Of Marriage and Society

This post promises to be short. Hi everyone, it’s been too long. I am sorry. I have been hustling. Publishing a good book is hard.

Now, it is alarming how much young people are talking about marriage these days. It is amazing how society confuses us, puts into our brain that there has always been and will always be statuesque. And that you are not a person until you follow that statuesque to the latter: First, go to school. School is important, school is very important, I cannot deny that fact, but are we learning the things we should be learning? especially with the Nigerian system of education. What the ‘Nigerian’ school (I haven’t been in any other school) does is it affixes your mind on the prospect of working for someone else, building the dreams of someone else. But today is not for the school argument; it’s for the marriage argument. After school, society congratulates us, ‘You’re a graduate now, well-done and congratulations. Now wear a suit, carry your credentials, preferably in a beige envelope, and seat on that couch with the gazillion other graduates and wait for a job interview. You will probably not get the job, but wait, still.’ But today is not for the unemployment argument; it is for the marriage argument. After you’re done with the job hunt and let’s say you get lucky and you are one out of the gazillion that gets the job, you know what society tells you next? Go, find a woman if you are a man or a man if you are a woman and marry him or marry her. This, ladies, gentlemen, is today’s argument.

Society does not consider it necessary to ask you if you are ready to be married. To observe you a while and find out if you have the maturity that is needed to embark on such a colossal journey as marriage. Society does not give a drop of damn what happens after you get married. All society knows is once there is a job and or a steady source of income, next comes ‘settling down’, they call it ‘settling down’ so simplistic a name, as if all you need to do is buy a mat and head with your spouse to Millennium Park and ‘settle down’ for a picnic. It is ridiculous. Society does not consider that you may be financially ready but not mentally ready, not physically ready. Marriage is not only about money, even though I say, every time I get the chance, that money is as important as any other thing, but you do not just have to be rich to be ready for marriage, you have to be many other things: patient, mature, meek, humble, FAITHFUL, PATIENT, kind, very kind. Remember, young people, even though society never tells you these things, in time, it will not be just you and the woman/man you married. Young minions, tiny things that have two-centimeter feet and three inch legs will come into the picture.
Society tells you how God wants you to leave your father and your mother and join some man yidi yada, it does not tell you it is sinful to bring children you are not mature enough to take care of into this world. Children whom you are not interested in monitoring their progress because you have to have a few bottles of beer with the boys in the club. Society does not care about these truths. All it cares about is you being married. Children are probably the most important pictures in this marriage argument. The worst people in the world today are those people who had faulty upbringings. Consider the serial killers, the serial rapists, the serial thieves and serial everything bad, when caught, if caught, they mostly heap blames and of course curses on their parents for raising them like cattle and not children. Consider that carefully, do you want to be remembered by your children as a hero, or as a villain that deserves the blame for… say a terrorist attack that claimed the lives of thousands of innocent people because you were a bad parent who was forced into marriage by society before you achieved optimum readiness? Think wisely, young people of marrying age, it is not society’s decision when you get married, it is YOUR OWN decision. Think wisely, society has caused enough damage already.

This post was somewhat inspired by a conversation I had with a friend. She asked 'when I wanted' to get married, as if marriage is a journey from Lokoja to Abuja that you can just 'take' whenever you 'want'. I told her I'd be ready in less than three years. LOL! The surprising yet incredibly unfortunate thing was that she believed me. SMH!

Till next time,, Keep dreaming!!