Matters of the Family and Love

By Stephen K. Ainsah-Mensah

1. If one could live well without fear of outward hardships that is a guarantee provided by money. Thus, monetary power has come to settle, in large measure, the issue as to whether a man can win the love of a woman one wants and wants to sustain; so love in modern times has lost much of its natural charm outside the sphere of money.

2. Take the case of a man who was brought up by a single parent. Suppose this parent was a woman full of courage and evidently successful, it is likely that the man would acquire the attributes of her mother – and more so. The man’s comparative advantage is that he is able to make up more than usual for the missing father in his life with a great personality.

3. Many parents, especially in traditional societies, tend to give much more care to sons than daughters. This prevents females from developing adventurous personalities. Thus, daughters may end up being unnecessarily placid and docile while they suffer from chronic suppressed talents. The source of gender discrimination is largely from this needless familial construction.

4. A liberated woman is the one whose mental and emotional refinement provides vital solutions to pressing problems while proving innovative in many respects. Besides, she sees a man, not as a natural competitor but as a creature with like aptitudes.

5. Man’s pride is damaged more by woman than by a fellow man when woman expresses the moral, mental or emotional weaknesses of man, usually in public. Opposites detest exposing each other’s terrible flaws.

6. When woman is able to win the committed interest and care of man, it could come largely from the woman’s artistic flair.

7. Man’s mental weakness grows, not from inadequate schooling or book knowledge; it comes mostly from a narrow perception of life, from what we properly term ignorance and arrogance. These defects are the result of a strained mind bearing a crooked window to the outside world. The clever woman takes advantage of these weaknesses granted she is the wife of such a man. Her benefits come largely from the material support of the man. The man showers gifts and all sorts of things on his wife in order to reinforce his ignorance and arrogance.  What this man does not understand is that the woman takes him to be not her match;  she is not willing to arrange or take her husband to important public places for fear that he may talk himself out or present a public show that could belittle or shame her.

8. Modesty, which, perhaps, used to be a significant trait of a good family, is no more so in the present acquisitive world. Presently, pride and majesty rule.

9. Suppose a man does not understand his wife or a woman does not understand her husband and that this is a frequent phenomenon, the problem must have arisen from a big deficit in the use of body language and verbalisms.

10. Today’s good family was built on the principles of yesterday’s family; but what is a good family? It is a family that shows success in the raising of kids and bears marks of adequate moral standards, proves through its members to be industrious, and retains the essential attributes of good leadership. Such a family is aware of the importance of dignity and indiscriminate love and expresses it about itself and to or for others.

11. Consider a very shy man who is made to enter a room full of very attractive women. He pays off for the lack of social skills, for the lack of outgoing attributes, with an exquisite physical appearance. This is not modesty but unannounced pride. It appears clear that woman is hardly pleased with such a man unless he strives to back his presence with some manly show, whichever way it may go.

12. It turns out to be true that a woman who refuses to please her husband because he is financially unlikeable has brought the curse of artificial love unto herself. Love tends not to work under such circumstances and, in fact, is doomed to fail.

13. A woman pesters her husband that her repetitive stay at home is making life monotonous, thus eroding the charm previously experienced about their marriage. The wife presses upon the husband that they should be going out together to exciting places despite the fact that the husband’s busy work schedule does not favour this outing. There is a zone of intolerance here. Suppose the man is compelled to give in to her wife’s passionate scheme, thus impairing his health and work, it may be that the woman has a problem with self-esteem of the form: “the unusually long stay of my husband outside may ruin the vitality of my marriage, so I must strive to bring him back to the initial level to which our marriage was strengthened through our long stay together.” The woman does not, at this point, appreciate the increase in the household income, which has come about as a result of the husband’s longer working hours. But this is an example of an unusual kind of egotism, which has to be purged sooner than later. It is also true to say that the woman has to do a serious evaluation of her mental, emotional and social skills either with her husband or with well-meaning people – or both. But, then, the flaw of the man is also evident from the fact that he does not seem to understand that the repeated isolation of the woman – even though the husband is bringing home much money – is not playing well on the emotions and frame of mind of the woman. A balance in each couple’s preferences needs to be sought and put in place.

