Marriage or Bachelorhood

Proverbs: 21: 9—It is better to live in the attic than inside the house with a quarreling wife 21: 19—It is better to live alone in the desert than with a quarreling and complaining wife
24: 3-4—It takes wisdom to have a good family. It takes understanding to make it strong. It takes knowledge to fill a home with rare and beautiful treasures
27:15-16—A quarreling wife is as bothersome as a continual dripping on a rainy day. Stopping her is like stopping the wind. It is like trying to grab oil in your hand

Ecclesiastes: 7: 26—I found that some women are worse than death. They are as dangerous as traps. Their love is like a net. Their arms hold men like chains. …
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Apollo Milton Obote was a confirmed bachelor until he ascended the Uganda thrown as prime minister. A head of state of an African nation is another long-term bachelor. For most of his autocratic presidency, Moi never had a helpmate besides him. A recent presidential candidate in Uganda is an unabashed bachelor, and drew a lot of rumors and innuendos about his sexuality.

Marriage and Bachelorhood are very interesting phenomena, especially in the African context where tradition, while still entrenched, is also in a state of confused flux.

To many African communities marriage is one of the prerequisite of reaching adulthood. It signals responsibility and a chance to breed those who will help one in old age as well as continue the bloodline. Woe to the woman who is not married at an advanced age, or worse, is barren. It shows up in bitterness, sadness and anger. She is the evil aunt without a husband, who now comes back to the father’s homestead to sow seeds of discords and bad blood. Many would prefer the shanty towns and slums than face humiliation back in the village.

An unmarried man is not taken seriously either, and can be the butt of jokes. Jokesters coin lyrics of folks songs of lamentations on the fates and circumstances of the tottering codger.

So, pressured by nature, tradition and culture, many people plunge into marriage unions before they know: who they are, how the world works or what is “real.” In this milieu few escape the sense of self that is ill-defined, confused, if not corrupted to face the rapidly changing society.

Marriage is now generally and universally accepted as a precursor to starting a family. And the family forms the basic unit of a society. It is in the family that we are supposed to obtain our nurturing—that is, help nature in shaping who we are. But, what is the state of marriage today? If marriage is so important, why don’t we prepare for it like we prepare for law or any other trade?

Like other human concepts, marriage did not just fall from the sky. It probably came in the process of formation of bands of hominids and the emergence of language. The female hominid that was knocked off had to stick to the scorer lest life would become difficult to negotiate for years. In essence marriage is a female conspiracy to tie down the promiscuous male to help take care of the product of fornication—the child. Encumbered with nine-month odyssey of carrying a baby in her belly and several years of the child’s brain development and acquisition of survival skills, the female had to do something. If he wanted exclusive use of her pleasure, the male had to hang around the cave. In time, nature helped her: neural path of attachment, like a footpath in the grass, was ingrained and took hold in the male’s nature. She became like from his “rib.” He would kill if another dipped his manhood in her even as his loin has not yielded to the urge to throw his own seeds far and wide. Today only the Masai can lend his wife to a visitor—even then, it is for the sake of getting more children (should any occur from the encounter) to help take care of his first love--cattle.

The female, on the other hand, has become quite complex in her manipulation of the male species. Hence, such a saying as “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” is not without truth. The male who tears up like her would be laughed out of the village. Not her—she gets her way.

It is true: Men are from mars women are from hell [Venus] (The “…hell” is a title to a song: http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/f/four_year_strong/mens_are_from_mars_women_are_from_hell.html>)
40,000 years of hominid evolution has wired us differently for DNA survival—and that has not changed much. The recent executive brain development that produced civilization often operates unsynchronized with the primitive lower section. As we fail to negotiate the two, we cause problems to ourselves and seeds of our loins. The result is wars that begin at home and engulfs the whole world. So, we have a Hitler, a Mobutu, or another who sticks to power like a tick on his second love--his cow.