Nairobi News

My husband and I celebrated our second wedding anniversary earlier this week. It’s a great feeling, knowing that we have survived year two without killing each other or separating and going our different ways.

Coincidentally, we are also celebrating eight years of our relationship, which started around the same time of the year as our marriage.

I think back and wonder, what if I had not said yes when he popped the question, what if I had said yes, but later on changed my mind.

I remember that during the planning of our wedding, things had gotten so stressful that I had once threatened to call everything off, only to think through things and evaluate the weight of that decision.

LONG COURTSHIP

Was a six year relationship worth throwing away over one disagreement on whether or not we should serve sodas at our wedding? I decided it was not then and I completely agree with myself.

I see so many relationships crumble even before they are given a chance to thrive. A male friend (yes, I still have those) mentioned that he is thinking of leaving his girlfriend of five months. I asked him what the issue was and he said that she was not putting enough effort in the relationship.

He explained that to him, both parties in a relationship must put in equal effort into it in order for things to work. Before he told me that he wanted to leave this girl, he had told me of a pregnancy scare. I asked him if he would still have left her had the pregnancy been there, he said he would just hang on for the sake of the baby.

I would attribute the continued life of our marriage to our long courtship. We dated five years and were engaged for one. That time gave us much insight into the kind of people we truly are, when we drop the façade and are real to one another.

GREAT ACHIEVEMENT

I got to understand what sort of man my husband is; his likes, his dislikes, the buttons not to push… I got to see most of it in that time. He also got to see my good side and less pleasant one. There were no big surprises when the wedding bells had stopped ringing and life got back to normal.

We have heard and seen the celebrities whose own marriages have not hit the one year mark, even after they dated for over half a decade. We all now stories of people we know personally who left their spouse, even if a small child was involved.

I do not know the cause for this, all I can say is that I’m glad not to be part of the statistics.

Two years are not that many. It’s not a great achievement. It will take a lot of work, patience, prayer and support from family and friends to keep this marriage going.

I’m thankful for an understanding partner who is genuinely willing to put in effort to make this thing last. I hope in the next 20 years I will pen an article on how we made our relationship last two decades.