What a man should know before the vows

April, besides being the Easter Month, is also a month of weddings. Some of you brothers tied the knot last month and are now newlyweds just from your honeymoon. To wed is a beautiful thing and I sometimes wish a marriage was all those good things that happen on the wedding day. Trouble, however, is that weddings last but a day while the marriage ought to be a ‘till-death’ thing. And it is not as fun as a wedding. It needs much more work – and resources. Whereas the wedding is only the first paragraph of a marriage story, most young couples think much more about the wedding than the marriage. A woman thinks about her ideal wedding gown and cake from when she is a girl, and sometimes confuses a beautiful wedding for a good marriage. And a man, driven by his perpetual urge to impress a woman, invests all his earnings towards a grand wedding and little for after the honeymoon. Haven’t you seen a couple calling a pre-wedding ‘harambee’ to fund a wedding? Others even take bank loans using their houses as collateral.

In my goings and comings, I have also learnt that society does little to help. Most parents’ greatest advice to their son or daughter is to “have a church wedding.” On the other hand, counselors during pre-wedding sessions usually talk about communication, finances and faithfulness as the ingredients of a long-happy marriage. These are important my brothers but I will tell you other facts about a marriage, which few people ever talk about. And these are what actually make or break a marriage.

THERE ARE PRETTIER AND MORE INTELLIGENT WOMEN THAN YOUR WIFE

This statement may come as a surprise to dating men and newly-weds. A man usually chooses a woman for her beauty and brains. Whenever he is with other men, he defends all her other faults by insisting on these two. And even when he meets and ogles at a woman who has a prettier face than his girl, he tells himself that ‘she could be only a pretty face with no brains’ or ‘brains without a pretty face to match’ if she is intelligent. However, this mindset is likely to end a few months or years after marriage when the man discovers that a certain female colleague is “a thinker” and also notices something special about her skin tone and lips that his wife would kill to have.

Sometimes a man will meet a pretty woman and wonder whether he rushed into committing to his wife. The irony is that this other woman’s husband might meet your wife and get the same feeling; that he too got a raw deal. The neighbour’s farm always appears greener. Why is what I’m saying important? Because many men jeopardise their marriages going after other women who they think are better than their wives. But after they have left, they realise leaving their wives was a blunder. In actual sense, it could be greener where they came from.

Every woman is beautiful and unique in their own way and the trick is to be satisfied with what you have. If you go chasing after women who ‘complement’ your wife’s flaws, it will be an exercise in futility. Follow a man who abandoned his wife for the brainy beauty queen and ask him whether he is now satisfied. It is highly probable that he is now eyeing the house girl who dropped out of class seven.