Will You Unmarry Me?

In 2000, I met Mwende. She was beautiful. She had a great figure. It gave me so much pleasure to show her off. I was in love. Wipe the sneer off your face. You see, Mwende was my first car, a white Toyota starlet, KAE 951N.

It did not matter to me she was 3rd hand having had 2 previous owners, she was mine and I had pledged undying love. That was until I put her on the road. I started noticing other cars around me. My Mwende was a very basic car just a box on wheels and this hit me even more when I looked at other cars in traffic. They had spoilers. They had sports rims. Spotlights. Bullbars. My lovely Mwende was loosing her allure and fast!

It is the same with marriage. In my humble opinion, once you get married, once you commit yourself to that one man / woman suddenly better looking men / women appear all around you. I say “better looking” because you may know nothing about them but they still seem like a better option than the person you woke up next to. This is especially so if you are in the middle of a spat with your spouse.

And that is the thing about this temptation thing! It would be so much easier to deal with temptation if it was not so alluring. If temptation showed up dressed in a sackcloth then the decision to walk away is easy but the trouble with the world today is because temptation wakes up, showers, gets dressed and looks so good, smells so nice ….ah, so tempting! “Till death do us part” becomes a noose tightening daily. “Death” could be any challenge - infidelity, careers, in-laws, childlessness etc.

You see, this month my dear hubby and I celebrated our 7th wedding anniversary. As different people congratulated us on our 7th anniversary, one jokingly asked about the 7-year itch. It is basically said that after 7 years of togetherness, there is an “itch”, an inclination to be unfaithful.

I like to think the reason why I have not had to deal with the 7 year itch is because I deal with my “itch” daily. Any marriage longer than 1 day can find grounds for separating but the challenge is to make a decision each day to find grounds for staying married. I purpose to make that choice daily. I pray for strength to make the right choices daily.

It would be a blatant lie if I said it has been a walk in the park. It would be an even bigger lie to say that since we are both Christians, when we have a dispute we sit down, hold hands and sing kum-ba-ya. Truth is there have been times when we have held hands because that was the only way to keep the darn things from each other’s throat.

I remember one particularly rocky time in the early days when I wearily asked if it would simply be easier for us to end our marriage and my hubby said that is ok but he had just one condition for us to do that. He reminded me that when we got married, we had printed 500 invitation cards and so for us to end the marriage, could we please print another 500 cards and invite guests to witness our separation just as we had invited them to witness our coming together? I realized this guy was nuttier than I was ….so I chose to stay with him I figured that I need to protect him from himself! I think his story is he needs to protect me from me but hey, so far so good!

A story is told of a guy who found his neighbor out in the street one night frantically looking for something using the street light. The guy asked what he was looking for and the neighbor said he had lost his key. So the guy went on his knees and joined the search. After looking for some time the guy asked him if he was sure this was where he had lost it. The neighbor looked at him and said no, he had lost the key in his house but the lighting in the street was better!

That is the folly of marriages today.

When and where did you lose your key?

How, when and where are you looking for it?

Blessings y’all!