Avoid living with other relatives in you marriage

Besides your own immediate family of husband, wife and children, avoid bringing other relatives to stay with you in your marriage home. Those often brought include lonely and sickly old parents, lonely widowed mothers, and helpless bereaved mothers in law and helpless bereaved fathers in law, brothers, sisters, cousins, nieces, nephews, orphans and sometimes widowed aunts. Naturally it will be all smiles with many nice stories to tell each other in the early days, weeks and even months of the relatives’ arrival to your home. Nevertheless the situation will gradually turn sour as they start feeling insecure and become jealous of your spouse for being a threat or stumbling block to the love they anticipate enjoying from you if he or she were not to around. For which reason, they will, from no where, start fighting and or scrambling for it by all means possible. They will no longer tolerate hearing or seeing you laughing with him or her. For, then they would rather see or hear you quarrelling or fighting. They will start working hard to bring about misery to you, to the extent of accusing your spouse falsely and even breaking or causing certain crucial household items to miss, to infuriate you and cause commotion with your spouse. Parents in law, brothers and sisters in law are known to be the common culprits in this. They are often accused of being responsible for disrupting and breaking marriages whenever they live in homes of their married sons or daughters or brothers or sisters. Although the purpose of bringing them is good and in accordance with Africa’s rich culture of caring for immediate families as well as extended family members in need, it is possible to wreck and even break one’s marriage in that way. It might also spoil the otherwise good relationship between the married person and his/her relatives. The only exception to this is where the lives or future of one’s relatives is threatened if they continue staying or living where they are and the way they do. In such situation, every able bodied person in Africa, including married couples must find a way to bring such relatives to their homes or rent or build for them homes near them to closely care for them. Relatives of this kind include one’s parents who might be lonely and sickly, helpless school age going brothers and sisters and school age going orphaned nieces and nephews. The compelling reason for bringing such parents to your home is that without them, you could not have come to this world and became who you are today. If you are a Christian, another reason is that it is a way of respecting your father and mother for your days to be long on earth and for it to be well with you (Deuteronomy 5:16). It is also forbidden not to mind about them (1Timothy 5:8). It is also forbidden to despise them in any way (Proverbs 30:17). Respecting them means according them special recognition whenever you come across them or deal with them or talk to them, including facilitating them or enabling them to live with dignity. Your standard of living must be seen or reflected in their lives too. If you are ashamed of friends or workmates knowing how your parents look like or where they stay, you are a disgraceful individual, dishonouring them, supposed to do something about it quickly to rectify the situation. Better help relatives from their homes As far as possible, help needy relatives from their homes instead of bringing them to yours even if you are still single, not yet married. For instance, avoid bringing relatives who have just completed primary or secondary education to wait for results of the examinations they did from your home or those waiting to know where they have been selected to go, to further their education. Similarly avoid bringing or welcoming relatives who have recently graduated from University to stay with you, ostensibly looking for jobs. The best thing to do is to send them the little assistance you can in their homes where they are already established with beds and mattresses or beddings to use and food from the plantation(s) or neighbours. It will be cheaper, convenient and appreciated to help them in that way instead of bringing on to yourself unnecessarily big expenses of feeding them in town, in addition to those of your immediate family. Let the primary and secondary school leavers wait for their examination results and placements from their homes. Also let University graduates apply for jobs from their homes and make trips, when necessary, with your assistance, once or twice a month, to certain places, looking for jobs or attending interviews. Discourage the dependence syndrome Much as we must, out of necessity, care for our needy relatives, we should guard against grooming them to become a liability to us and the country as a whole. Instead we should help them use their God given human capital to create basic wealth for survival. While waiting for their examination results and replies to job applications respectively, we should advise them to use their hands to honestly and legally earn money everyday, somewhere, instead of bringing them to stay idle at our homes. We must avoid being comfortable and satisfied with the shortsighted notion of calling them our dependants. However much we want to support them, we cannot meet all their needs in time. Although they too cannot do so when or if gainfully employed, they will be satisfied with what they get out of they earn. On the contrary, they will take offence of our failure to meet their needs. They will refuse to understand why we do not do so. Experience has shown that when school leavers and unemployed University graduates stay in towns with relatives idle, they spend most of their time watching television and DVDs throughout the day. By so doing, they raise the electricity bill and cause fast depreciation of the gadgets they switch on all day long. Some spend it in Internet cafes. Where they get the money to do so, God knows. Girls have more risks in this because of their gender. We must discourage the dependence syndrome currently haunting Africa and the developing world in general. Research has so far shown that more than seventy percent of the population of Africa South of the Sahara is dependant on gainfully employed relatives and friends. That is how serious is the dependence syndrome. Irrespective of level of education Such relatives will start doing all sorts of discordant things, irrespective of their level of education, to cause the two of you to part, in the hope of getting an opportunity of enjoying ‘hundred percent love’ they miss from you. When they see it not happening at the time they want it, they will start accusing your spouse of things he/she has actually not done to make you hate him/her. They will also ensure that they plant the seed of hatred in other relatives at your parents’ home and childhood environment, to make them hate your spouse too. In that way, they may even cause you to avoid going to see them or welcome them to your home even for a five minutes’ visit. Since the cause of their hatred is jealousy not ignorance, educated relatives will start accusing your spouse intelligently, in accordance with their level of education to convince you that it is decent and a matter of positive tradition for you not to tolerate mistreatment of your relatives by your spouse. Likewise, uneducated relatives will start accusing him or her of despising them because of their lack of education. dalemuta@yahoo.co.uk