Odia
Dear Odia,
I empathise with you but this is not to say you don’t have faults too of your own. Your first fault started long before both of you got married. How much bother did you put into finding out about the character and nature of the woman you intend to spend the rest of your life with?
Laziness and disrespect don’t begin overnight. These are character traits that are always entrenched from the beginning of one’s life. If a person has no rudeness or laziness in his or her gene, there is no way that can be developed overnight.
Yes, she may have masked her other attitudes, but if you were truthful you would have noticed way back then that she has the traits of laziness and rudeness in her. These are things people cannot hide easily. Also, you must have noticed too that she was also not frugal with money. A woman who isn’t prudent will also never be able to hide this aspect of her. In more than one ways, you must have noticed during your courtship days that she spent needlessly and carelessly. Even if you didn’t have as much as you have now, a woman who cannot manage a kobo will never be able to manage millions of Naira.
The truth is that you glossed over these things because you wanted her in your life and thought you could cope with these aspects of her.
Back then, no amount of warnings or cautions would have made you changed your mind because you were too much in love to bother about any flaw in her person. Love simplified and made smooth all these squeezes and folds in her character for you back then. When one is in love, it drives away all shadows of doubts and regrets as well as make perfect what is imperfect. This is why you didn’t see these things about her as faults back then.
Frankly if you want to enjoy this marriage, you simply have to develop the will power to overlook certain things about her. If you don’t, you will never be able to find the peace and happiness you need to manage your home.
I honestly can imagine your frustration at her inability to manage your home.
But considering divorce isn’t a solution because whether you like it or not you will eventually get tired of staying alone and decide to start something new with another person. What would you do if your next wife also comes with faults you cannot manage?
She is your cross therefore you must look for ways of making it work. Behind every successful marriage there is a fool. One of the pairs has to be stupidly patient to make it work.
In this case, you must strive to ignore whatever the shortfalls of your wife are with the same determination you elected to gloss over them while you were still dating.
Don’t allow the familiarity of your being together to rob you of that unconditional love you had for her at the time of meeting her. Take it from me; it is the only way to make an impossible relationship work. You must love her for what and who she is to cope with her annoying habits. Keep afresh the reasons you married her out of the many women you came across while still single. It is important else you will forget in your anger and frustration your reasons for marrying her.
Because you have started with the tradition of giving her allowances, to stop would be to create serious problems in your marriage. Don’t stop but ensure that you give orders for the house-help to wash your clothes and clean the house. You could also take time out to pay your electricity bills to avoid continuous disagreement between the two of you. This way, you also avoid the embarrassment of being cut off by officials of Power Holdings over unpaid bills.
As for showing you respect, teach her through your own examples to learn how to show respect. When she performs a function for you, learn to say thank you and please while asking her to do something for you. Gradually she would begin to learn from your own examples. Overtime it would come easily to her. She just might belong to that group of persons who resist force, but find it easy to follow the examples given. Don’t forget that most of our habits come from the examples we are exposed to in our growing up years. There is no way she would know the right thing to do as a wife or mother if the example she was exposed to as a child is what she is exhibiting now. If, as a child, she grew up with a mother or female guardian who loathed hard work, didn’t show respect for the head of the house, it is only natural for her too to be like that woman. We are all products of our foundations. Only exposure to other forms of behaviour and teaching can help her realise the wrong in her ways and this you cannot achieve by nagging, because to her there is nothing wrong in doing things in the way she knows. Sincerely, if you insist too much, she would see you are simply being unreasonable and difficult to live with.
Although it may not appear right at the beginning for you as the husband to show such civility to your wife when she should be the one showing such good manners, but doing that is helping your marriage grow. A successful marriage is the one that is very elastic and flexible; one that can be stretched and would still bounce back effortlessly.
By asking her not to work, you are also helping to entrench the lazy tradition she grew up with, even if you don’t want her to work in a formal setting, you can open a shop for her. Let her earn some money of her own to appreciate the hard work behind the money you give her as allowances. The human nature finds it difficult to appreciate the sweat of other people but feel the pains of tireless hours, dented hopes when the money comes from their own sweat.
If your desire is to ensure she is free to care for your home and children, look for a shop near the house. The important thing is to ensure she is engaged in something positive and productive. Overtime, she would learn to appreciate the value of money. Don’t ever give up on love. Shadows are part of our lives but they haven’t stopped us from achieving our goals, which means that once you have the right kind of determination to make this marriage work, you will come overtime to enjoy it because patience is golden.
Above all, hand over everything in your marriage to God who knows why He brought the two of you together.
Good luck.
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