by Tola Adeniyi
If a marriage survives the tumultuous first seven years the credit goes to the man and if it lasts beyond 10 years and goes on and on to forty or fifty years, the credit, without a doubt, goes to the woman.
Marriage flows into troubled waters right after the Honeymoon when stark realities begin to set in. The couple begins to see the man and the woman they marry in their true nakedness as opposed to the veil and spell of crazy romance, the deodorants, and brinkmanship in courtship. They are now face-to-face with the mother-in-law and father-in-law, the siblings of either side, the uncles and aunts, and unpalatable family secrets and tales that had been hidden from each other.
The man begins to exhibit his rejection of the constraints of his seeming loss of independence, the unfettered freedom of his bachelorhood, the thinning down of his circle of friends and of those who normally stroll in and out of his apartment. If he was used to night-clubbing, that habit too must be suspended. The man was not used to giving mandatory housekeeping allowance to anybody and was not used to programmed regular meals. All of these put unprecedented pressure on the emotions of the woman, now a wife, not a girlfriend…
It should be pointed out that while a woman is 90% emotional, a man is 10% emotional and 90% business. As the cliché goes, love is a woman’s total preoccupation while it is for a man, a programme apart. Emotion is expressed by tender feelings, caring, sentimentalities, loving, romance, dreaming, and all the look-good expressions. And it is fragile!
The shock that assaults the sensitivities of a new bride could be devastating and irreparable. It is now the duty and responsibility of the “unemotional”, “all-business” bridegroom to summon all his faculties to handle the challenges posed by the new realities. Here, most men fail. And this explains why in “modern” times, over 65% of marriages collapse in infancy. Some don’t make it to the second year of consummation.
It is the failure of husbands – whether young, old or middle-aged – that is responsible for the crash of many marriages at take-off. Rather than put the blame on the “impatience” and “intolerance” of the newlywed, it is the husband’s inability to do damage control and prevent his wife from becoming nuts that drives the wife away to nurse her wounded emotions and lofty dreams. But once the man succeeds in attaining cruising altitude, the wife is now comfortably seated in the cockpit as a co-pilot and can both enjoy the leisure of auto-drive.
Marriage is majorly about emotion, about feelings, about sentiments, about loyalty and trust. It is about making a good, comfortable, beautiful and pleasurable home. Intangibles. Desirables. This is the God-given, Nature assigned territory of the Woman. Family on the other hand is the business of ensuring, creating a Nucleus of husband, wife, child/children; the provision of food, health care, clothing and shelter. It extends to the provision of education, safety and security, transportation and gadgets of comfort and home entertainment. These are the responsibilities of the husband as head of the Family. These are tangibles.
It is a paradox that it is not the man who provides the tangibles that makes a marriage last beyond 70 or ten years. It is the woman, the wife and mother of the child/children, the homemaker that is credited with the feat of a long and enduring marriage. The man does not have emotions. The woman has more than abundant emotion. Emotional outpouring from a woman is the elixir to a man’s heart. It is the intangible engine room of his life and living. The good food for his nourishment, the perfume that sweetens his nostrils, the powdered and pan-caked face, the red-rose lipstick, the eyelashes, the negligee, the exotic attires that drive irresistible aesthetics to his face, and several other details left to the imagination is the combination which makes the man consider his home and family his highest treasure, and the marriage his delicacy.
For most parts after the 10th Anniversary of the wedding, the man is engrossed with everything concerned with building, sustaining, empowering and improving the status of the Family. Throughout the same period, the woman is preoccupied with building, sustaining, retaining and protecting the Marriage with all the endowments at her disposal. So long the man’s happiness at home, so long the marriage.
It is important to make it clear that we are not implying subservience, or economic dependence or a woman as an object of sensual pleasure, far from it. The woman here means total woman, gainfully employed, economically independent, self-assured and self-confident and her own person.
In the Yoruba society in which I grew up, every typical man of marriageable age usually got married except he was a eunuch or temperamentally unstable to live together with anybody long time. In the society aforementioned every adult male was gainfully employed, so also was the woman. Marriages endured for a long and divorce was a rarity. Wives were so supportive and husbands were so protective. And the culture celebrated delicious food as the surest pathway to a husband’s heart and his capture.
In emphasizing the power of Women’s emotions, and the difference between Marriage and Family, a woman who may not succeed in marriage keeps attracting men because of her grace and abundance of emotions. In other words, in or outside of marriage a woman’s emotional reservoir is a constant factor, and that’s why its deployment at home makes her the decisive factor in a long and enduring marriage. Plus, it must be added, the fact that her groom had succeeded in weathering the storm of the first 7 years with his commonsense, and thereafter, she and he had reached the cruising altitude.
Marriage, like the word love, is all about emotions. Family on the other hand is business. Serious and hard business. One feeds the other, and the two blends to make a home. However, if the pounded yam, the labour is so good, but the stew to go with it is sour, both the yam and stew will be spat out at the taste. The maker of the stew, the woman, is the deciding factor. It is the woman who has the credit for any marriage that goes beyond age 10.
