Let’s try to save family life

Expectations involve future wishes and hope. If the wishes and hope do not materialise with the passage of time, disappointment is experienced.
A marital partner with high expectations at the initial stages of the marriage process feels painfully disillusioned if the prospects of the expectations materialising get bleaker and bleaker as years go by and the couple gets older and older.
A former public relations executive at a local women’s empowerment organisation, Mrs Guide Manina Bango Dube (Mrs Moyo) who is now a resident of Canada, aptly explained it: “Many people get into marriage with very high expectations.

“If those expectations are not fulfilled, their hopes are dashed, leading, in some cases to the total collapse of the marriage.”
She should know this subject quite well since she handled and counselled many battered wives during her time in Harare.
“A large number of those women were violence victims following their remarks to their spouses that the lives they were leading were way below their expectations,” she stated.
Cases of this type abound all over the world and lead, by and large, to divorce.

So, a marriage ceremony should be understood in terms much wider than the standard response: “I do” and “Till death do us part”.
The most important nuptial declaration ought to be: “For better or for worse; for richer or for poorer”.
We now come to another very important marriage-destroying factor; inability to maintain one’s family not because of circumstances beyond one’s control, but rather because of reckless habits such as gambling, drunkenness and womanising.

Men are usually at fault in this particular aspect as it is they who are the traditional family bread-winners.
But nowadays, when gender equality is becoming the global socio-economic norm from the cradle to the grave, married women have a big role to play in the economic maintenance of their families.

Mrs Moyo (nee Bango) has this to say on this:
“This is another aspect of married life where some people become disillusioned because their expectations would have been much higher than the actual performance of their spouse.”

She observed that people’s expectations should not be out of touch with practicable reality on the ground, otherwise many marriages would end up with sighs, groans, gnashing of teeth and utterly bewildered and stunned children.
Some marriages have broken down mainly because of unwarranted interference by some family members of either the man or that of the woman. This is quite common in a traditional cultural environment where the so-called extended family is the norm.

In culturally transformed societies where the nuclear family is the community’s basic social unit, family members can be involved in the marital problems of their next of kin only at the invitation of the couple.

What does Mrs Moyo (nee Bango) say about this: “Generally, in African communities, the beginning and limit of the involvement of members of the family of the husband in the marital home affairs of their son, brother or uncle is blurred.

“This can cause confusion and even tension in the              family of a newly married couple. Some divorces                            have been caused by the rather rare but unwarranted interference.”

In some African communities, parents urge their daughters or sons to divorce if they feel that they have married from what they regard to be a wrong family or a wrong tribe or race or even religion or church.

We now come to a controversial possible cause of divorce in Zimbabwe: witchcraft. By this we are referring to sorcery, unnatural power, to do or cause harm to other people by the use of charms, magic or any other satanic way.

Known as buloyi, uroyi, or ubuthakathi in various African tongues, witchcraft is said to be used to cause death, barrenness, mental as well as physical disability, bad luck and even enmity between or among people in a community, or between husband and wife, between parents and their sons.

Some families are traditionally either suspected or believed to be witchcraft – practitioners. Decent members of any community are advised never to marry from those families. They are evil personified; elders will admonish those wishing to be maritally associated with such agents of the devil.

Should a young man bring a bride from afar, and a death occurs in the family where none had been experienced in living memory, tongues will begin wagging in the community, and accusing fingers will be pointed at the bride, and a divorce is likely to take place sooner or later as a result of all that.

It is to avoid this obviously irrational behaviour that modern young people would rather live all by themselves in their own hamlets as social development that promotes nuclear family culture.

The last factor that causes divorce is dishonesty. It features in some individuals in financial matters; especially where and when some cash is secretly given by the woman to her relatives or by the man to his.

The best approach would, of course, be to give whatever to whomever openly and after an agreement.
Should one marriage partner feel that his or her people should also be given or assisted, a mutually agreed formula should be devised and followed for the sake of harmony in the family.