Olayemi Enlighten

One of the things I've never truly understood is when an unmarried Christian man puts pressure on the woman he is dating for s*x. You can see I'm not using words like boyfriend or girlfriend or boo or such things. Once you are 18 years old, dear fellow, you are an adult. Adult should have sense. Good sense. Courtesy. Manners. SENSE!

I mean, if you had a daughter you've raised to 23 years and she brought one Mr. Idiot whom you are meeting for the first time who says to you - She lives with me and we have been having s*x for 6 months now, would you congratulate him? If not, why would you do that with someone else's daughter? Think about it. No Sir. She should have sense. And you should have sense.

Some years ago, a man and his friend brought a woman to the hospital in the night. They were all in their 20s. Brothers and sisters, this woman was DEAD. One of the men was her manfriend. I refuse to use boyfriend for these matters, because we deceive ourselves with these foolish names to take away the seriousness of things.

We say baby mama. That's a concubine.
We say sugar daddy. That's an adulterer.
We say cohabitation. That's fornication.
We must not all be mad. Some of us must have sense.

What is girlfriend? A whole 19 year old? 24 years. Even 31 years. You say girlfriend. That is not a girl. She is a WOMAN.

Anyway, they had been having s*x. She had abdominal pain one day. They went to the hospital and a scan showed an ectopic pregnancy - a pregnancy outside the womb. The doctor told them she needed a surgery. They asked if there was any other option. The doctor told them it could be treated with a drug but it was risky. They took that option and started the drug. That was 2 weeks ago.

Dear people, the drug did not work. She was rushed to the hospital because she collapsed in the house. The 'pregnancy' had burst and she bled inside. By the time she came her body was already cold. No heartbeat. Her pupils were fixed etc. There was no point doing CPR but we did anyway.

You see, that woman's parents and family

1. Didn't know their daughter was living with a man
2. Didn't know she had been pregnant

Didn't know Jack! As in Jack and Jill who went up the hill to fetch a pail of nonsense. Jack fell down and broke his sense and Jill came tumbling after. Dead.

This Jack man was so confused. He sat behind the steering wheel and held it like it was a lifeline. I could imagine the confusion and questions in his mind. We had to tell him he couldn't drive. His friend had to drive. What would he tell her family??? Where would he start? Your daughter died in my house. As how? As what? What was she doing in your house? I felt deeply for them and hoped madam was with the Lord. That is what truly matters in the final analysis.

What are you doing in a man's house whom you are not married to? I know you are an adult o and everything, but

Are you OKAY?

On a normal sense level, without broaching the subject of the Christian faith, that is very poor morals. We are not even talking about s*x yet.

Why are you asking a lady you are in relationship with. Sorry. A woman...why are you asking her to move in with you. As what?

ARE YOU MAD?

Is that not the person you are planning to marry? For like 60 years? Even if it is 20 years. Why do you want to start tasting now what you will eat and get tired of eating? You will live the rest of your life with this person and have s*x only with them for decades.

You now start saying if you love me, you will allow us sleep together yhen yhen yhen. It's not only sleep together. Na pajamas together.

What is your problem exactly? Nibo lo n sare lo?

I've never understood that thing. If you want to do husband and wife stuff - GO AND GET THE CERTIFICATE NAU!!!

Be a man and act like one. Sensible. Responsible. And Respectful. Respect yourself jare.

And you Christian woman. Ahn ahn? Carry yourself with honour jare. Don't be a fufu upstairs. BEHAVE YOURSELF!

I just wanted to say - Good morning.

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WHAT I WISH I'D KNOWN ABOUT MARRIAGE AND HOW I LEARNT

A little over a year ago, a member of TRFMA Community who works with singles, Nike Adedokun Folagbade invited me to speak in her Facebook Community.

Facebook reminded me of the event. As I read and reflected on the presentation I made, I thought I should share it with you.

😂😂😂😂😂😂 Mummy Mo's reality is that she's not always been a Marriage Expert.

Chairman and I have been students every step of the way. We still are learning.

Here's the presentation:
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WHAT I WISH I KNEW ABOUT MARRIAGE AND HOW I LEARNT

I am Modupe Ehirim. I met my dear husband in 1980 when we both were serving under the NYSC Scheme. We started out as friends and eventually got married in September 1985.

In our society, marriage is considered a rite of passage. You are born, you grow up and you get married. Every weekend, our people dress up gaily and go off to attend one, two, sometimes three wedding ceremonies in one day. What this means is that we have a familiarity with marriage that makes us assume that we know what it's about. However,what we know is often the glamorous part of marriage.