14 Consider a male child from a well-to-do family. He is provided all the necessary benefits to enable him be happy. Suppose the child shows very little intelligence but much more naughtiness in school and in general life, what must have gone wrong? It seems clear that there is a big lack of parental communication and constructive guidance here. The child grows in terrible pomposity; he proves to be absent-minded many a time. The parents have failed in their duty to take care of the child in a manner that conforms to acceptable standards, the rules for child development. In exceptional cases, the child is naturally incorrigible.

14. Patient, amiable and giving men face wives who see such attributes as sources for manipulation. There comes about one-sided expectations and demands that the man eventually sees as a scourge on his integrity and personal progress. The man’s repeated attempts to restructure his personality fails; the marriage gets watered down.

15. Monotony in life and work is something man dislikes and woman dislikes too; but a habitual pattern in a marital relationship is proof of monotony. The outgoing man sees monotony as an impediment to a colourful marriage, and the outgoing woman sees it in like manner. Both adults want monotony expunged. But, then, expunging monotony requires both the man and the woman to undertake regular outings together. If only the man does so or only the woman does so, there surely would take place an awful insecurity in the marriage structure. The man decides to go alone by arranging a transfer to work at a place far away from the wife. This could breed suspicion from the wife, or the wife may just get fed up in the course of time. One can be sure of the staining of the marriage despite many attempts to save it for the sake of the couple’s child or children.

16. Every overambitious man has to be careful not to marry a home-based wife full of the docile and unusually caring character. It is clear that the woman would feel very insecure and would do everything in her power to win her husband’s unfailing love. But this is not good for the overambitious man to achieve his goals as constraints are put on his creative skills. His most appropriate wife ought to be the woman with like thoughts. Even so, the marriage may be more workable if the couple live together more like “partners” than as husband and wife.

17. Good-mannered women raise their children with the principles of dignity, courtesy, relevant cooperation, social skills and circumspection; good-mannered men nurture in their children creative pride, principles of leadership, personal and professional advancement. However, the principles of the woman and man may overlap. For these reasons, children need both parents to put together the attributes necessary for developing exemplary children.

18. There is a time that the squabbles of a married couple diminish or tend to end. That is the time they choose to live together as very good friends, not as husband and wife.

19. Marriage from the onset may not function naturally if the marriage process was forced upon the couple by the parents. By and large, the new couple may lack conversational and other life skills necessary for enlivening the marriage. Yet, the parents’ superfluous selfishness becomes manifest from their insistence that the marriage was crucial to bear a child in order to reinforce the family tree.

20. Woman’s calculating tendencies coupled with her intellectual prudence generally outweigh that of man’s. She compensates for her comparative physical weakness – though not in many other cases - with mental and emotional toughness. If these two categories of toughness are fully unearthed, they overwhelm the influential man when he least expects. Understand that the said woman strives to own the influential man as if he is a personal property and exploit him to be with her at important public places in order for her to be also influential. But there is a limit to this, failing which the man may turn against the ego gratification of her woman.

21. Typically, a successful couple may get their targeted goals satisfied to their mutual joy when the woman fully supports the goals of the man and the man fully supports the goals of the woman. In fact, this follows the principle of reciprocity.

22. The terribly egotistic man abandons his love for his wife when the latter bears a new child. He then sees the wife as lacking the previous attributes of physical beauty though the initial process that led to the wife’s present physical appearance was generated by the husband: impregnating the woman. This man is a spoiled child of his parents; for he has been made to feel through his upbringing that the falsely earned domineering character of a man enables the man to decide whatever pleases him irrespective of the situation.

23. In general, man tends to lend financial support to woman more than woman does so for man. Why? Now, try to analyze the meekness of man in relation to his wife. What you may see is the point that woman is an expert in coordinating her colourful, romantic talk with emotional and physical charm such that her husband caves in to her constant requests for sustenance even as she has more than enough money or things to support her. She further gratifies her husband with caressing skills. And this zone of life proves how woman is cleverer than man. Man is usually unable to do a similar thing, at least not as well as the wife. His inner drives guide him towards other pursuits that are outside the ambit of his relationship. There is a point man's destabilized mental and emotional character compels him to seek comfort and mildness in life from the stated woman-ness of his wife.

24. Now, I come in to offer my conclusion. Let the battle or the race begin between husband and wife in the field of personal interests. Ask yourself: who is likely to win? Well, go back to point 23, and judge for yourself. The woman wins! It is a sweet win, and the husband admits his loss with a glad heart. Man keeps underestimating the coordinated intelligence of woman!