Keys To Happy Marriage

Posts Tagged ‘Divorce’

FAILED MARRIAGES: ONE DIVORCE, TOO MANY. BY CHRIS OKAFOR

Marriage is an act of joining a man and a woman together in a holy matrimony as husband and a wife. It often calls for fun fares, weddings, celebrations and conviviality.

People spend a lot of money in planning for these big occasions and sometimes end it up cruising around the world on honeymoon. The couples had, without doubt, in church and in present of a Reverend Father, vowed to be faithful and to love one another until death do them apart. To most people who had partaken in this vow, it must be upheld with respect and dignity at all times. They sees marriage as a sacrament while to many, there is absolutely nothing wrong with saying “I do” today and within the next 4 months, it is all over.

This school of thoughts viewed the entire institution of marriage as “free-entry-free exit” kind of a contact. It doesn’t matter if their well publicised and celebrated marriage would come to a halt within months of its inception.

On the other hand, divorce or dissolution of marriage is the ending of marriage or marital vow before the death of either spouse. It can be contrasted with annulment, which is a declaration that marriage is void, though the effect maybe recognised in such unions such as spousal supports, child custody and distribution of property.

The problem of failed marriages and divorce around the world particularly Europe and America is so enormous and inexplicable especially when there is no basis to determine necessary or sufficient causation. It is, indeed, a social problem with a hereditary attachment of which many are completely ignorant of and never believe in existence of the following concept which I am going to outline here. When one decides to put an end to his/her marriage on a mere provocation and on issues that ought to be resolved amicably, you have no moral justification to tell your children in future that there is anything wrong with divorce or having children with different parents.In Nigeria, for instance, there are some ethnic groups that advise their male children never to marry from a single parent or a broken home. The ironic reasons are palpable. They believed that marriage is all about tolerance and the woman being submissive to their chosen husband at all time and therefore no amount of disagreement between couples that would warrant a woman to abscond from home. In most cases, men reserve the exclusive right to send their wives out of their matrimonial home on the ground of infidelity and promiscuity.

Women are normally the victim and in contrast, because of male dominance, cultural and religious affiliations, it is customary for people in most African countries to come back home from their respective daily activities and announce to their wives that they are marrying the second or the third wife as the case may be without questioning. They have the sole right as well to have as many girlfriend(s) as it pleases them or go out and come back at will.In fact, it is not only a taboo but it is also an abomination for average African woman to go out like their European or American counterparts, get drunk and have a one night stand that often lead to pregnancies. Such women would possibly be disgraced before their children and sent packing from home without compassion of any kind.

This is liken to ” if you cannot stand the heat get out of the kitchen” kind of marriage which have been viewed in some quarters as some kind of slavery. The truth of the matter is that some of these women knew what it meant to them for their children to be jointly raised and as such, they choose to stand the heat rather than getting out of the kitchen. The respect to their chosen husbands, no matter what he does or did is total and it is fundamentally important that they do not bring shame to their respective family no matter how wretched, poor or rich that family may be.

Recent research has shown that the evolution of marriage has taken place despite an increased life expectancy that has theoretically made a longer and healthier life together as a couple possible. Although in the past, the death of one of the two spouses was the typical end of marriage, divorce is now the most frequently observed cause.In Switzerland, for example, the number of newly divorced residents actually exceeded the number of newly widowed residents in 1988 (OFS, 1990).

This is a relatively recent phenomenon, having existing for less than half a century and even less in some countries where it was forbidden or severely restricted until very recently (The mid 1970s in Portugal and Italy, 1981 in Spain, and not until 1997 in Ireland). Divorce is not only a legal instrument freeing a couple from wedlock, but an act that is at the heart of familial and social processes.To understand the rise in the number of divorces in various countries, one must first understand the reasons causing couples to marry. France, Italy, Sweden, and Switzerland are representative of the diversity of marital and familial situations existing in Europe.What we see sometimes in American reality television is an eye saw. An unacceptable situation where one is married and within 3 months, the man is sleeping with his wife mother. There is no basis of comparison between African marriages and other people around the world because what they see as a way of life is completely forbidden in Africa. Again, most people see this as being totally primitive.

