The Marriage Mirror: Shining reality on a divine institution

Chrisantus Mogeni’s The Marriage Mirror explores the pressures behind broken marriages and the search for lasting love. [iStockphoto]

When a writer friend of mine (let’s call him Len) lost his job with a major daily at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and his wife of many years left him, taking their two daughters away, he was subsequently bereft of all hope and very nearly committed suicide.

In the decades prior, he had had a colourful career abroad as a photojournalist spanning the geographical reaches of the world, from the United States in the West to Qatar in the East. Yet, family, not his job, had always made for the joy of living for him.

And so, understandably, the wrench of marital estrangement had proven harder to bear than the bleakness of job loss. Penniless, and without the anchor-bosom of family to hold onto, he felt adrift in the waters of life, with no seeable port to sail for.

This past week, reading Chrisantus Mogeni’s new book, The Marriage Mirror: A Handbook for the Married, the Single and the Brokenhearted Who Still Believe in Love (2026), summoned up in my mind what it must have been like for my friend Len above to watch his own marriage fall apart under the weight of provisional exiguity and spousal non-empathy.

Mogeni, a scientist, entrepreneur and divorced father of three himself, has, in his 221-page book, just invited society to an urgent conversation around the turbulence-hit institution of marriage.

Devoted to a lifelong search for answers to the ‘true’ causes of broken relationships, Mogeni has, in The Marriage Mirror: A Handbook for the Married, the Single and the Brokenhearted Who Still Believe in Love, more than made an attempt at addressing the question of what ails marriage. He has made a strong case for a society-level return to ‘the God-ordained plan for the union’.

Each of the book’s twelve chapters is prefaced with a felicitously selected Bible verse, and the author’s hoped-for, well-delivered message for the reader is that human wisdom alone is not enough to guarantee smooth sailing in the lifelong voyage that is marriage.

Melding a psychologist’s insight with a writer’s flair, the author retraces the origins of the multi-type pressure point that’s long marred marriage: provision, security, intimacy, respect, loyalty and reciprocity, among others, and writes what he understands to be the heavenly design for the union into a well-argued case for the divinely given hope.

Vision

Mogeni builds on his own refusal to accept marital failure as inevitable. And the book, really, is, for both himself and the reader, part a journey of discovery and part a cautionary tale. The author, while taking care to recognise and validate the role played by professional counsellors in finding and offering solutions to marital problems, warns against the overreliance on human wisdom for answers to the increasingly complex question of why marriage almost inevitably falls under the spell of turmoil despite the many vows-point hope and sanguineness.

The author’s vision of post-woe marital restoration and idyll is rooted in truths established following his own careful study of human psychology, human anatomy and physiology, finance as well as the Holy Scriptures, which, over time, equipped him with a ‘holistic’ understanding of the emotional, physical, financial and spiritual forces that shape marriage. Communication skills, financial stability and even counselling all make, partly though, for the all-important ingredients of a woe-free marriage, he acknowledges.

The union that would last, he avers, ought to, however, have been fashioned after the Scripture-type, God-and-Man covenant that both extols and represents marriage as the divinely ordained social design it is, and should be, from the start.

For those in upheaval-hit marriages, as well as the single and brokenhearted up against a bleak, loveless future, Mogeni’s book is, and will be, a much-valued, hope-inspiring tool in the worthwhile difference-seeking exertion.

 In the fullness of time, if only for its exploration and revelation of some of the hidden roots of marital conflict, including long-harboured emotional wounds, preconception-skewed beliefs, generation-following patterns, misplaced priorities and spiritual brokenness, the book will, and should, be the equal of its recommendational billing.

For to read it is to journey for the mirror-honest, sometimes-uninviting realities of self-scrutiny, the spiritual re-teachability of both the self and collective, as well as foresight-acquired resourcefulness, with much hope as the ultimate for those determined to make the now-much-troubled union that is marriage work.

One need not be of the religious stripe in order to fully enjoy, and benefit from, Chrisantus Mogeni’s well-written, easy-to-read book.

At a time when domestic violence is at its most concerning height in our part of the world, the lessons, and by extension wisdom, therein make it worthy of addition to the to-read lists of the married, the single and the brokenhearted who, indeed, still believe in love, and, of course, the irreligious.

Baraza is a Nairobi-based writer and historiographer. [e-mail]