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The nasty and ugly side of marriage

Marriage Advice

Familiarity breeds contempt. That’s been the proverbial catchphrase that is taken as, well, gospel truth. If that were the case though, would marriages really last past the one-year mark? Marriage, besides the close association of an annoying colleague at work or pesky boss, is probably where extensive knowledge or close relationship with someone may lead to loss of respect that’s tolerated to the point of habitual acceptance. No wonder, the old adage that marriage is the only war in which one sleeps with the enemy.

In its most romantic form, it’s like a deck of cards – it begins with two hearts and a diamond, but at the end, you would probably wish you had a club and a spade! Tales abound of married couples whose sense of decorum during the dating phase is cast to the wind, no sooner they unpack their honeymoon luggage and get in step with the humdrum pace of life’s tedious hassle.

The commonly cited case is that of breaking wind in the presence of your spouse with a deadpan expression of a mortician. Says John Mutua who’s been married for almost seven years now: “My wife was the shy type and was very particular about decency. I remember her pinching me repeatedly every time I let go after a ‘gas-filled’ meal.

THUNDEROUS RITUAL

But today, she’s the one who is leading the fart brigade,” Mutua says with the resigned air of a teacher whose student has taken over as the master. And why not, after all, marriage has been touted as a state in which the man loses his bachelor’s degree and the woman gets her master’s degree!

And boy, don’t they let the flatus rip! One couple intimated how their nightly routine has become almost a ritual of flipping the covers and unleashing one thunderous fart after another, much like the sordid scene of The Nutty Professor’s family, whose idea of colon cleaning is a prolonged, crashing expulsion of intestinal gas.

And so, as much as we might want to cling to the romantic notion that marriages are made in heaven, we should probably give credence to Clint Eastwood’s rejoinder that so is thunder and lightning!

Forget the chestnut of rancid socks strewn all over the house that is peddled by almost every married woman when describing the hygienic hopelessness of their men’s stinking habits. Betty Kerubo is more concerned about her husband’s ablution bloopers. The man whose door-opening and chair-pulling ways melted her heart all the way to the altar has seemingly transmuted into a crass, mannerless lout.

He’s the kind whose bowel movement is a firecracker affair that splatters the inside of the toilet bowl with a bombardment of tiny, hard-to-clean faecal ‘shrapnel.’ “I don’t mind the dirty spray of his sh*t in the toilet; what really annoys me is that he never bothers to flush and walks around the house as if everything is A-OK,” reveals an angry Betty. But hers is not the only freak show that is staged in the little boys’ room by a married man. Florence Wambui too is exasperated by her husband’s insensitive habit in the cloakroom. In her case, the man does his business the way he drives on a slippery road during the rains, leaving behind smelly skid marks in his boxers that he invariably shoves to the bottom of the laundry basket. “Sometimes I wonder if I am dealing with a two-year old. Even our four-year-old daughter has better toilet manners! Surely, how can a fully grown man soil his underwear and expect someone else to clean the mess? That’s just gross!” says Florence who apparently insists that the man wash his own boxers. She says he’s tried to style up, but sometimes just discards the darn things in the trash and buys new ones when he’s about to run out of clean undies.

‘HONEY, NIPITISHIE SIMU’

But it is not only men who give meaning to the shibboleth that marriage lets you annoy one special person for the rest of your life. Married women too have their fair share of barefaced habits that would have been considered outrageous before tying the knot. Consider the grunts of mama watoto in the toilet as she voids what’s left of the previous night’s dinner through the lower end of her digestive tract. And then the phone rings.

“Honey, please nipitishie simu,” she requests with blithe ordinariness.

Yes, that’s not as farfetched as it seems. For George Maina, 38, who is now chalking five years in marriage, that request is as commonplace in the house as “pass me the salt dear!” “It can be quite unsettling at times. My wife is so used to leaving her phone on the bedside table in the bedroom, and will always ask me to pass her the phone as she does her thing. She expects you to stand there until she’s through with the call, and may even want to chit chat after she’s done talking on the phone. I think it is disrespectful to the person on the other end,” he says.

GROSSLY OFFENSIVE                                                                         

Then there’s that messy time of the month when the missus’ ‘visitors’ reign supreme for five days. Reportedly, some women carry themselves in a manner that is grossly offensive to decency during their menses. Ayub Wafula, a 40-year-old businessman in Nairobi who has been married for nine years knows this too well. He says that he does not mind her wife’s now familiar straddling stance as she removes her soaked sanitary towel or puts on a clean one. What he doesn’t get is the sloppiness with which she handles the dirty pads.

“She rolls up the used sanitary towel in its package then stuffs it in a linen basket where she keeps her underwear. That thing can be there for weeks, sometimes you wonder what’s stinking up the place,” Ayub said, adding that their young daughter once strayed to the linen basket and spilled its content of stained panties and used pads on the floor, much to their revolting embarrassment. Actually, embarrassing in this case is an understatement. That must have been a traumatising experience for the poor girl, like walking in on a crime scene!

Still, as much as these seemingly offensive habits continue to define marriages, they are rarely deal-breakers, but rather serve as proof that whereas love might be blind, marriage is the eye-opener.

And married couples know just too well that the longest sentence you can form with two words is ‘I do.’

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