Marriage is once a highly revered institution, which was only reserved for men and not boys, but sadly that is not the case in the world of today. Marriage has been reduced to a mere coming together of two people, mostly of the opposite sex, without any significant bonding, foundation and other important factors in marriage.
These days, I see a lot of young people trying to separate the family of either the bride or groom from the marriage, especially at the early stage of it. For instance, I have seen a lot of this kind of stories where family members may be against the choice of wife/husband their person intends marrying, and a lot of people online will unleash hell on them for opposing the said marriage, on the ground that the family members are not going to live in the marriage with them.
Whenever such kind of story makes it way to the social media, it is often greeted with most young people raining insults, abuses, and all sorts of nasty words on the family or family member(s) opposing the said marriage, even when there’s a cogent reason to warrant them being against such marriage. These people just want marriage to be typical of just going to the market to buy foodstuffs, I don’t know where they got all these mentalities from, because I’m so sure it wasn’t learnt from their people respectively.
Take a good and careful look on the story below from Honourable Justice E.P Amarachukwu shared on her social media handle…
This post went viral, and I followed it on many platforms on social media, and I was extremely shocked at the majority of comments on it, mostly from the young people. You needed to see the magnitude of insults and abuses hurled on her over that post, even when they are seeing the sensitive point she raised in the post. They were not even talking about the point she raised, their anger was anchored on the fact that she’s opposed to the marriage.
You can imagine what we are faced with, and you are still surprised why most of these young people have a high percentage of failed marriages. People who do not take any factor into consideration before embarking on the journey called marriage.
Once they are able to post photos on social media and get favourable comments and reactions from people, then they are good to go. It has become an era of social media validation and not the family members. You can only look at such self deceit and foolly and laugh, because it will eventually end up in regrets and mistakes.
It is not just the man who’s married to his wife nor is it only the woman who’s married to her husband. Marriage is a family affair, as such, the entire family is married to either the man or the woman. Therefore, it is the duty of the family members to scrutinize the woman or man coming into their family, to do all the background checks before the marriage is initiated officially.
Besides, it is this angle of subjecting potential husband and wife to such scrutiny on both sides of the family, that makes you to have a decent life. You don’t go living a careless life and expect every family to throw their arms wide open to welcome you into their family, it doesn’t work that way.
Africa has cultures and traditional values, and no matter how long we keep pretending to have fully embraced the foreign cultural values we can never surpress what we have here. It is either you respect and imbibe some of these our important cultural values or you get yourself messed up in the end.
Written by Okwor Maxwell Onyeka, Nollywood filmmaker, writer and author of How Love Conquered The World, Conquering The Needles War Surrounding Feminism Ideology, Forbidden Son and others.
(Photo credit: Google/Ready to Ask, Prevention, News24 and SowetanLive).