RELATIONSHIP building takes a lot of factors to set it in motion; sustain the motion and thereafter ensure that the motion never becomes motionless. Everyday, the parties involved must make compromising sacrifices; have mutual respect for each other’s feelings. Ideally, relationships should be for keeps, it should be nurtured. Couples should learn the act of tolerance not endurance; couples should make deliberate efforts to remain friends. In other words, couples should ensure that the laughter, the fun of being in each other’s company must remain evergreen.
Building a relationship can take so much passion, effort, energy, but what happens after you must have done everything written in the books? What happens when the proverbial ‘song’ stops playing? What happens after you have done all in your power to make it work, yet it fails? What if the love and the passion you once felt for the other person suddenly dies? Or what if the other party simply stops loving you and suddenly decides to move on in life without you? Should you continue flogging the proverbial ‘dead horse’?
Are there nice ways to end it all? Do you simply tell the other party, it’s over or apply a more severe approach? A very close friend of mine, Yinka recently told me a story that simply put broke my heart. As I quietly drove home; after paying him a visit over the weekend; I simply could not bring myself to even begin to understand why some people would take the love of a spouse for granted. I could not understand why a spouse would talk a love so dear, so rare and throw it right in the other partner’s face and still live with themselves. It is unfortunate. This could cost the couple a lot and God forbid; it could end a relationship or worse still, a marriage. The reason why my dear heart is bleeding over this issue, is because it take a lot for a man to call up a female friend and simply open up his heart. Men seldom discuss their emotions but then they do; I listen, I listen because it takes a lot of courage on their part to get in touch with their feminine side and open up. So many women are guilty of breakups in relationships. I have not said that men are completely blameless in that regard, I am just saying that a lot depends on women to make it work. That a man is crazily or madly in love with us does not make him a fool, neither should he or his feelings be taken for granted. If you have opted from your adult mind to marry or date a guy, please make efforts to make it work. No matter the number of times you hit the sack ensure that it does not in anyway stop you from having a mutual respect for each other.
Back to Yinka’s story. He told me how he got involved with a lady I will call Miss X. The feelings they had for each other was very passionate. They found love and they mutually chose to nurture it. Things were wonderful between them until Yinka’s mother had a little accommodation problem and had to temporarily move into her son’s apartment. Miss X became uncomfortable with this arrangement and would not have it. For her, their home was made for herself, her man, her own relations. To her, Yinka’s mum was an unwelcome guest. Contrary to the animosity she felt towards her mother in-law; Yinka’s mum on her part did everything womanly, no, humanly possible to make her daughter in-law happy. She cooked, cleaned, shopped, in a nutshell; she ensured she did virtually all the house chores before Miss X would get home from work. Just to ease the pressure for Miss X when she got home.
But, according to Yinka, every hand of friendship his mum extended to Miss X was either misunderstood or simply thrown back to her face. In order for peace to reign, Yinka took it all; he tolerated it all; he even endured it all; even though the longer he stayed in the relationship, the more hostility his woman continued to throw in his mother’s direction. His mother was treated like a maid or even worse than a maid, yet Yinka stayed committed to the relationship.
The ‘scale’ began to gradually fall off his eyes according to him, when suddenly Miss X as if feeling her hostility towards her mother in-law was not severe enough came up with sudden dos and don’ts. Yinka watched the girl he once loved and cherished turn from an angel to a monster. First she stopped her mother in-law from ever entering the kitchen and then she began to starve her. She would give her man food at 10 p.m. (that is when she gets back from work) and then pretend to forget to serve his mother. She made his five-year-old daughter from his first marriage wash her clothes and bed sheets if she wet the bed. The list of her atrocities was endless. Initially her man was not initially aware of this new development. But the day he got to know was the day he told himself some bitter home-truth. He knew this union was definitely over. How to end it thereafter became the issue. To cut a very long story short, he waited one fateful morning for her to leave for work; he called up a few friends, hired a truck and then moved his belongings and of course his mother’s out of the apartment. It has been three years and he has not looked back. He also got his mother a separate and more comfortable apartment with two maids to a match. He said to me that Miss X till now has since sought and is still seeking a reconciliation, but Vera, ‘over my dead body will I go back to that monster that calls herself a woman’
A top female pastor I admire so much, based in the United States of America, was suddenly called up on the phone by her husband’s lawyers, suing her for a divorce. It was devastating for her.
She was devastated because the one that cheated all through their married life even though they were both pastors was her husband. According to her, he had virtually slept with all the female members of the church and yet she continued to overlook and tolerate just to ensure that the marriage did not hit the rocks. That the marriage was ending was not what grieved her, it was the selfless efforts she had put in just to make it work that shattered her. She felt used and dumped.
She has been trying to find her feet since he left her and the kids, but I am happy to say that she is back to the big screen, looking better than have ever. I am sure she has simply decided to move on.
Relationships are meant to last for ever. But this is life. Things happen. People change. I am sure you can tell that I am incurably romantic and I love happy endings. But I am no fool. I know that relationships differ from person to person. I am fully aware that some unions are meant to last forever. In fact, I advocate that people must make their relationships work at all cost
To the two categories of people, I wish you well in whatever position you find yourself today, whether you were dumped or you dumped someone. My worry is not whether you end it or when you end it or if you should even end it in the first place. My worry is how you end it. Are you civil with the way you end it? Like Jerry Springer would say: ‘Take care of yourselves and each other’.