Marriage
Would you feel incomplete without it?
In the early 2000s, weddings were a phenomenon — not like the full-blown magnificence we are privileged to witness these days, but a phenomenon nonetheless.
So, as a young child, it wasn’t unusual to long for a relationship that led to a wedding that then led to marriage. And it was common knowledge that the true definition of romance would be a young man “willingly” meeting with the parents of a young lady he was interested in. “Willingly,” because back then it was not out of place for men to seek the hands of women they had impregnated solely because the parents of the lady who had been impregnated insisted on it as the only remedy.
And the most genuine expression of love would be the young man visiting the family house of the young woman with his kinsmen to ask for her hand in marriage. Noting that for the grandiosity of these gestures to manifest, it must be accompanied by the willingness of the man to take these actions outside external factors such as the one revealed above.
Interestingly, all of what characterized relationships in those days which is said to epitomize what pleases God is fast becoming an obsolete template. For example, cohabitating before marriage used to be unheard of. Even worse, older men alive today would have sworn there’d have never been a time they’ll witness when younger men would blatantly pop the engagement question prior to meeting a woman’s family.
And then there is a wilder, unforgivable, and unimaginable act of women disrupting the norm and taking charge — asking for a man’s hand in marriage- openly with no male family member or third party mediator. While this is the stuff of legends, society will not have it and is resisting.
Because society is the sole adjudicator for acceptable behaviors and otherwise, it can be difficult to stray from what has been collectively agreed upon to be a norm. Marriage as a concept practiced by society has left no room for exceptions and herein lies the problem.
Remember you as an individual were not consulted to interrogate these beliefs before they are passed as norms. It is only right to reject beliefs that undermine your agency to choose alternative paths to explore life.
So much so that when the question, “an intimate, destination or large wedding?,” none should also be an option.
