Your spouse needs you now

A good friend is about to celebrate her second wedding anniversary. If I needed more indicators of how fast time is flying nowadays, this would be another one. It seems like only yesterday when she called to tell me that Mark had proposed; I still remember screaming down the phone with her excitement.

She was almost the last of my friends to get married so this was extremely happy news. I still remember the wedding that blew us all away. It was a card only affair at an exclusive place and for a minute, we thought we were attending some rich person’s wedding.

You see, Mary had been rising up the career ladder as the rest of us were busy getting married, having children and all that comes with getting married. So because she was getting married when she had all the money to spare, coupled with an equally endowed husband to be, she had the wedding that we all dreamt of but never had because we got married not too long after university.

STRANGE AFFAIR

So, my husband and I were driving along on a Saturday mid-morning when Mary drove past headed in the opposite direction, alone.

This wasn’t strange. Many times, Mary and Mark will be in different places at the same time.

I sent her a text just to say hello and jokingly wondered if she was already done with Saturday chores and was headed out. Her response began an almost hour-long text conversation about her single status.

Despite being married, Mary calls herself a married single. She says they are happy, but they have been unable to synchronize their lives since they got married.

At some point, they realized they spend little time together and were almost strangers to each other, so they both agreed to pursue their careers for a while longer then focus on their marriage in year four.

Everybody is free to run their marriage as they want, but I told Mary their decision didn’t sit right with me.

URGENT THINGS

In life, everything competes for your attention so it is very easy to relegate the things that matter — your spouse and children, to the back burner as you chase all these other ‘urgent things’.

We normally tell ourselves that we’ll come back to those things that matter later but, as I have been reminded by different circumstances, life just keeps happening. We say we’ll spend time with our loved ones once that promotion is in the bag, but what is happening in the meantime may well mean that after that promotion, there may be no family to spend time with. Worst case scenario is that one of you may pass away as you’re working on that bigger salary and higher post.

As we keep postponing part of our lives for tomorrow, let us remember that with every day, our lives are drifting into tomorrow, which is the future.

 A future we can never be 100 per cent certain about.