THREE WORDS TO MY WEDDING SON

Today I am hosting friends and acquaintances to my son’s wedding. As my son gets fulfilled today, I have a few words of wisdom I was rehearsing to start him off. So I’ll share them with you. I ran out of patience longtime ago with political wedding speeches which are politically correct. People usually want to sound civil and end up portraying marriage as a heaven, where bliss will be waiting to bring all the goodies you have been missing all your life. I can never understand why we always raise people’s expectations when we know the reality will soon crash like a thunderbolt. Here are three words of wisdom to you my son:

First, marriage is not heaven. It’s not even a nice garden or comfortable house. It is nothing but a shell house. Marriage doesn’t bring any of the good things attributed to it, instead, it is you, the couple entering it, who must bring the goodies into the marriage shell house. If you want happiness, joy and bliss, bring it; if you want peace, come with it. Marriage doesn’t make you happy; it’s you to make it happy. Enter your shell house and decide how to finish it, furnish it; which curtains, tiles, wall paint, lights, wall pictures you want to add to it.

Secondly, you must add value to your partner’s quality of life, dreams, investments, position in society and everything else. Nobody marries you to make you a better person! Instead they expect you to make them a better person, to add some value to their life. Nobody marries for charity; you’re in it because you were deemed the additional value. So, add value. Make yourself the treasure your partner has been yearning for and you will be the value-addition. Indulge in each other’s passion, improve each other’s skills, hobbies, knowledge and all abilities and you’re half way there.

Lastly, when you left your parents’ close responsibility, you became free to indulge in what excited you in life. That’s why temptation made itself your permanent roommate. You drank hard, partied alot, dated crazy and did things you wouldn’t do in your parents’ house. That’s when you allowed her to have a stake in your life. At marriage, that stake is signed into your life’s constitution. This means your life is no longer yours alone! Your wife, and later the children, depend upon it too. Your being alive matters a lot. Thus, you have to stop joining senseless brawls that may lead into fights, stop driving recklessly and risking accidents, stop returning home late and risking robbers, etc because there are stakeholders with an interest in your being alive. For their sake, live healthier, eat right, exercise, be clean. If you have been bathing once a week, it may have to be twice a day! Since it makes your sex life vibrant. I wish you my son and our wife, a long and successful marriage.