Nairobi News

All marriages are happy. It’s the living together afterward that causes all the trouble. ~ Raymond Hull

Before you get married, you will be so sure that this is the person for you, the one God made especially for you, your missing half.

You will be so confident that all the trials and tribulations that you hear about people who broke up after vowing to remain together forever will never befall you, for you are different.

They didn’t love each other as much as you two do. Your relationship is much stronger than a few challenges ever will be. Your union will be unshakeable; you assure your friends and family. You will never grow apart, you tell each other.

Then you walk down the aisle, spending either Sh 100 thousand or Sh 100. Then the problems start.

You start cursing yourself, or worse, each other, for spending way over your budget. You realise that you could have done without the Limo ride and could have spent the money on furniture or pots and pans or cups and spoons that your guests didn’t give you, because they saw you were more than capable of getting your own.

RESENTMENT STARTS

You realise that you are now in debt because the loan you took was not to start a business as you had said, which would have brought in an income. Slowly, the resentment starts.

If you were frugal, you cannot understand why you cannot buy the car like your other friends did after their wedding.

This man that had promised the world to you now seems to be going back on his word and yet he can afford it. No more are the little gifts, or the expensive trips. He also seems to have changed quite a bit.

Whenever you visited his bedsitter, it was always neat; clothes ironed and kept away, even the delicious aroma of a meal would waft through the air. Now, he doesn’t seem to know his way to the kitchen and has no idea what cleaning his clothes entails.

They always said it would be the small things that would get to you, like never replacing the toilet paper or worse, leaving the empty roll on the floor for you to pick up. Small things like squeezing the toothpaste from the middle instead of the end.

Or maybe it is the fact that all the housework is left to you, yet he was more than capable when he lived by himself.

NAGGING AND EMBITTERED

Even if you have been living together, something ‘snaps’ once the promise of eternal monogamy is made. Things will never be the same.

“You should train him to help you from the start,” a wise sage tells you a week before the wedding. “Never ask him why he hasn’t done something for you,” she says in the same breath.“What you agree to do now will be like that forever,” you are warned.

You make sure that you have applied all the things you have been told, making him aware that you are equal in the household and that he needs to pull his own weight around the house.

The resentment continues to brew when you realise that your rules were made to be broken. He will leave his socks at the door and even after you shout and rant, you will still be the one to pick them up. You will sulk and give him the cold shoulder and he won’t even know there is a problem.

Before you know it, you also start to change. No longer are you the carefree girlfriend who thought her man could do no wrong. You become a nagging, embittered wife, the kind the Holy Bible admonishes.

Then you understand why your mother, grandmother, aunts and other women long married before you are so indifferent. They realized that it was a losing battle and that you will be the only one to get hurt.