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more withdrawn Beatrice became.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.
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