This was a personal story a man shared with me recently.
“My mother died about seven years ago, but what died with her was my marriage.
My ex-wife is from a rich family, and she never failed to make the class disparity between her and my people obvious. I am the only son of my mother and the economic pillar of the family.
There was nothing I didn’t do to make my wife embrace my people, but she behaved as if they were beneath her and should not be found in her space for any reason.
One day, I went to my uncle and his wife for advice on how to bring my wife and my people closer, and he pointedly told me that the ‘freedom’ I was seeking was already too late.
My uncle’s wife is the most reasonable woman I know, but even she was not good enough for my wife to relate with in the family.
When age and ill health began to take a toll on my mother, I begged my wife for us to move my mother in with us because looking after my mother in her old age was a promise I made to myself due to all her sacrifices in my life. My wife vehemently refused.
What I found unforgivable is that she knew how close I was to my mother and hated to have her out of my sight in her vulnerable moments. I don’t even trust my sisters to take care of my mother better than myself.
God knows I could take anything from my wife, but the indifference she showed to my mother convinced me that I had nothing left in the marriage.
She had a habit of threatening to walk out of the marriage. One day, when she said that to me, I told her she had my blessing and permission to leave the marriage. Otherwise, I would leave before she did.
Women underestimate the bond some of us have with our loved ones. Do they really expect a man to be happy with only his wife and children while every other person he has known all his life disappears?
I became the man she found good enough to marry because my widowed mother spent the best years of her life in community farmlands, working to send me to school.
Towards the end of my university studies, my sisters, who were doing odd jobs, also began contributing towards my welfare. Can anybody ever repay such sacrifices in a lifetime?
We have two children together, but the marriage eventually broke down. I couldn’t understand why my wife was so resentful of my loved ones. Yet, my affection for my people never affected how I felt about her and our children.”
This is the untold story of many people whose spouses harangue them not to prioritise their loved ones in order to “cleave and cling” to them.
“Leave to cleave’’ is the favourite marriage sermon of many married women. But I see such women as control freaks.
A friend put it succinctly when he opined that “this generation has turned the sermon into a weapon fashioned against a spouse’s family, especially the man’s own.”
“For better or for worse” is fast fading from the consciousness of a generation that needs it, yet people are more concerned with a spouse leaving every other person they have known all their lives to cleave only to them.
“Leave to cleave’’ has not done much good to the African marriage besides sowing the seeds of divisiveness, greed, selfishness, pettiness and everything bordering on “me and mine” within families.
Every married person needs to make peace with these realities:
People were in the life of your spouse long before you came into the picture.
Unimaginable sacrifices were made in the life of your spouse by these people.
These people also deserve to be prioritised in the life of your spouse.
You should neither fight it nor feel threatened by such a reality.
You cannot claim to know God and still want the important people in your spouse’s life to stay away from their loved one.
Marriage should not place anyone under the burden of perpetually choosing between a spouse and their own people. If your spouse gives to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, it will not diminish who they are to you.
We have a culture in Africa where parents take care of their children, and the children are expected to give their parents a shoulder to lean on when the time comes.
Nobody deserves to sacrifice, sweat and deny themselves so much to raise a child who will end up caring only for their spouse and children.
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