adminHELLO there everyone, how are you all? Your answer should be “great”, especially if you spent Valentine’s Day with a loved one; whether family member, friend or foe kikiki… This week, I am answering a couple who asked me to come to their home to try and fix their relationship. The issue was that they had been together for a year and then got married.
But two months after the wedding, they feel they cannot live together, their differences are too different. They said from day one they have been fighting about everything.
Unfortunately, I do not do that anymore due to lack of adequate time it needs to work a couple through to healings. I will, however, try and answer the basis of your problems and hope that once you understand the basic, you can use this as a tool to understand each other better. But this is not enough, you need professional assistance from either church leaders who are dedicated to making your marriage work, or a marriage counsellor or even a psychologist.
But then again sometimes the traditional set-up of having the “tetes or sekurus” intervene could work if you have that luxury.
Okay, so here we have a couple who did not go through pre-marital counselling. They have lived with their parents all their lives, they went out for a year, but did not have the luxury of spending much time with each other.
They also did not have parents who instilled in them the rights and wrongs of being a husband and a wife. So these two went into marriage blindly, expecting an “MNET DSTV” style marriage, only to find out it does not exist. Now they want to end the marriage after a few weeks!
So many people find themselves in this situation at one time or the other, but most manage to work it out if they get assistance or if they do not venture outside the marriage for comfort.
I may have to sort this issue out over a few weeks because there is more to marriage than two people. There are males and females, there are two different people, there are different maturity levels, there are expectations of husbands or wives and so forth; there are seasons of different loves. I don’t know.
We will have to see from the response we get from readers. But for now let me start by trying to explain who you are as separate entities.
You know some of the best people to speak to are our grandparents. They may seem not to understand our current way of life (old fashioned). But the truth is they have lived many decades longer than us. They have made hundred more mistakes than we can think of. They have had all the arguments or witnessed all the arguments.
They have lived through hell and heaven in their marriage or marriages and they can tell you so much more than any professional counsellor can. But of course not all of us have the luxury to have a gogo or sekuru to get wisdom from, so let me try and give you the kind of chat they may have given you.
First, no two people are alike, even if they are identical twins. Each person has a dynamic trait or print that distinguishes them from the other. So as individuals they live to please themselves.
They eat what they want, they dress how they wants to dress, they speak to please themselves, they behave as they want to whether right or wrong. They live in what I call their own space.
Now periodically this individual may choose to enter the space of another individual or allow another individual to invade their space.
This happens when the two find common ground. However, this does not mean everything is perfect.
The only connection is common ground. But as the two become connected (relationship), they realise that there are individual tendencies that arise that do not meet the expectations of the other individual.
The partner may choose to ignore these until it is too late, or they may choose to confront the issue and deal with the consequences. This is where the marriage or relationship breaks down.
Anastasia can be messaged on 0772 933 845.
Online Reporter