HOT TEMPER GIRL FRIEND

The young man’s fiancée has a violent temper and a consuming jealousy. She goes berserk if she sees him with another woman and recently broke the windscreen of his car because he saw another lady in the front seat of his car. The young man is asking whether or not he should go on with the marriage plan. In the past I would not have bothered devoting this column to this issue because ordinarily it is a no-brainer: he should not only walk away, he should flee from that potentially fatal relationship. But no, he is seeking advice over what is pretty obvious, even to him. You know why? The answer is in a quote I used some time ago in this column. “Everybody in love is a fool,” and at this point in time, the young man might just be the biggest fool of them all. Now the whole essence of courtship is to study the person you are involved with and answer that critical question whether or not you are ready to spend the rest of your life with him/her. This boils down partly to asking yourself whether you can tolerate his/her shortcomings for the rest of your life (these shortcomings are apart from other shortcomings, you never knew of, which will manifest after your wedding). You must answer this question with all sincerity because it forms part of the vows you take on your wedding day before being joined as husband and wife: “For better, for worse.” Many people planning to go into marriage are unable to answer that question clearly because their senses are beclouded. That brings us to an issue we talked about some time ago in this column. Even though only two people are involved, courtship should be a family affair. Do not leave it alone to your son/daughter. He/she is in love and foolish, he/she cannot think straight, his/her judgment is beclouded. Courtship is the last time parents and family can legitimately intervene (mind you, intervention is different from interference, which is negative). Once they tie the knot, parents become extended family and can easily be called “meddlesome interlopers.” If you intervene, you are not doing anything new or strange. In those days, parents and family played “detective” for their children getting married. They made inquiries about the family their children were marrying from or marrying into. Such inquiries were mainly related to certain illnesses and tendencies in the family, or whether the family was “cursed” and whether they are freeborn or slaves. Times have changed, so are the emphases (although the Osu Caste System is still a sticking sore thumb in Ibo land; Christianity and modernity have had negligible impact in wiping it out), but the need to carry out due diligence is immutable. Do your due diligence before giving your son/daughter parental nod/blessing. In those days too, parents prayed for their children before sending them into matrimony. Life then was much simpler and more straightforward. We are currently in a very complex world, even though we call it a global village, which it is. If parents then prayed per annum for their children going into matrimony, today’s parents must pray per second; if parents then did only prayers. Today’s parents must accompany prayers with fasting. The benefit of the involvement of dispassionate parents is that they are not emotionally involved, so they are not “foolish;” they just want the best for their children. Parental involvement is usually a tug of war because their (parents) ways are not their (children) ways. Your son feels he is a man now and should take his decisions. That is true, but he is inexperienced and needs help. Marrying a woman with a heinous temper, for example, can be a ticket to an untimely death. In a fit of anger, she can stab the husband to death, give him an acid bath, put otapiapia (poison) in his food or cut off his genitals while asleep. There is no limit to what people can do in a fit of rage. We read about them every day. When they become sober, they blame the devil, but the harm has been done. I advise parents or families, whose children are about to go into potentially “fatal” marriages, to do all within their power to stop it. Sometimes the signs are usually there, but we gloss over them. Your daughter comes home with a black eye and you explain it away as “young people in a relationship argue.” That is no argument, it is physical abuse. Your daughter-in-law-to-be destroys property when provoked, and you say it is childishness, she will outgrow it. Yes, after causing irreversible damage. I am not saying people cannot change for the better; I just prefer to take decisions based on prevailing circumstances. Remember that I am talking about families who genuinely love their children. If you come from a family where selfishness reigns, where parents do not want their children to get married for fear that attention will shift from them, pray to God and follow your heart. Finally, to our subject matter of today, my advice to you is, do not go ahead with that marriage. If your fiancée’s anger is caused by demons, she and her people should get help to cast out the demons. If it is systemic, she should get professional help to manage her anger positively. But if you decide to marry her and help her sort out her anger, remember “for better, for worse.” Follow it to the end. If you succeed, you are then not only a husband but a hero. But if you die in the process, which is a possibility, I pray the world sees you as a martyr, not a foolish man or the proverbial stubborn fly that went into the grave with the corpse