When you are unmarried, you likely want to be married the next Saturday or the next one or maybe next month but you don’t want to wait forever especially if your friends and sisters are married. Your mom, dad, aunty, daddy’s second aunty, grandmothers aunty and the woman who came after your uncle’s step mother would all be asking you the same question “when are you settling down?”. You become ‘unsettled’ when they ask that question no matter how settled you have been before then. Then events turn and you settle down…with many romantic fantasies.
How you guys are constantly waking up to kisses from each other, a home where all you have is all laughter and no squabbles, waking up to coffee or tea in bed….Ah ah!!! that coffee thing, if hubby is dreaming of waking up to coffee from bae and bae thinks the same too, only ghosts would come serve that coffee as both of them are in bed dreaming of coffee. Truthfully, the kind of ‘love’ that leads to marriage has a large portion of romantic infatuation, you know that bubble of romance and its exquisiteness; in my little girl’s voice – “beautiful something”.
Most times, reality replaces many fantasies and issues start arising. Fantasies cannot survive many days and years of living together. Then you start your dumb fights. The long unnecessary arguments, and sometimes yelling about something that was not meant to be sweated.
Like – when you are meant to tell the partner driving the next turn. He is driving but you have the address, 10 minutes after, you say “I think we missed the turning” and he goes “but you have the address” ..”yes, I do, but we were meant to be looking out for the turning together”…I have since stopped being a GPS, address has to be handed over to whoever is driving..I cannot shout!
Or – you are both watching a TV program and without notice, one picks the remote and flips through 30 channels in 10 minutes. “hey, can we stick to one channel please?”, “yes, but we need to check out many first to determine which we would settle for”.
“we can’t make a decision with the rate at which you are flipping through, one has to get the drift of the program before deciding what to watch, not in 10 seconds like you are doing”
“well, give me five minutes”….I have learnt to hide the remote control after I have found something interesting before intrusion.
And the popular “you always…” fight. Generalizations and hasty conclusions to win in a brewing fight. You always forget to turn off the tap, you always forget to replace the towel…you always want to win, you always blame me…This desperate generalizations eventually come back to make me laugh. Once, we were headed to the movies, he forget about the date as he was buried in work and was jolted back to it when I called I was waiting for him. The storm started brewing…I do not like to be kept waiting because he had no patience for waiting too. Well, I spent over 90 minutes waiting before he got to pick me and ‘sorry, I’m late’ couldn’t break the raging storm. I wanted to express whatever feeling I had that day…anger, hurt, fatigue…but he wanted sorry to be enough.
Then the shouting began, “listen to me…”, “oh! no, you listen to me..I’m the one whose been on my feet waiting for you”, “but I told you I was on my way”, “yet you didn’t say how far away you were”…”you always keep me waiting” “you always want to pick a fight”…and many others “you always”…. end of story was that we turned back home after our lungs were tired from shouting and saw no movie eventually.
Got home, 30 minutes after…took a good look at each other…shook heads at one another and started laughing hard.
Sometimes, these fights are like storms, but in a tea-cup, and can’t hurt or drown anything but sugar.
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