I was trying to figure out, what could be so wrong that some married couples stomach each other for only less than a year before running for the hills?
Besides, for most of these couples, theirs was not a case of ‘wait until marriage to have sex’; in all but two of the cases I sampled, the couples had been sexually active before they said ‘I do’, yet months after they had pulled all stops for a glamorous wedding, things still fell apart.
They seemed to concur on one thing: the sex stopped soon after the wedding.
“I actually felt a little conned; like that man had been putting on a show the entire time. How could you explain his sudden beeping and lack of a libido soon after our nuptials?” one of the ex-wives said.
I told her, maybe he felt emasculated after the kind of wedding you threw for him! She had admitted that she had taken out a huge salary loan to give herself and her fiancé “the wedding of our dreams”.
Pondering over the question, she brushed it aside as the possible cause of breakdown; “Naaah!”
Well, I don’t know of many men who would feel so libidinous after their wives have paid their own bride price, wedding service providers as well as for the honeymoon! But well…
Another one said she had married such “a psychotic baby”.
“The sex was alright and regular, but it is the other things. The man was weird, especially about his toilet habits [I will spare you the gross details] and he liked to let his food go bad and mouldy, before eating it! I could not see myself in that life or bringing children into it.” In less than a year, she was safely back in her Kulambiro apartment.
A woman back in the 1950s would have stood by that man and even fiercely shielded his secrets; not with millennials and Gen Zs; sorry!
The way young people’s marriages don’t last these days should be subject of serious theses. I turned to the one who had waited till marriage, yet her marriage had not lasted beyond the honeymoon, because her new husband reportedly had a teeny-weeny penis and was seemingly clueless about what to do with it, himself.
Again, stuff a young bride seventy years ago would take as simply her lot and stay put; this one hightailed it back home and refused to reconsider her decision, because “I could not unfeel how disgusted I had felt in that intimate moment”.
The other virgin bride said it was her husband that had walked out on the marriage after a few months, and she is not sure whether it was something she did wrong in bed, or he was just a serial monogamist, “because none of his subsequent relationships with more worldly girls ever lasted beyond six months”.
Another young-and-divorced millennial said he had married a ‘daddy’s princess’, who not only had never lifted her finger to do any chore in her life, but also regularly ran back to daddy to report about their marital woes, and said daddy “would verbally come down on me like a tonne of bricks!”
“After seeing how my married buddies were treated with respect in their wives’ homes, I tried to sort our issue and put my foot down more where my wife was concerned. One day I came home to an empty house; she had asked her father to pick her up and left without notifying me.” Said ex-wife is now older and wiser and reportedly wants her marriage back, but that ship has sailed.
I could go on and on, but I can also draw the conclusion here: the pain threshold among young couples is low. Small, small stress like this, and s/he will be out of that marriage faster than you can say divorce. If you want to fix that generation of marriages, start there; teach them more about tolerance, compromise and how to roll with the punches. Good luck!
caronakazibwe@gmail.com
Source: The Observer
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