By ZAWADI LOMPISHA
Are you in a fictional marriage? You may probably not be able to answer my question because you have no idea what I’m talking about. So let me give you a clue.
Let’s start with a couple I recently heard about. The husband and wife meet about four times in a year, the longest of those being about two weeks. How? You may ask. Well, they both have high-flying jobs and live in two different countries that can only be connected by two long distance flights.
So they plan to meet once in each quarter only for a few days and the longest duration is when one of them takes their leave from office. Due to the nature of work, they cannot be away from the office for longer than two weeks at a time. How they even made the time to meet and agree to get married is a mystery to me.
Then there’s the couple that live together, and by that I mean they walk into the same main door of the house that they call home. Once inside, they not only have separate bedrooms, but also can sit at the dinner table and have a full meal without saying a word to each other.
If one needs to communicate to the other, they do it through their children, who then relay back to the other the response. And this has gone on for a long while.
This is a true story. Does it sound more like fiction than fact?
And how would you describe the marriage where the so-called husband spends more time at his mistress’s house than with his wife? The story is that he is always busy at work or some other activity, but it is no secret that they both know that he has a mistress. This has never been discussed and yet the elephant in the room is squeezing everybody in it, but no one does anything to try and evict it.
Have I given you enough clues to now assess your marriage? Is it a fictional one or not?
The trouble with fictional marriages is that they rarely end up ‘happily ever after’ as the fiction love stories tell us. To the contrary, they leave a trail of destruction that carries over to successive generations as the children in those marriages also bear the brunt of their dysfunction.
As painful as it might be, the only way to turn fiction into reality is to confront it and deal with it. An affair remains an affair whether you discuss it or not. Looking away does not wish it away. If jobs have conspired to deprive you of one another, sacrifices have to be made. One of you must quit their job at the very least and move to the other’s location.
Short of that, the fiction will most probably come to a crushing end!
