Tuesday 29 April 2014

HOW ANGER CAN DESTROY YOUR MARRIAGE


One of the commonest evidence that a person has not yet developed full maturity of his personality is the tendency to give way to fits of temper. Most husbands become angry whenever they did not get their ways or whenever something happened that wounded their sense of personal pride. Some husbands not only speak most unkindly to their wives but resort to threats and sometimes throw their shoes at the women or whatever other objects that may be handy.
            Some women are also capable of uncontrollably anger. Some become angry when their husbands forget to fulfill some promises made. The commonest cause of anger is keeping of late night by their husbands because it is believed that they must have been with other women.
            Practically all cases of temper date from early childhood.  Habits are formed more quickly when we are young, but if we have already passed the youthful flexible period it is now time to put our temper under control. Some had throughout childhood had indulged in their temper as a mean of coercing their parents into cooperating with them. They had frequently gotten their way by throwing tantrum whenever their will was crossed.
This same tendency followed into their adolescence with very little change. Even during their young adult years they still used their fits of temper as a means of demanding their own way. As they married they found that their reaction to having their will crossed remained the same as when they were children.
            The only difference was that some spouses were unwilling to give in to their partners’ tantrum as their parents had been. Some wives had certain strength of their own and had not been willing to accede to their husbands, as their parents used to, by giving in allowing them their ways simply because of the threat of a fit of temper.
            The high price to pay for uncontrolled temper is losing the esteem of your partner, and setting such an example before your children portend the danger that they would lose their respect for you and their own personalities would suffer as the result of the unhappy home environment.
            Happy home have been created by couples that have learned to control themselves. The control of anger is the ability to analyze the causes of your difficulty rather than to react with a fit of anger. Anger is like a parasite that grows with the growth of the supporting body, and, like a parasite, it can be killed by separation and crushing.
            It had been observed that a person is most apt to give to temper when life is stormy and all seems against him, that is when he resorts more to anger. On such occasions his store of nervous energy and his ability to exercise self-control is at low ebb. You should therefore adopt the definite policy of delaying the settlement of any difficulty until such time as you are calm.
            The control of grievances which tend to build up in a person’s mind until he finally becomes very angry, that he imagines all kinds of retaliation. This pent-up antagonism is a potent producer of trouble and should be dissipated before one finds occasion to take his partner to task. One of the best ways of relieving this pent-up emotion is to engage in some profitable and enjoyable physical exercise. Visiting of friends and taking a walk can work wonders and making you more tolerant of those who have provoked you. Every time you succeed in controlling your temper you break the chain that enslaved you.
            In order to help create a happy home, wives should treat their husbands kindly and avoid rebuttal whenever they felt ill at ease and tempted to a fit of anger. This is not with the thought of giving in to his whim, but simply in recognition of the principle that when an angry outburst is met with calmness and patience, the flurry of anger soon passes, curbing the tempted one to regain his composure and consider the immediate situation impartially and unemotionally.





Monday 28 April 2014

TO PARENTS OF ABDUCTED NIGERIAN SCHOOL GIRLS


Many children have been subjected
To life of misery by uncaring, selfish
Mothers and tyrant fathers
A life of irregular feeding till
Their flesh melted leaving behind bones.
Many are sent out to hawk various wares
Along busy streets giving no consideration
To the risks involved; childhood made a curse.
Many underage children are sent out to
Unknown families to earn money for their
Lazy parents to use as they deem fit not caring
The condition under which these children live
 Making the children grow up in a loveless world
Happiness marred by pungent suffering meted out
To them by insensitive adults who treat their own
Children with uncaring demeanor
But the parents of abducted Nigerian
Girls in Borno State of Nigeria by Boko Haram
Chose to give their daughters a lasting legacy
Of education that will guide their steps eternally
But evil men abducted them for devilish purpose
Putting pain the hearts of loving parents
The whole world is shocked by this barbaric
Disposition of those who ignorance, illiteracy
And myopic thinking have taken hostage in
This period of electronic thinking
I share the pain of the parents of the future
Light of our country but I want
To let them know that this will pass
Forces of darkness will not extinguish this light
Sit back and think; have you not
Been in tight corners before
Where escape seemed impossible
Have you not carried heavy burden
You feel will break your weak neck
The present situation no matter how
Hopeless it seems will pass away.
Transient it is and pass away it must
Proving God is in control and ultimately
Leaving behind its lessons and
Experience written in our minds
With cosmic pen.