My husband and I were well adjusted individuals. By that I mean that we had healthy self esteem and reasonably stable families of origin. In our individual nuclear families, we had parents who were 100% committed to the marriage institution and its success. We saw them live out this commitment in the way they related with one another and operated their marriages. I must note that in our extended families we had many experiences of marriages that were in crisis and that also failed. So we very much aware that the marriage experiences of both sets of parents were not the experience in other families.

This means that we started out in a much better place than many couples. We had models of healthy marriages and had learnt from them social and interpersonal skills that make marriage work.

In addition, my dear husband was also one who had personally developed himself over the years. So when I met him he had a very solid vision of the future he wanted and the kind of wife that will be with him to realise that vision.

I will be honest. I had a pretty sheltered life prior to meeting him and so I’d not thought so far about what I wanted in life. The vision I had for myself could be summarised in a few words - “Get a postgraduate degree and then get a job”. But with such a clearly laid out vision and a healthy self esteem that accomodated a strong minded woman like me, I felt I would do well with a man who demonstrated that he knew where he was going in life.

We also had the additional benefit that my church where our wedding took place insisted that we must go through an exhaustive Pre-Marriage Counselling process.

With all the pre-marriage preparation process, you will conclude that my husband and I went on to have marriage totally free of crises.

We didn’t because the reality of life is that until you begin to live with one another 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year there are many things that you won’t know.

I have now been married for thirty-one years. Looking back, here are five the things I wish I had known about marriage.

1. There are as many paradigms about marriage as there human beings.

The paradigms of marriage that I knew were those that I had seen in my own home and community. My husband also had his own paradigms. How was I to know that because we’d had different life experiences prior to marriage, we’d see things differently?Background and family systems as well as life experiences prior to marriage play a major role in conditioning our perspectives, choices, attitudes to everything. Sometimes, when we clash, it's actually our origins clashing. The major misunderstandings that hubby and I had early in our marriage can be explained by this factor. At the time, I didn’t know this and thought perhaps we were not suited to one another. One such misunderstanding even saw hubby asking me to move out.

My husband and I had talked about many things before marriage. We both said we were Christians. Simple word with straightforward meaning, it would seem. After marriage we found that we had very different understanding of that word. And for many years, the differences rocked our marriage.

It was the wisdom of Godly counsellors that prevented us from breaking up.

2. Everyone lives by a set of rules that is rarely spoken but always known.

How was I to know my husband and I would have our own ideas about what was acceptable and it would never occur to either of us that our expectations would be so different. That we'd become so irritated by each other's unspoken expectations and frustrated that our spouse didn't live by the same rules.One such rule that caused trouble was this. I loved gizzard. And when cooking would pop it into my mouth. It was rule where my husband came from that the gizzard was for the oldest man. I didn't know. It caused massive quarrels for a while every time I cooked chicken...lol

Igbo people eat swallow and soup in separate bowls. I didn't know that. You don't want to know how many misunderstandings that caused just because I was adamant that he should use one plate to make life easier for me. Lol

He eventually explained to me that even if he didn't mind it would cause trouble if I served his father or brothers that way, then I finally understood that he was insisting because he loved me. Lol

3. Conflict is a natural occurrence when two people live together.

I thought conflict meant hubby and I were incompatible. I had grown with a habit of avoiding conflict which I carried into marriage. I didn’t know that conflict simply meant that hubby and I disagreed about issues that were very important to the two of us and that we could work to resolve them and arrive at solutions that were best for our marriage. When we had conflicts, I would cry and be unhappy and imagine that I had made a mistake in my choice of who I married. I have since learnt that misunderstandings are a natural part of marriage. No matter how deeply a man and woman love each other, they will eventually have conflict simply because they are different and unique people.

Many times, when I imagine that he would be upset, I will not say what is on my mind. I will go on and do it and then when he finds out of course, it will be World War 3. I eventually understood that people are unique and different. They also have different backgrounds and life experiences. Opening up and speaking to one another even in the face of conflict helped them to understand themselves.

4. Someone who loves you can repeatedly do things that hurt you because they have not learnt how to treat people right.

Sometimes when my spouse is angry and/or unhappy, it actually has nothing to do with me.

I didn't know about emotional blackmail and other poor and ineffective communication methods and so I didn’t recognise them when he used them. Rather I was accepting responsibility for stuff I didn't even know about.

I was hurt many times with what I later learnt psychologists refer to as the :"Silent Treatment". When I was at the receiving end of the "Silent Treatment", I thought it was my responsibility to make things better. I didn't know that people who used silent treatment were emotionally immature. And there were healthy ways of responding to hem instead of just begging them all the time to forgive you even when you didn't know what it was you were supposed to have done. When I understood what the "Silent Treatment" was, it no longer hurt. My healthy responses helped him to learn to do things differently and our relationship improved.

5. Marriage is a long term project.

I wanted to live happily ever after with my husband but had a one day at a time perspective. When you have a one day at a time perspective, you respond to the issues that arise in your marriage without thinking what consequences your action today will have some years later in your relationship.

