Good husbands are team players, not providers in a home

 

Apparently, Kampala is a lot lighter and fresher these days and if you have been wondering why, wonder no more. It is because most National Resistance Movement honourables are in Kyankwanzi being told how to warn enemies before destroying them.

 

Of course, we expect them to learn more valuable life lessons, which they will forget as soon as they arrive here to resume their squabbles over who signed the recall petition and who did not. 

 

That gave me an idea. Why don’t I take you to my own Kyankwanzi for a few million seconds of love dress–up? It seems such a good idea. All you need to do is imagine yourselves in army green–no, for love, we shall use army red - overall uniforms in Kyankwanzi Patriotic School, receiving an opening visionary address on how we need to return sanity to love relationships. 

 

Marriage, for example, needs to be a haven of happiness and hiding from the stress of Office of the Prime Minister corruption. But it is instead a stress itself to many people including those who are richer, more educated, empowered and sort of know what killed Nebanda.

 

We have the highest ever love counsellors and pastors per capita, but we still do not know how to create harmony in marriages. Instead, we love to blame each other, call each other fearful names, resort to unfaithfulness and that way, divorce rates are spreading faster from their haven in developed countries to Africa, Uganda and sadly, gathering signatures in Rubindi, my home area. That is why I will not allow it. Over my dead body.

 

After years of patiently counselling couples, studying relationships and participating in one, I have come to a conclusion that marriages are stressed because we are putting old wine in new skins. We just got too busy with the 21st century corruption to notice that the dating context has changed.

 

Previously, our caveman ancestor and grandfather of recent times succeeded by just being the provider. He brought home meat, food, cabinet positions, money and also threats and occasionally, teargas.

 

That is how he managed to keep the Zaris of today tamed with all sorts of Lamborghinis and they lived happily ever after. Of course, it bred and fed corruption into a chubby citizen of Uganda, but we will still blame someone else for the corruption.

 

Today, things have changed and many of us are refusing to notice and continuing to try hard to be the providing man of the 20th century. But that is old wine.

 

Today’s female emancipation has made wives realise that the male definition of happiness is not fitting their preference exactly. Many wives, whose husbands are a full definition of a provider, remain unhappy if their own potential and ambitions are stifled. Somehow, they all want a say, a hand and a leg in the marital business and social affairs that affect them. In other words, wives seem to be fed up of male dictatorship transferred from dad to husband. 

 

They want partnerships. Just as in business, marriage is supposed to be a merger, an alliance, a partnership where two entities become one for a purpose. An effective partnership is where the two unite to accomplish a mutually beneficial goal.

 

The partnership must be voluntary, based on trust and for mutual benefit. Partners must also have equal access to and openly share information and knowledge.

 

They must perceive themselves as equally valuable, albeit in different ways. Every partner must have something of value to bring to the partnership and that something must be essential to the rewards of the partnership.  

 

Today’s most successful husband, therefore, is not one who provides, but the one who knows how to manage partnerships.

 

Wives now know that fulfilment is not in the material things a husband brings home (and brags about you being nothing without him), but about having an appreciated role to play in the home, being consulted as an equal partner, being allowed to tap her potential, reach out for her dream, ambition and harvesting shared value from the marriage.

 

In short, we should not only start trying to be good managers of partnerships, but also train our children to appreciate that marriage brings together two persons with the express intention of benefitting from it.

 

Next time, my Kyankwanzi lesson will be about the skills of managing marriage partnerships. That way, I can become very popular with your wives who will in turn force you to read and change into new wine for their new skins.