The man who defined love as a temporary insanity curable by marriage has made most people mad by those very words. Ambrose Bierce might have been insane when he decided to rearrange the wording of that ‘truism.’ To make sense out of that definition, it would be appropriate to look at it through the prism of modern Abrokyire-inspired marriages. And that would mean reading that statement backwards: marriage is a temporary insanity curable by love. Even making it sound like Arabic doesn’t help much, because insanity, temporary or permanent, is something very few people aspire to. Either way, there is love in the equation. We don’t want to make a mistake in the opening paragraph of this article by confusing love with marriage. May be, we can afford to do that in the dieing pages of our story when we would have worked our way to know that if you read the word love backwards, it is ‘evol’. Mark how close ‘evol’ is to ‘evil.’ If you think of the letter ‘o’ as a figure, it is zero. If that does not explain why most modern marriages end on a zero note, there is still more to learn. Perhaps, it is no accident at all that the word marriage sounds so much like a mirage; it often is.
Of course, we are not reducing the beautiful institution of marriage to semantics or pragmatics, even if it appears only a little promising than ‘concubinial’ relationships. Marriage, we mean heterosexual relationships, (the gays would excuse us this time) is still a respectable institution. And he is a liar he who says he enjoys the dreaded single life. “Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty”, celebrated celibate Mother Teresa has said. In fact, those who philosophise about the strategic importance of the single life are those who in their desperate moments spend precious man hours in the solitude of the singleness, day-dreaming the forever-happily-ever-after bliss that a good marriage promises. And they enjoy the dream better in the night because it is the most important thing on their minds. It is not unusual for a single lady to play omnipresence, like God, frequenting every social gathering, to advertise what she has to offer should any son of Adam dare to make a bid.
Single men also have their ways: they change their driving routes, hoping to meet a prospect in the other street. Those who do not have the patience to wait often end up doing the Spitzer whenever they can afford to pay. Or they just spend the boring single moments pleasuring away when the DVD is rolling out the naked images of flirtatious Godforsaken bitches in the porn industry. Other times, you just sit in the sofa, gazing into the dryness of the ceilings and wondering why you didn’t make do with some old prospects. And if you have noticed, you would always go back to find the old prospects still languishing in the prison of their single cells.
The single life is terrible everywhere, but it is most uncomfortable when you live abroad. And it is not because of the cold weather here, at least you can always count on summer; it is mainly because of the individualistic existence that most immigrants new to snow and underground tubes are forced to put up with. If you share a flat with an Iraqi or an Afghan, what could you possibly do together? The gregarious instinct in all of us desperately craves for a little touch of humanity in such situations. Everybody needs somebody, Opanin Kwadwo Kyere, radio marriage counselor, would tell always tell you. When you have a genuine feeling that you need somebody, often distance does not matter much. The objective is to alter the boring pattern of work-home-money transfer-home routine that is the religion of immigrants. So, bringing a partner from your home country to join you abroad is often the dream of many men. It is a dreadful game, but it is the best thing that could happen to anybody if it is successful. It comes at a price, often a big one, but not doing it isn’t any cheaper. And here, Bertrand Russell was unmistakable in his famous gnomic saying: To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead. So, what has to be done ought to be done, and done well. But how well can anybody do something as delicate as marriage, so that all that is well ends well? Oh Shakespeare, how did you get fair Desdemona to love Othello?
May be, I am not the right person to discuss this very important subject, because I haven’t been married for that long. Besides, that very young marriage is already going through a revealing phase that can at best be described as painfully enjoyable or at worst conveniently regrettable. My senior brother in the writing trade, Moses Kofi Yahaya, would do a better job on this. The Columbian trained journalist has done a Masters Degree dissertation on why partners who join their lovers abroad turn the tables on them and make a mess of everything. Moses identified many factors, the chiefest being economic. The gender-liberating culture of the west is also another reason. If a woman stands to benefit from a free council house and a weekly stipend in the event of a divorce, why should she endure the daily nightmare of making the beast with two backs with a man who is a beast through and through? And it is not always the women who turn the tables; some okotokonko African men who are used to the Gold Coast romantic paradigm of wife-cook-clean-lie are unable to cast their kurasini nature aside when they are sponsored by hardworking women to join them abroad. They remain unpolished forever.
