6 Questions I Stopped Asking After My Marriage Ended

It probably goes without saying that after my marriage ended, my views evolved or completely changed on a lot of things.  On last week’s episode of the I Am African Podcast, I asked my guest, Ruth Marimo, how anyone could cope with not being included or invited after they make a drastic change in their lives. She told me that while one will lose some loved ones, that one will also gain new, relevant people. She proceeded to ask me if I had met more divorced people or people with marital issues since I announced my divorce and how my marriage ended.

Yes, I have! They gravitate towards me. It’s almost as if there’s a magnet on me and a stamp on my forehead saying, “I’m divorced, too. I’m here to listen, if you need to talk.”  And for the record, I do not mind this at all. I whole-heartedly believe that sometimes – if not all the time, God gives us a mountain to show others that it can be moved.

So, anyway, the other day, I was talking to someone who is going through divorce, and we we were talking about things we just did not know before marriage, things that love blinded us from seeing and inexperience shielded us from knowing. Here’s the thing: you just cannot know what you’ll get from marriage because what you see isn’t always what you get, and it’s not necessarily because your spouse lied about themselves but because they, too, are growing and learning and evolving, and sometimes, the new version of them does not sit with your current version of you.

Before I got married, I thought I had it all figured out (isn’t that always the case?). I wondered things about marriage, and in my cute little head, I thought I’d never, ever, ever have to face these problems — because you know, I was different, and I picked right.

But now, having had the marriage, the seperation, and ultimately, the peace-restoring divorce, there are many questions I no longer ponder about marriage and married people.

6 Questions I No Longer Ask About Marriage  Since My Marriage Ended

1.  How do couples go from loving each other to not being able to stand each other? Apparently, it happens. I should know.  I will not speak for anyone else, but for me, the emotion I was feeling was not hate. I did not go from loving my husband to now hating my husband. In fact, I probably still loved him – maybe. But the love was in spite of everything else. I was not in love, but there was love or something like it. However, it was also the kind of love that needed to be administered from afar. I could not look at him the same way because I could not unknow the things that I knew about him.    

2.  Why would money cause problems in a marriage? This one is still a funny one to me. Before marriage, there were two things I was wrong about concerning money. First, I thought that a couple would only have financial problems if one person was really not sharing what they had, and since I was (still am) a firm believer that if one partner wins, the other wins, too, I thought that once we share with each other, there would be no problems. Secondly, I thought that when money was spent excessively within a marriage, it was because the woman, perhaps, liked buying clothes and shoes and home goods more than she liked saving. Was I wrong! 

First of all, I found out that sharing my money with my husband meant nothing if he was just going to squander it. I also found out that being the supportive, dutiful, generous wife was apparently not something that all husbands deserved. While I toiled and saved and even paid off his personal debts, there was no appreciation given to me AND the more I paid off, the more debt he incurred, so I became resentful, and I stopped declaring how much I really had. Had we stayed married, I would have become one of those Nigerian wives you hear about, the ones who secretly build a mansion that their husbands never know of. I would have been her, and I would have been proud.

Secondly, I found out that men, too, could be the ones spending excessively on clothes and shoes and needless purchases when important bills – you know, like rent – were still outstanding.

3.  What kind of marital problem can love not fix? Love is a beautiful thing, walahi. There are not many things that trump loving someone and being loved back by that person. BUT as I learned, sometimes, that isn’t enough. Love is like the roof of a house. It crowns everything else. If you build a house with the best materials in the best neighborhood and paint it with the nicest color, it won’t matter when the rain comes and everything pours into the house. For me, as a wife, being loved by someone I could not trust to lead me or protect me was like a beautiful house without a roof. I was soaking wet, y’ll! My furniture was destroyed, there was mold in the house, and the dog floated away.

4.  Why should class/background matter in a marriage/relationship?  It shouldn’t. But it does. It is beyond how much a person has right now or how much their parents had when they were children. In fact, it isn’t about that at all. It’s about how a person grew up, whom a person was raised by, how the person sees life (God, money, relationships, etc). It’s about the quality of people the person had and has now in their lives. It’s about the trauma(s) the person had (we all have trauma, by the way, as I recently learned from Ruth Marimo on episode 18 of the I Am African podcast)

5.  If you change your mind about loving someone, then did you even ever love them before? The answer is yes.  Again, I will not speak for everyone, but I can be radically honest with you about my love: I don’t know how to love a romantic partner unconditionally. To say that I love my partner unconditionally would mean that no matter what he does to me, I will keep loving him. If that is true for you, then good for you. But it isn’t true for me. I do not know how to – and I choose not to – love someone who does not love me back. Love is a verb. Loving me means that you act like you love me by not doing things that you know will break me. Anything contrary to this means you do not love me, and I have to make the painful decision of choosing not to love you anymore. It may take some time, but I will get there eventually.

6.  Why would anyone go into a romantic relationship without marriage as the end goal? This was me before. As far as I was concerned, marriage was the ultimate goal of a romantic relationship. Otherwise, why waste your time? What are you doing it for?  But I’m starting to see things differently. Maybe I want love and affection and companionship without the marrital strings.

I mentioned in a previous post that I may never get married again, remember? I can’t say that I will never get married again, but now that I have been married and I have seen who and what makes a terrible husband, I’m working overtime to not get another one of those. And I’m also consciously working on myself to make me the best version of myself in all the roles I have been blessed to be in (daughter, mom, niece, friend, cousin, neighbor, coworker, enemy sef, and maybe a wife). 

If tomorrow I anounce that I’m getting married, know that God showed up and showed out. Considering my history with Him, it won’t be unusual, honestly. But this man might have to come with wings attached to his back to prove that he’s an angel-ish, and he should at least have a notarized letter from God saying that he was indeed sent by God. And equally as important is the million-dollar question: will this man have twins in his genes to give me the covetted confusingly-identical twin boys? 

*Insert mischievous chuckle here*