Does the hyper-romanticization of relationships set us up for failure?
My grandmother tells me that she met my grandfather after two weeks of being his wife. Here me, she was married to him for two whole weeks BEFORE she met him. She tells me this with a smile on her face because she knows my modern, grossily and overly romanticized view of love and marriage cannot comprehend this. She was sixteen years old when she was brought to my grandfather’s family home while he was out doing construction work in the next town. My grandfather’s first wife had died and his brothers wasted no time finding him a replacement. There is a tenderness with which my grandmother tells this story, and for me, well I am like “stolen bride”.
She was just a young woman, doing young women things when one of my grandfather’s brothers saw her living her best village life. He (the brother) asked around about her (we call this stalking), he inquired about her family and where she lived. He then went to tell the rest of his family, eight boys and one girl, that he had found his older brother a new wife. He organized a little family trip back to where he’d found her and they all agreed that they were going to marry her for him. My grandfathers family took a few cows to my grandmother’s father, she was clothed in new-bride traditional attire and taken to her new family. She laughs when she tells me about his reaction to seeing her for the first time: “he said I was too short” and she really was. But it was too late, there was no return policy, they were going to be a family now, height didn’t matter.
I asked her how she survived fifty years of marriage to a man she met two weeks after being his wife and she simply says two things — 1. there was no return policy in marriage for us, whatever was broken, we were going to fix and 2. we did not go to bed angry. “It’s biblical you know, Nororo (her nickname for me), ‘do not let the sun set in your anger’, that what the bible says” she tells me. My grandparents marriage was unconventional for their time especially when it comes to gender roles. My grandfather was my caretaker, he was a stay at home granddad and my grandmother was the breadwinner. There was also no overt romance but there must have been romance because these two wild ones made ten children together. TEN! Two of the ten died when they were infants, so may grandparents raised eight children together and I was their nineth.
I remember a lot of their marriage, I was nine when my grandfather died. I remember how they used to make working the garden fun by breaking us up into team, my grandmother’s team had the most fun. I remember how the three of us laid in bed eating the fish my grandfather hid in the pocket of his jacket after recieving his pension each month. I remember how my grandfather cooked, cleaned and helped me wash my school uniform. What I don’t remember is a fight, not one argument. My grandmother called her husband “tata” which means “father”, she had such a deep respect and reverence for him. I think she respected him more than she loved him.
My grandmother’s screams echoed in my head for months, the screams she let out when she saw her husband dead in his garden. She screamed, wailed, threw herself on the ground, lifted both of her arms above her head making it difficult for those trying to comfort her to hold her. My grandmother lost so much that day, her husband, her baby daddy, and her protector. She was only 56 years old when he died, and he was 74! I once jokingly asked why she never remarried and her answer was “no one is like my husband, I can’t be with anyone who is not him”.
I reflect on my grandparents marriage because I wonder if our modernized, hyper-romanticized and often unrealistic views of marriage can learn from them. My grandparents had no expectation beyond building a life with another person, creating a partnership rooted in respect and shared values. What they connected through was their love for God, their belief in family and community. They were who they wanted to make it work with. No hopeless romantic ideals, but life and partnership. My grandparents didn’t lean on love for their relationship to work, they leaned on commitment and responsibility. Pewww! This is a challenge for me because social media makes relationships like inferior to what we see displayed. But, I wonder what magic we can create with simplicity, clarity and yes, don’t get me wrong, LOVE.