But in most cases, it is the women who mess up their men. Otherwise, David Aquah, a fellow language teacher in my school, would be alive today. As I pen this sad piece of construction, family and friends have gathered at the crematorium in Ruislip, North West London, where the Goka born father of two is to be burnt, to please the mother of his children. The picture is still fresh on my mind, when a little over five years ago he sought my company to Heathrow Airport, to pick up his wife. She had come a very modest girl. Indeed, David himself had joked that she had a near peasant appearance but we were convinced that it was a lot better than going for a posh fiery feminist who may have read Ama Atta Aidoo’s Changes. She was wearing a tight Adwoa Yankey blouse over a worn out ‘suudii-dyed’ blue jeans trousers that had been folded at the base. Her shoes were a lot better than what the characters wore in Gulliver’s Travels but they were oversized. The only thing complementary on her was her hand bag, and that was because David had sent it as a Christmas present to her from London. The first time she saw an airplane was when she was escorted to the Kotoka airport by her in laws. So, we were not surprised that she had to be helped to walk on the escalators at Heathrow. At a point, she stopped and swore she was not moving until the electronic stairs stopped. She held onto the husband tightly, her eyes closed until she made it to the concourse. She heaved a big sigh. Nobody would blame a Goka girl for swearing at an escalator. She found the toaster the eighth wonder of the world but today she dials 999 at the least provocation. She could speak English with the speed of a menstruating tortoise but now she is proficient in the language enough to chat away with boyfriends on a mobile phone. It was one of those telephone conversations that incensed her lawfully married husband. She filed for divorce the same week he challenged her about those calls. Talk had gone on that she occasionally entertained boyfriends in her marital bed whenever the husband was away, making money to feed her insatiable greed. David could only see his children as she permitted while an asylum seeker, her new boyfriend, had become the owner of the bed David had shared with her. Thinking about it was unbearable. Stress set in, high blood pressure quickly followed. Depression took over and finally, a heart attack settled it for her. A hardworking Goka scholar has died needlessly. He was only 42.
More terrible stories abound among Ghanaians abroad. Generally, marriages seem to have lost the allure they had when Reverend Kwesi Tawiah and Yaa Nyarko Aboronoma tied the knot some thirty-five years ago. Another ‘Abrokyire marriage’ victim whose story inspired this article told of how he had to spend months in jail at a time that he had to be researching for his PhD thesis. On this occasion, the lady (and often it is the villagers who cause trouble) had devised a cunning plan with divorcees she had chanced on at a konkonsa spot disguised as a hair saloon. They fed her stories on how liberating the single life can be. They also made her aware that she could support her poor family back home better if she had total control over her finances. Besides, she could get a free two bedroom house and a weekly allowance if she became a single mum. With that plot, she wrote her own Hollywood script, playing the role of a battered wife who had to be rescued from Sorbibor. It was a blockbuster that broke box office records.
If a woman misusing a man is unthinkable, a man feigning love to ‘leapfrog abroad on the back of a woman’ is an investment with the devil himself. For, it is only Mephistopheles who can explain why a Simpa Kwaseapanin of a low paid civil servant from Winneba would travel abroad on a woman’s sweat to make a mental case out of the hardworking lady. After getting him the Green Card, the twit paid her back with a red, and vanished to pitch camp with an old lover in another state of the USA. Why would any buffoon treat a woman that way? And as if Christians were not saved by grace, his lover bombards the poor lady with insults daily on the instruction of the former husband. She kept hearing voices after every ‘telephone insult’. It graduated to a strange kind of paranoia. Tears wet her very life. Then she went mad. Yes, crazy. She still is. He is not.
Napoleon once asked of an army general: “Has he luck?” Far from the heavenly sanctified institution that it appears to be, “happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance,” Jane Austin has said. It is a game that must be worked at. According to Ivy Compton-Burnett, “there is more difference within the sexes than between them.” Women ought to be appreciated as selfish and greedy people who always want it all: good job, good looks, good car, good house and money. This is the reason why women marry, not love. They start considering options when one of these things is missing. Men also need to be seen as control freaks who are foolish enough to think that they can satisfy a woman’s true needs. In fact, if there was a third sex, men wouldn’t get so much as a glance from women. No wonder my wife often jokes that she married beneath her.
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