As church leader she still cheats in exam hall…

Dear Agatha, 

I just read your response to a guy in the ‘Daily Independent’ on a wasteful wife. Mine is worse! She is wasteful, rebellious, covetous, likes and runs after rich men and she greatly lacks in focus.

She has done and abandoned so many things in the last nine years. She tells lies at every opportunity and prefers the advice of outsiders to mine. Can you imagine a wife that diverts children’s school fees to other purposes? 

Can you imagine a woman who abandons sex with her husband midway to attend to her brother who called in the middle of the night and did not return to bed until daybreak? This so-called brother of hers still calls at midnight despite informing him that it is not good for the health of my home? Can you imagine a woman who has taken concrete steps to heed the advice of one of the men who once slept with her to relocate abroad and the man is ready to sponsor her trip and education abroad? For Christ sake this woman is a leader in a Pentecostal church but cheats at examination hall.  These are just examples of what I have been going through in the last nine years. Please advise me on what to do.
Femmi.

Dear Femmi, 

What went wrong in your relationship? Just as it takes two to tangle, it takes the same two to destroy it. There is no way she can be this bad and you would not have known during your courtship years.

She certainly couldn’t have been the first woman you date; something must have attracted you to her in the first place. When a relationship becomes this troubled, good wisdom requires both parties to back to the drawing board. From your account, it is obvious that none of you have been able to pull the relationship from the point you left it nine years ago. 

Often than not most of the issues that later become monsters in our relationship are products of mistakes made before the decision to marry that particular person was made. They are usually premarital. For instance, some of the issues you are today complaining of were the things you decided to gloss over during your courtship years. A woman that has promiscuous tendencies must have unwittingly given one or two clues during those heady days of your courtship. The truth is that you didn’t care back then either because you didn’t recognise these signs for what they were or simply thought your love was sufficient to change her. A lot of time, we think the faults in our partners are things we can change overtime instead of learning to accept them from the very beginning to be issues that we would have to learn to live with forever. 

While I don’t condone infidelity in a relationship, think of what you do to aggravate the situation between the two of you. Are you the kind of man who lacks the patience to handle a woman or the kind that is too timid to act his role as the head of the home?

What steps have you taken to check her excesses? For instance, you accuse her of infidelity; have you concrete evidences to show that she is really having an affair or are your conclusions based on mere suspicions? Have you also sat her down to discuss her attitude with her as well as the likely effect her behaviour would have on the children?

Again, what is the quality of relationship between the two of you? How come she can confidently make arrangements to travel abroad without your approval? Definitely, you don’t seem to have control over this woman which calls to question the quality of the leadership you offer your home. How have you tried helping her become straight, stopping her from cheating in examinations? 

Time has really come for you to sit her down. Ask her probing questions about how she feels about you and the marriage as well as her decision on the marriage?

Unless both of you are sincere, determined as well as understanding of what marriage is, there is no saving this marriage from collapse.

Therefore, you must gauge your feelings for each other; consider the things that are important to both of you in this marriage, project into the future with a view of finding out if both of you can keep the flag of this marriage going, especially you! With everything you have said, you have obviously gotten to that stage where you are no longer happy with all that is happening around you. 

If both of you are sincere and have enough of the love that brought you together in the first place you can make it work despite all the odds against.  

It’s a matter of forgiving the hurts and pains of these past years and agreeing to continue on new terms. But in all these, seek the face of God because sentiments apart, some marriages, no matter how much we desire it would never work due to very wrong decisions we took before the marriage. Only God has the power to make such unions work. 

Good luck.