need men for economic reasons are the ones who don’t: Do not underrate the vegetable stall by the street corner; it has sent children to school and fed the family whilst the good for nothing husband spends his meager earnings on beer and diseased prostitutes. He beats her up and emotionally harasses her to cover up for his own lack of achievement. Isn’t the vegetable vendor better off staying on her own and having the occasional boyfriend who will treat her well? Staying on her own and paying her own rent, she can demand fair treatment from men and eventually she will find a husband who will treat her with respect.
We can go against society if we are getting a raw deal. We have to interrogate situations before we go into them.
Some might question why I am biased towards the unhappiness of women, when there are men who are also in unhappy marriages and the unhappiness is caused by women? Well, men can find solace in small houses without society turning its big nose. Men can jump from one marriage to the other with their heads held high. But you won’t see men queuing up to marry a divorced woman; she will become the one night stand perfect candidate.
We have held the institution of marriage so highly that we don’t stop just for a moment to consider the kind of contract we are signing when we say we do. The man will be saying; you will wash up, cook, take the beatings, and take the STI & the HIV silently because you are the woman. What is the woman saying? Do we ever stop and just think that what we want is happiness and perhaps rushing into marriage is not the right way to get that.