It is difficult for average women in Europe generally to stick to their marriage when they eventually realized that their husbands are cheating on them. That would invariably be the last straw and would be used as an affront to divorce in which they would be beneficiary to their husband’s stupendous wealth and without recourse to how such separation would affect their children.The ratio is 1 out of every hundred and we have seen this ratio at work sometime ago when a footballer wife defiantly resisted their former assistant shameless confession in order to thwart her marriage. She chooses to stand firmly by her husband throughout the trying period. In United States, during Bill Clinton era, a similar newspaper unconfirmed report between Bill and a Monica Lewinski almost ruin the marriage between the then president and his wife. Again, the latter choose to remain with the husband rather than divorce.

This is just one in a million and like a reoccurring decimal, one hardly turns the pages of newspapers these days without reading about ones divorce or the other. There are countless number of lawyers placing adverts on newspapers and magazines for cheap divorce rates.Today, one of the primary reasons why most celebrities cannot marry is that they are not ready to let what they have laboured all their entire life to be given to a nitwit in the name of divorce settlement .It is quite obvious that people go into marriage for number of reasons while some people, most especially women, go into marriage for the financial gains not really because they needed a family.

According to Jenny Burley and Francis Regan, the Irish story of family law reform in the post-second world war era is quite different from the experience of other countries. One of the main reasons why the story is different is that from 1937 divorce was banned under the Irish constitution. Divorce law reform therefore required a referendum to change the constitution. Even though there were thousand of separated people in Ireland in early 1980s, the proposal to introduce divorce was vociferously opposed in referenda in 1986 and 1995.

The opposition to constitutional change was fuelled by anti-divorce campaigns which used fear tactics, related to money, children, property and inheritance to argue that divorce would tear apart the very fabric of Irish society. The campaign also claimed that divorce would open floodgates to marriage breakdown. The availability of this divorce in Ireland since 1997 has not, however, borne out of dire predictions of the anti-divorce campaigners.Successful and failed marriages have its origin and background from family circles and some people has argued that it would take a divine intervention for the products of broken homes to triumph where their parents have failed. This is simple. Children learn a great deal from the good and the bad we do at home.

What are responsible for most ignominious exit in most marriages particularly from most women are sheer greed, drink and drugs, insatiable lust and lack of tolerance, which unavoidably, is contributing immensely to the drastic decadence in family and societal values.The devastating effects of divorce on children and families are enormous. Research made by Dr.Todd.E Linaman on families noted the following:Future effects of divorce• Children deal with the effects of divorce not only as children, but into adulthood. The effects of divorce will impact the next generation of children as well. • The child’s suffering from the effects of divorce does not reach its peak at the time of the divorce and then level off. Rather, the emotional effects of divorce can be played and replayed throughout a child’s life. Academic effects of divorce• Children from divorced families drop out of school at twice the rate of children from intact families, and they have lower rates of graduation from high school and college. • Children from divorced homes performed more poorly in reading, spelling, and math and repeated a grade more frequently than did children not facing the effects of divorce. Social effects of divorce• Children of divorced parents are significantly more likely to become delinquent by age 15, regardless of when the divorce took place, than are children not dealing with the effects of divorce. • The single best predictor of teen suicide is parental divorce and living in a single-parent household. • Comparing all family structures, drug use in children is lowest among children not facing the effects of divorce. Emotional effects of divorce• Divorce has been found to be associated with a higher incidence of depression; withdrawal from friends and family; aggressive, impulsive, or hyperactive behavior; and either withdrawing from participation in the classroom or becoming disruptive. • Adult children of divorced parents experience mental health problems significantly more often than do the adult children who didn’t witness the effects of divorce as children. Relational effects of divorce• After divorce, children tend to become more emotionally distant from both parents. • As adults, children of divorced parents are half as likely to be close to their parents as are children not dealing with the effects of divorce. • In their own marriages, children of divorced parents are more likely to be unhappy, to escalate conflicts, and to reduce communication with their spouses. • Some studies concerning the probability of divorce for children of divorced parents have found the risk to be more than twice the risk for children who haven’t personally experienced the effects of divorce.This is just one of the numerous factors affecting divorce on families and the list is endless. One thing about people that I have met in my life is that they do not realize the impact of the mistake they must have made in terms of making a decision that would ultimately shape their life until such mistake begin to hit them. It is, however important amidst these factors that we should think very carefully before considering divorce.Chris OkaforGalway Ireland: chrisokafor@myself.com

