Out of decency and civilisation, avoid quarreling in your marriage. This is because doing so promotes infidelity.

The best way to start avoiding it is understanding and appreciating that wherever human beings live together or work or travel together or interact, misunderstandings are bound to occur between them.

You are one such human being and so is your spouse. You must therefore stop seeing it as a strange thing when it happens or for it to happen in your marriage.

It will continue to be there or not to be there depending on how you react or deal with it. The best way to deal with it is to contain your emotion whenever it happens and avoid overreacting or taking drastic steps when you are too annoyed.

As a principle, you must always avoid taking radical steps whenever you are too happy or too annoyed. If you do, you will ever regret it.

A former friend of mine in Nairobi, Kenya, called me in the morning of 1978, telling me how the previous night he had succeeded being accepted by a girl he was craving to marry and had in response and ‘appreciation’ promised giving her the new car he had bought two days ago.

He further told me how he was going with her that morning to the Registrar of Motor Vehicles, then based at Gill House, to transfer the car log book to her names.

The girl was a fresh graduate from Nairobi University, a lawyer by profession. 

The friend further told me how he must honour his promise as a gentleman. He then asked me if I thought he had done the right thing and was not stupid.

I politely told him that it was indeed a premature and unwise thing to do. For how sure was he at that juncture that the girl would marry him to become his wife.

He responded by telling me how he could not guarantee so at that moment but insisted that he did so because of being very happy. The girl got a brand new car from him as simply as that.

Interestingly, she became pregnant by another man, married him and never married my friend.

A worse thing would have happened if his emotionally charged reaction was in response to a disappointment. He would have killed or maimed someone.

We must indeed learn to contain our emotions whenever we are too happy or too angry, to avoid regrets.

Another example is the case of my former neighbour also in Nairobi in 1978. He disappeared from his house for three days, drinking himself silly and the family worried about his safety and whereabouts.

When he returned on the third day, at 3:00 a.m., opened the gate with a spare key and entered, he beat his wife for delaying or failing to open the main door for him to enter the house.

He chased her out of the premises with the two little daughters, to teach them a lesson that he was the owner of the premises supposed to be respected and opened fast anytime he came back.

Since it was still night time and very risky for the mother and the two little daughters to move to anywhere else on foot, they came to my gate requesting to be sheltered for a few hours until daybreak. 

I instructed the security guard to open for them and let them in where they found me outside the main door of our house and let them into the house until daybreak.

I considered the neighbour insane. I did not expect anyone in his right mind to do such a thing to his family during those wee hours of the night. He should not have done so even if it were broad daylight to his dear wife and children whom he had offended by missing incommunicado for three days.

Perhaps he did so out of stupid self aggrandisement. Whatever the reason, he overreacted. He might have also have done so as a way of making up or covering up for his absconding from home.

Whatever the reason, he failed to act properly to contain his emotion.

Whenever there is a misunderstanding or disappointment, decent individuals keep it cool or simply avoid confrontation. Nevertheless some individuals who think avoiding confrontation is running away from the problem, they express their disappointment to the person or persons concerned as a way of finding a solution to the problem and or as a way of preventing the same from happening again. 

The risk of doing this is that quarreling and even fighting may occur in the process or as a result. It all depends on the personality or degree of restraint of the person or persons being disappointed.

It must be noted that whenever there is quarreling or nagging in a marriage, absence of love starts being felt by the offended spouse.

Depending on his/her maturity and moral fabric, the quarreling may lead or force him/her to start looking for a member of the opposite sex to give him/her the love, comfort and sympathy he/she misses. 

In this way, infidelity will start infiltrating the home. As a result, the concerned spouse will start being elusive at home and even not minding what his/her spouse does, thinks or says about him/her.

In case the concerned spouse is a wife, she will start producing children who do not look like any of the spouses in the home and deceptively say that they look like one of the great grandparents from her parents’ lineage.

In case the concerned spouse is a husband, he will start coming home late with the excuse that they are very busy at the workplace.

Sometimes he will be away for a number of days under the guise that he is going on an official trip or in another town attending a seminar or workshop and so forth and so forth.

Whenever he appears, quarreling will intensify to the extent the two starting to sleep in separate rooms. Then separation or divorce to the detriment of the family’s future.

To prevent this, we must avoid quarreling in marriages by containing our emotions.
 
dalemuta@yahoo.co.uk