By Abdulmutallib Mukhtar
Hiding vital information has played more destructive than fixative roles in both pre-marital and marital relationships. Relationships and marriages have been failing because couples keep hiding vital information from themselves.
Recently, a much anxiously anticipated wedding sadly failed two days to the wedding after the grandmother of the awaiting bride visited from another town. The awaiting groom met the grandmother and greeted her. She gave him some elderly pieces of advice about the complexity of marriage institution. While giving him the advice, she innocently mentioned someone’s name as ex-husband to his bride-to-be, as a way of furnishing an example about the significance of patience. This descended to his ears like an arrow. He quickly left furiously without her reaching a conclusion. What happened was that, from the beginning of his relationship with the young lady, she had never told him she was once married even though the marriage lasted only for a short period of time and there was no conception. Her family had not also disclosed to him of this issue. But the innocent grandmother had never known the information was concealed, hence her letting the cat out of the bag. The marriage couldn’t take place even after family members and friends had visited from different places for the wedding.
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Secondly, a close friend dated a young lady recently and he honestly fell in love with her so much that he sent his elders to her guardians. She loved him too and sincerely needed the marriage. The lady was not only beautiful, but also an embodiment of many enviable qualities among which is her widely known good character. She told him that her father died when she was young and that she was brought up by a maternal uncle. She said all her father’s relatives lived in one of the core northern states. It was when his elders insisted to meet her guardians from the side of the father for their marriage arrangements that something hidden was eventually discovered. She refused to disclose that there was a problem between her mother’s and father’s families which put the two families at loggerheads. And she and her mother had cut all times with the father’s family for a long period of time.
For this reason, she directed her soon-to-be-husband’s elders to a man whom she claimed to be a brother to her late father. When they traveled to where the man lives, he told them a quite different story. He said he is not a brother to her father and that the paternal relatives to the young lady live in the same town she lives along with her mother. He said she lied simply because she was avoiding anything with her father’s relatives. They returned home disappointed as a result of which they ordered their son to jilt her on the basis of her non-disclosure and lies.
In addition, a man I also closely related with married a fine divorcee. She told him that she married once in her life and that her ex-husband divorced her on the unproven accusation of marital infidelity. Her guardians also maintained the same. But despite this, the man still went ahead and married her happily. Shortly after the marriage, he discovered that his wife married four men before him. This sudden discovery terminated the marriage.
Similar stories abound with the sad ending because we think erecting a building on a faulty foundation can, in our narrow thinking, stand the test of time. In fact, not only concealment of fact brings relationships to an end, even mere pretenses do. Relationships have to be transparent to avoid a tragic endings. No matter how long the relationship lingers, it can crash upon the discovery of something previously and deliberately concealed.
Abdul Mutallib Muktar