Marriage is the most important act in the life of the majority of men and women. When it is a good marriage, it brings men and women to the fullness of the life God intended for them.
The difference is this: in the first case, the existence of any contract is denied; in the second case, the existence of a contract is admitted, and the contract is made, even though at the very moment of making the contract one has every intention of violating it.
Is it only a pleasant companionship which may not survive the trials and tribulations of family life? No one can hope to realize the full fruits of a good marriage without first understanding what marriage is.
Many erroneous notions regarding marriage are still being circulated these days, particularly in reference to its permanence and its obligations. The reason for these errors is the failure to recognize the sacredness of marriage. Marriage is not, as some seem to think, a legalizing of sexual relationships between a man and a woman. It is, instead, a relationship established by God Himself primarily for the generation and education of children. The very name “Matrimony” signifies this: it comes from two Latin words. matris munus. meaning “the office of motherhood” or “the duty of the mother,” which duty is the generation and education of new life.
What Is Marriage?
Marriage is an institution as old as the human race itself. It started in the Garden of Eden with our first parents. God blessed Adam and Eve: “Increase and multiply and fill the earth” (Gen. 1:28); and God’s fundamental laws with regard to marriage are well expressed by Adam: “Wherefore, a man shall leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they shall be two in one flesh” (Gen. 2:24).
Thus, marriage can be defined as a lifelong union between a man and a woman who are lawfully capable of giving irrevocably to each other the right to acts necessary for the generation and education of children, mutually obliging themselves to a common way of life in order to work out their eternal salvation. Among the baptized, every true marriage is, in itself and by itself, a sacrament instituted by Christ to produce grace.
The most essential factor in marriage, of course, is the contract. A contract is an agreement between two parties, each assenting to give something to the other or to do something for the other for a definite length of time. There cannot be a contract without the free consent of both parties.
There are six obstacles to consent.
1. Lack of the use of reason, infants, the seriously mentally ill, the intoxicated, the drugged, the hypnotized cannot give true consent.
2. Defective knowledge. In order to give consent, the person must
know the essentials – that marriage is a permanent union of a man and a woman for the purpose of procreating children. He must know that this requires bodily cooperation of husband and wife. After puberty, it is presumed that the person knows these basic facts. It is not necessary that he know all the biological mechanisms involved in the sex act, conception, pregnancy, and birth.
3. Mistaken identity. If you “marry” one person but thought that
you were marrying another (his twin, for example) there is no true consent.
4. Pretense. People who say “I will” while acting out a marriage on the stage or in a movie are, of course, not married. There is no intention of getting married and, hence, no true consent.
But if a person is a bride or groom in a real wedding ceremony, his external consent by saying “I will” is taken as evidence of true internal consent. He would have great difficulty trying to prove later that he said “I will” but did not really mean it.
5. Force or fear. Canon Law is specific on this matter, saying that “invalid is a marriage entered into through force or grave fear unjustly inspired from without, such that in order to escape from it, a party is compelled to choose marriage. No other fear, even if it furnish the cause for the contract, entails the nullity of marriage” (Canon 1087).
If you are forced into a marriage by a force that cannot be resisted, you have not given true consent. There is no marriage in such a case.
What about fear? Notice the conditions. It must be grave or serious fear. It must come from without, that is, from some other person. It must be unjust. Finally, it must be fear of such a nature that the only way to escape it is to marry. If fear fulfills all these conditions, it results in forced consent and there is no marriage.
6. Intention contrary to the essence of marriage. If one or both parties would deny that marriage really is a contract binding on both parties, or that marriage gives the right to sexual intercourse, the marriage would be invalid, because denial would indicate a failure to understand what marriage really is. You certainly are not making a contract when you do not believe there is a contract.
And you are not making a contract involving sexual intercourse as one of the things promised if you do not believe that sexual intercourse is one of the things promised. But, as we have defined, marriage is a contract involving promise of sexual intercourse.
However, if one or both have the intention of not having children, or of refusing sexual intercourse,. or of not fulfilling other duties, the marriage is valid. It is considered that they freely accept and consent to the married state but are not willing to fulfill its duties.
When it fails, it leaves behind a trail of faded hopes and dreams and broken lives. For those who are planning marriage, therefore, it is vitally important that they know what marriage really is. Certainly no one can find the secret of successful marriage without first having a clear understanding of what marriage is.
Is it merely a civil contract, entered into by a man and woman mainly for companionship and social and material security? Is it the result of a purely physical attraction, thoughtlessly embarked upon in the full bloom of youthful ardor?

