LIFESTYLE: Marriage: Why parents should pull their sons’ ears now, By Funke Egbemode

I know abusive men in marriage like it when we tell their bartered wives things like these:

“He will change, just keep on praying”

“If prayer fails, start to praise God. He will notice your pain and come through for you”

“With God, all things are possible”

“God is able to do all things. Including changing your husband. You’ll see”

“God is the owner of the hearts of kings. He will touch his heart and you never know, he could become a big pastor eventually.”

“Marriage is all about patience. He’ll come around”

“If you leave him, who will take care of the children like you?”

“You want to leave your children, to be raised by a step-mother?”

“Noooo, you can’t leave. What will people say?”

“How will you face the church, the society…..?”

“Life of a single-woman is hard.”

“Marriage is forever. Everybody is carrying their cross. Your friends also have their problems”

You know what, all those lines are true and cute. Marriage is a long-distance trip, a marathon, a long-haul, usually with no layovers. You need all the energy in you, physical, spiritual and emotional to carry on even in a good one. But a marriage spiced with slaps and blows, bruised lips and black eyes? I don’t know what that needs. I don’t know if patience can cook a stone like our parents told us. I just know that it’s only a living wife that can feel the balm of Gilead on her wounds.

A certain public figure reportedly told his daughter to slap her husband right back if he dares to slap her. You can take that anyway you want. You are even free to tell your daughter to turn the other cheek if her husband slaps her. That’s your opinion and you are totally entitled to it. Some of us have more violent responses to men slapping our daughters but I will not impose my ‘ vawulence’ on you. I firmly believe that if a man slaps a woman for the first time and she responds in kind, it will make him think twice the next time he raises his hands.

Just think about it, picture it. Be honest. Do you think a man who remembers the stinging pain of his wife’s palm on his face will rush to repeat the experience?

There was this young wife who had been battered repeatedly by her husband decided to do something about it or shall we say she decided to give him a memorable treat.

‘For two years, I bore his fist. He treated me like I had no sense, no feelings. Yes, he picked all the bills but I treated him like a king too. I love him, even now, but his anger issues, God-complex and controlling nature has to be experienced to be believed. He got angry because I told him I wanted to resume my business when our son was nine-months-old. He beat me for taking a PHD form. He beat me for going to the movies with my friends. Really, I don’t know how other women are able to live with physical abuse for years. Me, two years was my limit.’ Bisi told me.

So what did she do? She paid some muscle men to beat her husband up. Shocked? Harry, Bisi’s husband was more shocked.

Harry’s first shocking realization was how unperturbed his wife was when the thugs waltzed in like they owned his tastefully furnished living room.

“I paid the thugs. I gave the instruction for them to be on standby. I alerted them when my husband was settled in the living room to watch his favourite wrestling match. Their brief was to beat my husband up and they did a good job. They gave Harry a good beating and he couldn’t believe I was there telling the guys not to break any bone. I told him I wanted him to have a taste of his own medicine and that since I couldn’t serve him myself, I brought the boys to help me force-feed him. ‘

Of course it wasn’t a pretty sight and the aftermath was even uglier. Bruised face, bruised ego, Harry threatened (this time, only verbally) to deal with his wife. He would get her arrested, sue her for assault, attempted murder, even armed robbery, though the boys only stole his pride. They made Harry beg for his life, made him apologize to Bisi and made him promise he would never lay a finger on her. In self defense Bisi showed Harry a gallery of past photos of double lips, black eyes, plastered and bandaged limbs from past beatings. She counter-threatened to make a media-mince meat of Harry if he called in the police. Harry considered what that kind of mess could do to his business, his image, his mother’s status in church, counted his teeth with his tongue and decided to close the chapter.

I know a lot of men are angry with this kind of end to this kind of story. They prefer when a woman in marriage is taught a lesson she’d never forget. Well, I don’t understand the angst. Harry had been teaching Bisi all kinds of lessons for two years. Why is Bisi’s one lesson a big deal?

Seriously, this piece is not about women who slap men or the propriety of retaliation. It’s about the risk mothers of abusive men run when their abused daughter-in-law decides to fight back. What if Bisi didn’t ‘supervise’ Harry’s lessons. What if she was so angry that she told the thugs to break Harry’s legs or his knee-caps?

What if an abused-daughter in-law decides to poison her husband? What then? So, before you start a self-righteous speech, sit in a Daddy’s chair, a Mummy’s chair and consider the view. If your son is an abusive husband, you risk a loss, an irreversible loss.

May all our children outlive us.

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Re- Young men, older women

I just went through this your very interesting piece and I discovered that you are not looking at the angle of the woman trying herself out with ‘another dish’ after 18 years of eating ‘the same dish’ that refused to ‘belleful’ her or the woman going for the boy out of vendetta!

I know a woman who was married as a virgin who didn’t conceive for the 22 years she was eating the ‘dish from her husband’ but got belleful when she ‘tried another dish’.

To be fair to her, she didn’t do it on purpose. She ‘ate outside’ in response to the painful discovery that the husband had impregnated a woman out of their wedlock and had two children. The madam of the house discovered that her husband hid the new woman in another town away from her. He secured a teaching appointment for her and settled her in a nicely furnished apartment.

All these was smooth- sailing until the second baby arrived and some sympathetic busybody who was aware of the affair decided to inform the madam with hard evidence of the video of the naming ceremony, photographs of the new baby and the other baby as well as of the woman and the address of her house. Real CIA stuff!

She confronted the man with the evidence and he owned up to the act!

Apparently betrayed that her husband of 22 years could be sowing in another farm without her knowledge, she parted ways with her husband and stayed away from him in protest.

It was during that protestation that she met this dude who is just some four months older than her. She too ‘allowed another farmer to sow in her own farm’. And she got pregnant!

Of course, she didn’t know how a freshly pregnant woman behaves until she got to the hospital trying to

treat malaria. It was at the hospital she was told she was up against ‘omolaria’. And wahala ensued!

Wahala because she hadn’t formally divorced the man, they only separated for eighteen months ! And how could a woman whose husband hadn’t touched for 12 months upwards suddenly be seen with big belle?

So in this case of the Kogi VCs wife, it is a possibility that she too had heard of some escapades of her husband and that the VC had sowed his wild oats in some varsity girls’ gardens and maybe one or two are already with children for him.

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It’s also a possibility that the man could also be starving her of sex!

Maybe this sex-starved woman too then felt cheated and wanted to get back at the VC and therefore enticed -yes enticed, this 300L student to drill her own hole too!

And the result was pregnancy!

So it’s not only about the boy coming from a bad home but also of a woman deliberately enticing him.

I once heard the story of an Hijab-wearing housewife, mother of four, who was married as a virgin and had remained faithful. But after her husband started going around with other women, she too deliberately went to sleep with other men to satisfy herself and get back at the man!

Editor mi, please tell Professor Abigail to look at those key angles of a woman on a revenge mission and the possibility of their bloods not matching too.

– O. Balogun, Abeokuta