Our men don’t cleave and cling, By Chukwuneta Oby

Opinion

Chukwuneta Oby (@NetaOC) | Twitter

This issue involved a couple. The wife couldn’t place the husband’s sudden resentment towards her. But when I communicated with the man, I understood what he was grappling with.

According to him, they lived in the same town with his mother but the wife has never for one day visited the mum on her own.

Not even when the woman was sick! He recounted the several times he was so sure he would get to the hospital to find the wife beside his mum, with the food or fruits or beverages that she brought for the woman but nothing of such happened.

He also said that on the day that he got to the hospital and found his mum alone, he couldn’t contain his emotions. So, he stepped outside and started crying! Apparently, the lady is the type that stays in her lane, come rain or shine.

This man lost his mother early this year. There’s a certain anger that the demise of a loved one deposits in those closest to them. And that anger is often targeted at whoever you feel didn’t treat the deceased fairly. This is what this brother is grappling with.

Frankly, I am NOT comfortable with the level of inconsideration, selfishness, meanness, pettiness and divisiveness that play out in marriages of these times.

You can’t say you KNOW God, yet you make no significant efforts in the family you are married into. People are not in our lives/space forever.  So, learn to relate intentionally.

Make efforts that can make a parent-in-law bless the day you became a part of their family. I know how thankless certain efforts can be with in-laws but take this as a duty to your God and not for accolades.

If you have become part of a family by marriage, stop treating them as outsiders, enemies or rivals. Repair your relationship with the important people in your spouse’s life. And take the burden of perpetually standing in the middle (to please you) off his shoulders. Every man is a happier husband when his wife gets along with his people.

Women, stop prodding your husband to “cleave and cling” to you. Our men don’t really “cleave and cling” in marriages. His loved ones will remain a significant part of that union or you will end up with a stressed man in your hands.

Many marriages are now stressed beyond redemption because a woman is married to her expectations and not her reality. Let’s begin to do what we can be okay with, if done to us, because life is good at giving us a taste of our own medicine.

Don’t always seek to detach a spouse from his ‘close-knit’ family. Make efforts to blend in, instead. Even if you succeed in detaching him from his people, he is never a happy man, deep down.

Instead, you have created a void in him that you can never fill. If you are married into a family that’s not united, that could be your God-given assignment right there to bring everyone together.

There’s so much marital infidelity all over but some of that actually stems from the void that people unknowingly create in the life of their spouse. It’s not every void that a wife can fill in the life of a man.

Credit: Chukwuneta Oby

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