WHY MARRIAGES SHOULD NOT BE ARRANGED

It is unusual for the bride to meet the groom for the first at the wedding ceremony, but Beatrice hoped to at least get a glimpse of the man before then. The only piece of information she had about Peter was that he was an older man. No one told her how much older, though, and she was filled with trepidation. What if he turned out to be a monster or had no teeth? She knew that his age and appearance should not be important to her, but what if his manners were atrocious? Or worse, what if he was a cruel man? Could she live with someone who would mistreat her?
            Her mother had often told her that she worried too much, but wasn’t the unknown always a worry? To Beatrice it was. She wished her mother was able to offer advice now. She would calm Beatrice’s fear. But her mother had died two years ago and her father had decided she must marry Peter. There were times when she physically ached to talk to her mother. Today was one of those times, for Beatrice was on her way to marry a man she had never met.
            Her father and a younger sister accompanied her. Their destination was Lagos where her wedding ceremony would take place in just two weeks. The closer they came to their destination the more withdrawn Beatrice became. Her father tried to think of a way to lighten her concerns about the future. At last he said, “You are not going to a funeral. It’s your wedding, so cheer up.”
“I will try,” she promised.
.           “I don’t want you to worry about your future husband. I have been assured that he is a gentleman, and will never raise a hand against you, and as you know, there are husbands who would be cruel to their wives.
            Rose had this to say about her own case, “My father forced me to marry two men I never loved. I was nineteen when I married the first. I just turned twenty-one when I married the second. The second marriage lasted only three years. They were both far older. They were my father’s friends. Their ages were closer to my father’s than to mine.
            “In the nights he made love to me I lay inert. I feel that this was not happening to me but somebody else. Besides, a woman was not supposed to show pleasure, not supposed to feel it, if she was a decent woman. That was what I was told. So it did not trouble me that I had no pleasure. But to a great extent it was due to my loathing for my husband. I hated every thing about him.
            “He was not satisfied with me. And why should he be? I could not love him. He wanted what I could not give. He wanted a wife to please him in return for his name and his support; that was what any man would want. A woman was supposed to please, and to act pleased, whether she was pleased or not. That, too, was part of the unspoken bargain.
            “But I could not do it. Something in me could not do it. And I felt pity for him because he gave fairly to the bond called marriage, while I could not. We
were strangers to each other, although he would never undermine his dignity by admitting that he knew we were, or that I loath him. Someday I thought, someday it will happen. Something in me that I am holding back will give way. And actually it happened. One day as he wanted to touch me I screamed and pummeled his back with my fist and ran out of the house and that was the end of the marriage.”
            The two short stories prove that there are occasional cases in which parents are unwittingly selfish in arranging the marriage of a son or a daughter. When parents place the consideration of their interests above that of their children, it is bad. Young people should have a say in who they should marry, so as to avoid the problems of incompatibility.
In some cases the parents out-rightly oppose the choice of their children for selfish reasons and desire for the continued companionship of a son or a daughter ahead of the considerations which would enable the young person to build his own future happiness, the young person could seek the help of family friends or pastors to talk to their parents.
Of course, a young person tends to feel that his arrival at adulthood entitles him to make his own choices and that it is his own home and not that of his parents that is about to be established. The young person may even feel he is in a position to avoid certain mistakes that his parents made when establishing their home, which sometimes does not work out.
Some of the relations of young people involved in arranged marriage are vain and pretentious. And it is only the shallow-minded who strive to attract attention by pretentious claims. Men have been known to send pictures of themselves to relations or friends to arrange brides for them, dressed in borrowed clothes. The ocean depth is mute; it is only along shallow shores that the roar of the waves is heard. So it is stupid young person that will decide to marry someone he or she had not dated for sometimes by dressing in borrowed robes. Courtship will enable the young people to know something about each other. The mark of a truly successful marriage is absence of pretensions.
Before two people fall in love, they must have met. Love blends young hearts into blissful unity, and so makes them to ignore past ties and affections as to cause a son’s separation from his father’s house, and the daughter from all the sweet endearments of her childhood home, to go out together and build for themselves another home, around which shall cluster all the cares and delights, the anxieties and sympathies of the family relationship.
This love, if pure, unselfish, and discreet constitutes the chief usefulness and happiness of marital life. Without it there would be no organized households, and consequently, none of the earnest endeavor for a competence and respectability, which is the mainspring to human efforts, none of those sweet, softening, restraining, and elevating influences of domestic life, which can alone fill the earth with the happy influences of refinement.