“To the unmarried and to the widows I say that it is well for them to remain single as I do.”?
(1 Corinthians 7:8)
The immortal words of St. Paul, who quite possibly had experienced the pain of separation and divorce first hand prior to penning these words, and who certainly dealt with relationship breakdowns in every church he pastored.
I seem to be at that stage of life now where all my friends are getting divorced. I’ve long passed that stage where all my friends are having their 21st’s. And I’ve passed the stage where they are all getting married, and even the one where my friends are all having children. Now I’m up to the ‘all my friends are getting divorced’ stage. I suppose the only one left after this is the ‘all my friends are dying’ stage. Not much to look forward to really.
Of course in terms of divorce I led the way. I managed to stuff up my marriage long before almost any of my peers. It’s nothing to be proud of, but at least it means that no one needs fear that I’m going to judge them. Who me? I don’t think so.
The disturbing thing for me at the moment is that it seems to be all the couples that I’ve most looked up to as couples that are now falling apart as couples!
When it come to some of the couples I know – such as where the guy deliberately gets the girl pregnant because he figures that having a child will give him the motivation to give up is heroin habit – I sort of expect those marriages to last only a couple of years at best. And yet it’s not those couples that are falling apart. It’s the marriages made up of men I admire for their integrity and courage, who are married to women who are loyal, nurturing and understanding. And most of these people are good, solid, church-going Christian folk. It’s not supposed to happen this way!
I was talking to a girl recently whose relationship had only just broken up after some 20 years of marriage. She was not a part of the church and said that she’d never be. For her the final proof of the non-existence of God was the way in which men and women had evolved with an in-built incompatibility. Her analysis was simple but profound. Men have evolved as creatures that need only to eat and mate. Women have evolved as creatures that need to nurture and nestle. Hence, not surprisingly, we find that men can’t handle monogamy and that women can’t live without it. Marriages are thus biologically doomed to failure from the outset, and the statistics on modern marriages would seem to bear her out. How could a loving God have created men and women in such a way that they were genetically geared towards their mutual destruction?
It’s a good question. Every male knows that his biological drives are not geared towards monogamy ? not lifelong monogamy at any rate. Conversely, it is unrealistic to expect women to settle for anything less than monogamy in today’s society. Does this mean that God is cruel, or is there something in the whole marriage concept that we’ve missed?
I wonder if at the heart of the problem is the assumption that we all make? That marriage is supposed to make us happy. Indeed, I suspect that most of us believe that the institution of marriage was brought into being for the very purpose of making us happy.
Weren’t we all brought up to believe that love and marriage go together like horse and carriage, and that the phrase ‘they got married’ should generally be followed by the accompanying phrase ‘and they lived happily ever after’? Perhaps that’s the problem. Perhaps we need to look beyond musicals and fairy tales to find a basis for our adult relationships.
I don’t think any of us seriously imagines that our institution of marriage came about because some individual had a ‘bright idea’ one day about how he could make everybody happy. Marriage is a social institution, and social institutions are developed because they serve a social purpose, not because they bring personal fulfillment to certain individuals within the community. Whether or not you believe God created marriage makes no difference. If He did, God did it for the sake of the community as a whole and not for the sake satisfying every individual’s social, emotional and sexual needs.
It makes sense when you think about it. What is the purpose of marriage? To create a stronger society. Strong marriages create strong families who build a stronger community. Marriages contribute stability. They contribute structure. And most importantly, marriages contribute children.
Read through your Old Testament and you’ll get the feel for what marriage is all about. Marriage is all-important because without marriages there are no children and without children there is no army. This is why baby boys are more valued than are baby girls. This is why gays get such a hard time. This is why childlessness is such a curse, and why polygamy is a far better alternative than singleness. It’s not because the individuals involved prefer it that way. Marriages are there for the sake of the community first and foremost. If an individual finds satisfaction in his or her marriage, then that’s a bonus.
So how come every time someone says ‘I’m not happy in my marriage’ we treat it as if something is horribly wrong? If someone expresses dissatisfaction with other social institutions, such as the government or the taxation system.. we don’t normally get too worked up. Maybe it should be the other way round? Maybe when we hear someone speak of their joy in marriage we should react as if they were speaking of their love of Queen and country.. giving them a sort of quizzical smile that expresses admiration without empathy.
I suppose the truth is somewhere between these extremes. Nobody would deny that the institution of marriage can be of some assistance in helping us to satisfy our individual social, emotional, and sexual needs. The truth is though that no marriage is ever going to satisfy all of those needs and desires. We human beings just weren’t created to have all our needs for companionship, security and intimacy met by one other solitary individual. We need a community.
This brings us to the positive side of the marriage-community equation. Marriages exist for the sake of the community as a whole. That’s the bad news if you thought that your marriage existed for the sake of your individual happiness. On the other hand though, the community exists to meet those needs we all have as individuals. That’s the good news.
Our individual needs for companionship, security and intimacy can be met. They just can’t be met by one solitary person. We have to learn to draw upon the group for our sustenance, and find support and affection from a variety of people within the community. I think that’s a large part of what church is supposed to be about.
So where does this leave us? Is there any hope for the modern marriage? Not so long as people look to marriage as a means to making all their dreams come true. Not so long as individual men and women look to their partners to satisfy all of their social, emotional and sexual needs. Not so long as we demand that our marriages make us happy.
Yet what would happen if we all began to approach marriage in an entirely different way. What if we began to look at our marriages as being the most significant contribution we could make to the broader community?
What if we saw the importance of our roles as parents in terms of the great good that could be achieved in the community if we bring up our children to be strong and capable? What if we stopped assessing our partners and our children in terms of the amount of satisfaction they bring us, and were able to see those relationships as being our gifts to humanity? Perhaps then we’d find ourselves saying things like ‘well, I don’t get on brilliantly with my wife, but I think we’ve managed to achieve some fine things together and that the world is a better place for our union, and perhaps that’s more important than my individual happiness’.
OK. That’s a long way from where we’re currently at in this society, but I have a feeling that it would be a better place to be.

