What did our parents hide from us?

I am at a wedding right now and the priest is giving a heart-warming sermon about love and how beautiful and lovely love is and blah blah blah…

The bride looks radiant, the groom looks…well let’s just say he looks like a groom who has spent a lot of money.

As the very handsome and sexy looking priest drones on and on about marriage, I am thinking of my friend Eka who just moved out of her husband’s house two days ago.

Barely a year and a half ago, we were all gathered like this to celebrate them and their lovely love, we listened to an equally moving homily about patience in marriage and all the works, she had the same look this bride has on her face right now – rapturous joy and love – I remember how she wept happily while taking her vows and how he looked at her with eyes full of love while taking his.

Today, she has moved back home to her parents, after 18 months of marriage.  She entered it looking very beautiful and when she left, she looked like “onye akuru ihe tinker kuru pan” – like she was handled by a panel beater!  Why?  I’ll leave her story for another day.

Having come from what is known these days as a very dysfunctional family, I am not really in a hurry to get married, but I know I will have to cross that hurdle eventually. 

The thing is, these days; a lot of marriages are failing very fast and there are so many horrible stories told by married women that makes my skin crawl (not that it will stop me from getting married sha), and one begins to wonder how our parents –okay, not my parents- marriages worked.  What is that secret that they are not passing on to the younger generation? is there a secret ingredient that we are missing? Are they not telling us sometime?  Are they really as happy as they appear to be?  On the other hand, could it be that something is seriously wrong with our generation?