As a result in the early days, I did many things from a short term thinking perspective which didn't have good long term consequences.
So these are the five things that when I look back on 31 years of marriage, I wish i had known and was very much aware of them right from Day 1. I would have enjoyed the earlier days a lot more.

How did I learn these things?

First, I was committed to having a lifelong marriage and being happy in it.

Second, I was not willing to leave my destiny in the hands of another person. So I had decided from the onset of my marriage, that anytime we had a crisis, I will look for what is in my power to do to resolve the crisis and do it.

As a result of these two decisions, any challenge we had found me searching for what I had power to do. Since the World Wide Web and Google and other search engines weren't yet in existence, books on marriage were my primary resources.

I didn't read these books or study about marriage to acquire knowledge or information. I read them looking for solutions and tips that I could immediately apply to situations that were happening in my marriage.

As I read these books, I learnt that many of the challenges we had were common to many marriages. The authors who were experienced professionals helped me to understand how to handle the issues that we faced.

Understanding that much of what I was experiencing was common to marriage calmed me down. I became less afraid that my marriage was going to break down. I had a new perspective towards any crisis we experienced. I saw the crises as an opportunity to learn more about how to do marriage.

As I applied what I learnt, many challenges were resolved. I also now had pre knowledge of other things and so future crises were prevented. I started thinking ahead. Whenever we experienced changes in our lives, I sought information and knowledge to deal with them, so crises were averted.

My husband and I are now almost home alone. I am currently studying how couples our age whose children have left home live. You'd be surprised that that stage of life comes with its own challenges too.

Were I to advise people who are just starting out in marriage, I will encourage them to become ardent students of marriage.

Yes there are bad marriages, there are crises ridden marriages, there are abusive marriages. But there are also great marriages. Instead of being fearful and trying to protect yourself from hurt, seek knowledge about how those who got it right did so.

You can also get marriage right. Anything done out of fear doesn't yield good results. Don't be fearful. Be bold reach for your dream of having a good marriage.

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I am currently visiting with a couple who have been married for close to forty five years. I have slept two nights in their home. As I saw them doing things together, I was reminded that marriage is a long term project.

As they shared their life experiences with me, I realised that they had been deliberate and intentional. They had lived with the philosophy of what do we want our life together in the long term to be like? The way they responded to the issues that arose in their relationship was guided by their response to that all important question.

Dear reader, married or single, what do you want your life with your spouse to be like when you have been married for forty-five years?

Allow yourself to dream. Share your thoughts in the comment box.

I wrote this post in 2017. The content is still relevant.

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Don't burn out before you speak up, get the necessary help and do it with wisdom.










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Don't burn out before you speak up, get the necessary help and do it with wisdom. #speakup #mentalhealth #love #burnout #woman #help #communication #putyourselfouttherechallenge #olayemi_enlighten

It's that time of the year again... Concept Smile projects will be hosting an outreach tagged: ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS 💃💃💃

This outreach will be holding in two locations (Ijesha and ilaje Bariga) both in Lagos...

You can be a part of this outreach by donating your new or fairly/neatly used clothes,shoes,bags etc (For Adults and Children)

You can also donate toiletries, household items, food items and cash donations...

Come support us to put smiles on faces this Christmas, For more info, Call the number on the flyer, more flyers and details coming up...

Join me this evening as we discuss honest mistake as parents and create sustainable solutions together.

Please share and comment 🙏💕💕

Connect with me and as she shed great light on her childhood and its effect on Adulthood.

Please send in your questions and concerns in the comments section.
We will love to hear from you.💞

Mini-me is what she is in so many ways. (Sometimes it's the best)

But when I see the traits in what she does, I question my childhood and wonder if I should have done better.

1 major prayer I say is that God should let her be like Him in actions and words.

As much as it's cool to have someone look like you I don't think you will like two of you in a place at the same time.

Will you have loved your daughter to model after you or someone else? Really who can you tell your kids to talk, think, and do things like for now?

Please share your thoughts ❤ 🙏

This is for me and definitely for you, yes You.

In whatever situation, He loves you, you just need to dig deep into His love.
❤❤❤❤❤

Take His love which is His word, embrace it, live it, and enjoy it.

Hey you, it's been some minutes.
Hope you are doing good, I am quite fine, thank you.

A quick one here, yeah

I've heard people say, "You have to be happy for yourself and there is no one that can make you happy except yourself"

Also "if you can not be happy by yourself, how can anyone make you happy".

So this question for us;

Does this statement affect couples too?
Is there a way my spouse influences my happiness or not?

I will love your thoughts in the comments section, 🙏🙏🙏 do well to say something.

I appreciate your comments, thoughts, opinion, and feedback. Thank you.