With the recent breakdown in relationships and marriages in Africa, young single men and women will be afraid to start a relationship let alone going into marriage.
You might want to ask why are relationships and marriages becoming so volatile in this modern age?
A little misunderstanding can spoil everything for both couples and bring a total crash to a one-time booming relationship.
In Africa, there is a great difference in relationships and marriages compared to that obtained in the western world.
These differences somehow kept marriages in Africa to the end of “till death do us apart”.
Some of the factors that kept the African marriage bond include:
- Respect for the husbandÂ
- Women being recessiveÂ
- CommunicationÂ
Respect: in the good old days, women in Africa saw their husbands as mini gods, they showed the utmost respect and allowed them to pilot the marriage ship.
This is currently lacking in modern age marriages as the women want to be heard and take key decisions in their family.
Sometimes these men feel challenged and can’t keep up with this new attitude from their wives, and things start to go wrong.
Most times it becomes a battle between the woman and the ego of the man. This happens because the man came from a background where his mom shows his father a great deal of respect and allows him to take all the decisions in the family.
Women being recessive: In the African settings, a man is the one to make all decisions, he only seeks the words of his wife when the matter is beyond him and sometimes might not take the advice at all.
In the good old days’ women sought permission from the man before she did anything and held on to the man’s decisions about her finance and other things however, these have changed as the modern days’ women are becoming more dominant and gradually drifting to the western style of marriage.
The modern African woman wants everything to be equal in the family, they want to take their own decision and want to have full freedom from their husbands however this may not go down well with some men as they feel challenged and disrespected because their wives sometimes take decisions without their consent or behind their back.
Such modernization has also brought problems to the African marriage settings and has become the major factor in the crash of marriages.
Communication: Modern African. Marriages now suffer from good communication between couples and this is due to the fact that modern couples hardly spend quality time together with good communication.
The man and the woman now work and come back late feeling tired, unlike the western world African couples hardly find time to go on vacation because of the bad economic state of the continent unless they are above the average family when it comes to financing.
The good old days’ woman sits beside her husband while he entertains her with stories. There was real communication between spouses and this was one of the bonds that kept marriages going.
Even with the advent of social media and messaging apps, modern couples still find it hard to have effective communication.
ConclusionÂ
I’m not saying that women should go back to the good old days but they can borrow some good factors from the days of old and apply them to their marital life.
Although the average African man has come to the terms of modernization women needs to understand the ego of a man and try to manage it for peace to reign.