TO BE OR KNOT TO BE REGISTERED

Marriage is no longer a divine union that requires celestial blessings included in the various religious rituals associated with it. It has got far reaching legal consequences too. It is for this legal reason that we have to consider this law. Moreover, the growing number of divorce cases, cases regarding custody of children and maintenance, polygamy, and dowry deaths reveal that marriage is no longer considered as a divine union by the society. Hence let us not be under the illusion that this law would violate the sacredness of marriage rites.

IS THIS A NEW LAW?

As it is, any Indian citizen who opts to marry under the Special Marriage Act of 1954 automatically has the marriage registered by the marriage officers who has been specially appointed for the purpose.

The Indian Christian Marriages Act of 1872 also demands for compulsory registration of marriages. Accordingly entries are made in the marriage register of the church, soon after the ceremony along with the signatures of the bride, bridegroom, the officiating priest and witnesses. The Registration of marriages is mandatory under the Parsi Marriage and Divorce Act of 1936. Marriage being a civil contract for the Muslims, the qazi records the terms of the marriage in a nikahnama and hands it over to the married couple. It is only under the Hindu Personal Law that it is not compulsory to register the marriage.

IMPLEMENTATION OF THE LAW

Certain State governments have out of the their concern to stop the crimes committed against women and children made the registration of marriage compulsory. They believed that giving legal status to wedlock would strengthen the institution of marriage. Thus we had,

PROBLEMS DUE TO NON-IMPLEMENTATION OF LAW:

The non-registration of marriage under Hindu Marriage Act has given rise to two major problems.

The Hindu Marriage Act on bigamy has got many loopholes. The Section 494 of the Indian Penal Code also has some faults while dealing with the offence of remarriage of husband or wife when the either of them is alive. So far these laws required that certain ceremonies have to be performed for a marriage to be valid. These ceremonies could be done according to the caste and religion of the bride and the bridegroom. Unless these ceremonies are performed the marriage is considered to be invalid. This holds good for bigamous marriage too. Women are the primary victims of bigamous relationships and they are the most affected ones because of the non-registration of marriage. They find it difficult to get property or maintenance in case of dispute, as they are not able to produce any proof for the validity of their marriage. There are umpteen cases where the wives have lost their case because of their inability to prove their first or second marriage of their husbands.

The second major problem caused by the non-registration of marriage is the problem of Child marriage, which is indeed a serious national problem. It is estimated that almost half of all marriages that is conducted in India involves under-aged girls. The Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929 has prescribed 18 years as the minimum age for girls and 21 years for boys for getting married. This law is applicable all over India except the State of Jammu and Kashmir. The serious nature of the problem is evident, as states such as Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Orissa, Haryana, Chattisgarh, Bihar, Jharkhand, and Madhya Pradesh where child marriages are rampant haven’t opted…http://www.sitagita.com/view.asp?id=9688