Solid marriages are a basis for a stable society

Apr 19, 2011

EVERY week, young and old couples head to various worship centres to get married. At the church ceremonies, couples declare commitment for each other until death do them part.

Felix Kulayigye

EVERY week, young and old couples head to various worship centres to get married. At the church ceremonies, couples declare commitment for each other until death do them part.

During sermons, religious leaders, preach love and fidelity and invite God to help the couples live a life of bliss.

You might be wondering what a combatant is doing writing about marriage and family matters. It is because we need to concern ourselves with the speed at which matters of passion are becoming sources of national instability and social disorder.

The military has protected the country from external aggression, guarded the Constitution, yet, murders are committed daily against those that are dear to us. Why?

In March we celebrated another International Women’s Day, but despite this the media has continued to be awash with cases of murder, suicide, acid attacks, public fights and yet many more go unreported because lovers do not want to throw their private lives into the public domain.

Unfortunately, many couples are simply cohabiting and yet cohabitation is not a legally recognised marriage. Therefore, when it comes to times of disagreement and separation property cannot be properly shared out and people end up fighting and at times killing each other.

The Bible has several teachings about marriage and one such teaching is in Proverbs 21 verse 9 and says: “Better to live on the roof than share the house with a nagging wife.”

Whereas this is a Bible teaching, it is testimony that writers of the Bible were gender biased, because it does not give a wife options out of an abusive relationship.

Nonetheless, the Bible cautions men in I Corinthians 7 verse 3, saying: “A man should fulfill his duty as a husband, and a woman should fulfill her duty as a wife, and each should satisfy the other’s needs.”

In this teaching, equality is advocated and it should be the guide to social harmony. Evidently fights between spouses have never solved domestic disagreements, but rather render homes constant battle grounds that do not only undermine national stability, but destroy the future of society. Children in violent relationships grow up traumatised, socially imbalanced and would most likely turn violent in future. Thus the vicious cycle of violence continues.

That is why it should be the concern of everybody that people who loved each other so much can turn on each other and sometimes kill each other. We have lost many valuable Ugandans to domestic fights (doctors, engineers, teachers and even reverends) dies at the hands of their loved ones.
We need to manage our homes and work places well to ensure sustainable peace and harmony in our country because stability in homes will aggregate into a stable country.
Stable homes groom socially stable children that grow into useful and productive citizens. It is imperative to examine whether the advice being given is still relevant to marriages today, or probably the emphasis or priorities of the people have shifted from mutual support to dependency and exploitation.

These days some people want to get married so that their spouses can finance them. In some homes a wife will lend her husband money to pay fees or medical bills for their children and yet the wife will demand equal say on the property in the home. To the women folk out there, such kind of behaviour is a recipe for death and destruction.

The notion of marrying for wealth, therefore, should be stopped. Wealth can be acquired together through hard work.
It is also true that many husbands only make their women pregnant and leave mothers to sweat with the upbringing of their children. In addition, some fathers who pretend to care about their children simply pay school fees, to schools whose locality they even do not know.

When such children want time to play with their fathers, the fathers simply say to them, I do not have time, unbelievable! It is such children that grow up with hatred for fathers and lack of respect for marriage. This partly explains why some relationship do not last.

There is a common belief that women prefer men who are wealthy and as such men get lost in the search for wealth at the expense of their conjugal obligations.

Failure in the bedroom always costs family harmony, and eventually partners are forced to look outside the marriage for love.

Bedroom matters can be improved through communication with each other, rather than self-imposed exile in our homes.

Let us build bridges rather than walls in our homes, otherwise, the continued undeclared wars tear homes apart. It is the obligation of every man to respect and protect his wife. It is high time we deal with the crucial issue of maintaining happy marriages as a way of stabilising our communities.

The author is UPDF spokesman

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