By zawadi lompisha

Lately, I've been wondering if there's something I'm missing about the institution of marriage. This is because the number of people who are unhappily married or are jumping out of the marital ship seems to be increasing.

And some are my friends. In fact, for many of them, I was involved in the wedding plans and we have continued to be friends through the various phases of marriage.

Take our friend Mike* for instance. He married his long time sweetheart five years before my husband and I got married. Mike met his girlfriend when he was in high school and they just kept seeing each other. So it followed that they needed to get married. Even when they broke up, they stayed single until they reconciled. So while the rest of us were now breaking up and linking up with other people, Mike and his girlfriend were planning their wedding.

There was a problem though; Mike’s best friend didn’t think he should go ahead with the wedding. Gerald thought it was a relationship of convenience and he wanted his friend to try other relationships before making up his mind. Despite this Mike went ahead with his plans. Gerald was so angry but after about a year, he finally admitted that he may have been wrong. Well, after several years, we realised something was amiss.

Cold marriage

At our socials, Mike and his wife would come together but never say a word to each other the entire evening.

Questions put to either of them about how they were doing was always met with a ‘great’ response.

So, it didn’t come as a shock when ten years after they got married, Mike went to work one morning and didn’t return home. He took nothing. His distraught wife called all his friends but nobody had seen him. Not even at the office.

After two days, Mike showed up at Gerald’s door. He needed to talk. The long and short of it was that there was no spark in the marriage. They related like business partners. No emotion, no warmth. So he left. Their differences were irreconcilable so they got the divorce they wanted.

Well, last Saturday, Mike was marrying some woman he has been seeing for the last two years. Many friends were shocked when they got the invite.

Has Mike learnt his lessons? Does he even know what made his first marriage fail?

Will this second attempt at marriage succeed? I highly doubt it. Will Mike let anybody talk sense into him? Of course not.

This time round, Gerald, his best friend and right hand man, didn’t bother to show up; he says he is too emotionally tired to be dragged through another fiasco.