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Laina Makuzha LOVE by DESIGN
For any couple or believer in love, whether male or female aspiring for a long term relationship or marriage bliss, what could constitute an ideal or happy marriage worth fighting for, or worth holding on to? I would really like to know from you as well dear reader.
This curiosity grew into a more burning question this week after reading an article in The Sunday Mail, stating that marriages were under attack and that 30 percent of marriages in Zimbabwe were collapsing within 5 years.(see full article on https://www.sundaymail.co.zw/30-percent-of-unions-collapse-within-five-years-marriages-under-attack) pegging the divorce rate at an alarming level to say the least.
“Reasons cited in the divorce files included abuse, lack of communication, financial challenges and infidelity”, the article stated. It had enough stats to validate claims by marriage skeptics that the institution is fast becoming extinct or pointless, which just got me thinking.
However another article: https://www.sundaymail.co.zw/70-years-of-marital-bliss spoke of a truly sweet couple, that’s been married for a whopping 70 years and counting — yes, 7 decades! Gogo Mazhaina Kuyeri (96) and Sekuru Agushito Sanyarika (105)’s love story really inspired me and sparked fresh hopes for the survival of the marriage institution. I also know great couples celebrating 3 or 4 decades of marriage and beyond, for instance Pastors and marriage counsellors Davison and Gwendoline Kanokanga who have gone past 30 years, or author and multi-award winner Emeldah Tsumba and her husband Pastor Leo Tsumba who have been together for over 40 years and even co-authored a book on marriage.
While these may seem few and isolated compared to the divorce figures, that seemingly small spark of hope is enough to encourage me to keep doing my small part in the quest to promote joyful, healthier and wholesome marriages, stronger bonds and stronger prospects of marriage and happiness for those still searching. What that says to me is that despite any challenges that may come with modern times or differences in generations, strong marriages still exist and are happening right now.
Ever wondered why some people attract the best partners and get to live their best life, while some just don’t seem to have that same fortune? There are as many reasons and circumstances as there is sand on the earth— a few of which we have discussed before in this column. This week I chose to touch on deal breakers, just so couples can possibly look out for these and work through or around them or simply avoid them in the process of building stronger marriages and relationships in thissecond half of the year.
Knowing or deciding what your deal breakers are, upfront, can save you much heartache as it can help you avoid pitfalls.
Deal breakers can be described as traits or differences that people normally want to avoid in potential partners or discoveries that make you rethink whether the relationship will work for you. Your deal-breakers may differ from someone else’s. If still searching, an approach that could help is: before deciding to define the relationship and making a deeper commitment to each other, first consider if someone is truly right for you. It saves you in the long run. We all have automatic deal-breakers, very personal ones sometimes — that we’re cognisant of (and probably some we don’t even realise until we encounter them). While your list of “must-haves” or “can’t-haves” may differ from your best friend’s, there are also some universal relationship deal-breakers many people have in common.
The Personality and Individual Differences (2023) journal re-analyses in an article, data collected from a prior experiment to distil out key deal-breakers — red flags. The original work (Jonason et al., 2015) had identified deal-breakers, without full analysis.
Researchers recruited 285 US undergraduate students, 60 percent women, 61 percent European American, 95 percent heterosexual, and 50 percent in a committed relationship, with average age of about 22.
Participants completed two rating scales: the Mate Value Inventory, a 22-item scale of desirable traits rated in terms of how much they agreed a particular trait (eg sense of humour) was important to them, and a rating of how open they were in relationships, the Sociosexual Orientation Index. They rated items from a prior 49-item inventory of deal-breakers, defined as “bits of information you learn about a person that might make you lose interest in the potential partner”.
Some of the factors cited as deal breakers:
Poor hygiene, smelling bad, being unattractive, gross, having health issues like STDS were mentioned. So were: Addicted, having an alcohol or substance use problem, cigarette smoking, and having a criminal past, clingy, being controlling, or too jealous, promiscuous, apathetic, being inattentive or uncaring, being untrustworthy, and being dismissive of one’s interests, unmotivated, lacking ambition, having limited financial prospects, being too passive about life, and having different moral views than oneself.
It was intriguing that the research found that both men and women considering long-term relationships, apathetic was the strongest red flag, followed by gross, clingy, addicted, unmotivated, and promiscuous.
Notice that an issue that many men seem to worry about that I shall not mention here, did not even feature as a deal breaker. So relax my brothers. For shorter-term relationships, women and men rated ‘gross’ as the biggest deal-breaker, followed by clingy, apathetic, and then unmotivated.
However, in the short-run, women rated unmotivated as less appealing than promiscuous, whereas men rated promiscuous as worse than unmotivated. We may discuss some of the deal breakers indepth in the next edition but meantime, let’s keep the conversation going. I would be delighted to hear your views on this or any other topic we’ve covered.
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