” Treat your wife with respect and care, she is your helper, not your competitor. Care for her dearly, protect and provide, my son,” said a father to his 24 years old son getting married.
This was the story of old, as told to me by my late great-grandmother. These were some of the words I remember from what she heard her father in law tell her husband in 1936, in the presence of many other men relatives who were agreeing with his every word.
While narrating this love story to me, granny expressed how this generation is suffering because of the lack of men responsible enough to take on the mentoring task for other men. A responsibility that comes with offering the necessary guidance and counseling, while presenting self with integrity and passion for community growth, peace, and harmony. She could also mention how wars are partly to blame and culture change that has seen women rise up to take up roles that were never theirs to bare.
Today I am a married woman who in her first year had to counsel, share ideas and aspirations of what marriage should be like, listened to heartbreaking stories and prayed for many struggling while picking notes for my own. Within all this, one thing kept on echoing, Men were Lacking.
Men were lacking because they didn’t get any or enough preparation before marriage like their wives. For gals, marriage training starts at 2 years old by taking care of dolls. Everything from keeping and managing a home is taught to you within everything until you say ‘I do’. For boys, it’s the other way round like everything else in their lives; they are supposed to know after all they are now men taking on a woman. The church would be thought to be the place where both sides get balanced instructions only for it to be like families nowadays, hell-bent on the girl child pleasing her husband and forgetting or leaving out the emphases on the role of the boy child in this pleasing.
The happy ever after is not as it has been portrayed. The women are too much and the men are not enough. The comparisons are heartbreaking, the difference is where one is very ready because of earlier preparations it would seem natural and the other is so green, he is trading towards ignorant.
Because of the above would be ignorance, my husband’s foundation (Kuteesa Foundation – For The Boy Child organization) is planning a 3 hours group session for young men intending to get married.
The session is for men to share thoughts, views, guidance, counseling and ideas about marriage. It will be a mixed up group of men recently married, getting married and those who might be considered generals in the field.
It is a free event where donations to the foundations will be accepted but our main focus will be that the young men getting into marriage acquire the desired knowledge, counseling, and guidance needed to be good, better and best husbands.
Don’t be a lone ranger. You will fail. Everyone needs to be accountable to someone, this session will provide intending and those already in with accountability partners. Young men need other men to challenge them in their spiritual walk, and as noticed they also need men to show them how to move into the institution of marriage.
Call the numbers on the flyer or email, you can also leave a comment on this post, you will be contacted.
