I can’t stand my wife

Share a problem With Auntie Agatha, gataedo@yahoo.com, agatha.edo@gmail.com Tel: 08054500626
Dear Agatha,
I got married to a complete stranger less than three months after we met. The more I got to know her, the more resentful of her I have become.

I discovered she lived a very careless and carefree life; lived with different men; did a lot of night clubbing while in school.

She smokes, is in the habit of dressing immodestly and playing truancy. In fact she played her time away and in the process destroyed herself. She is also spoilt. I got to know a lot of things about her from her friends and those close to her. Some she told me herself. 

Living with her has been terrible. She argues and disagrees with me on everything. She favors going out and spending carelessly even when she has important things to do with money and time. 
Even though she is re-sitting her exams, she hardly sits down to study. We are always at each other’s throats. I am close to hell.
 
The smell coming from the core of her person is enough to drive one out of the bed and house. I am finding it very difficult to continue living with her. This is not my idea of a wife and I feel very bad to the point of wanting to kill myself. 

For now, no baby, I even like it that way. Please advise me on what to do, I am very miserable.
Miserable Husband.

Dear Miserable Husband,
One thing you must appreciate about marriage generally is the fact that it comes in very attractive package. You don’t get to know what the package masks until opened. Some get very good deals, some others get moderate deals while another group get very worst deals. But one thing is certain, whatever we find in our packages, we are to manage and make the best of.

Your challenges are compounded by the shortness of your meeting and decision to get married. This is the tragedy of not taking the marriage institution serious. Most often than not, a lot of couples rush into marriages more for extraneous reasons than the actual desire to stay married. This is why every intending couple must first of all take time out to study each other objectively.

Getting married less than three months after your first meeting showed lack of plan for the future as well as your marriage. It also underscored your ill preparation for the challenges ahead of you both as a married couple.

You must realize that having signed the document in the presence of the world, there is no way you can hurry out of it with the same speed with which you entered into the agreement.

Besides, being from different families, your values and outlook towards life are bound to be different. It takes time for such things to blend in any marriage even if you had all the time in the world to get to know yourselves well before signing the dotted lines.

The tragedy of an ill conceived plan is having to live with it. You must give your marriage a chance to work; by making out time to reposition and refocus. This is the real challenge in every marriage.
The mistakes you see in your wife are the same things she sees in you. If you have one thing to complain about in her, you can be sure she has several things to say about you. This is natural. You are both humans and come with defective manuals from the creator’s work table.
Marriage is lending to each other our strengths, thoughts and dreams. It is also learning from the other person.

There is no way you can both think or act alike. Marriage and life for that matter would be really boring if the same things happen everyday of our lives.
Your wife is your challenge and the link between you and your dream. Despite the shortness of your knowing each other, something must have made you settle for her among the many ladies you must have met in your life. This is the time to explore your reasons.
I appreciate all the confusion, laced with disappointments that must be going on in your head over the quality of woman you married, but if you are honest, are you without blemish?
The kind of things you said about her aren’t things she could have hidden from you for long. Even if she did succeed to conceal the other things from you, the bits about her dress sense and attitude she couldn’t have been able to hide from you. If despite seeing the way she dressed you still went ahead to marry her, the same determination if applied to the protection of your marriage can change a lot of things in your lives.

Doubtless, you have feelings for her; don’t deny this simply because you are disappointed with the package you have. If we all choose to walk away simply because there are too many defects in our packages, the entire marital system would have long collapsed completely.

This is why you must make the essential sacrifice for this marriage. Besides what assurances do you have that if you give her and this marriage up, you will get someone better than she is?
Life doesn’t work the way we plan or hope it would. Sometimes, it takes a very warped path to get us to the promised land.

Sit her down and tell her everything you feel is wrong with your marriage. Say it the way you feel and tell her what your decision is as well. It may not count for much now but overtime, she would begin to appreciate your kind of patience and selflessness in trying to make this marriage work.
Having lived the kind of life you described, getting her to change her person may not be as easy as you think. She is no longer a spring chicken; she is old and already set in her ways. For this reason, her metamorphosis cannot be achieved overnight. It has to be done in phases. The issue of her offensive odor can be tackled first.

She may not even know how bad the odor of her person is. This is something you can help her with without making a fuse out of it. It is a simple matter of suggesting you both take a bath together and in the process help her to wash that vital part of her well. Let it come as romantic suggestions. For a woman who has been around, she will warm up to it. Follow this by buying her new pants. Insist she gets rid of her old ones. Using fresh lime juice, especially after menstruation can get rid of foul smell as a result of the different discharges women secrete at different times of the month.
Encourage her to shave her pubic hair; to minimize the amount of amount discharges trapped in the hair on her pubic region. When a woman isn’t too neat, these can cause her to ooze. You can tell her your aim after these efforts for her to continue on her own.

Advise her to soak her under-wears over night in detergent water. It will help keep them clean.
Although you may wonder at the logic of teaching an old woman how to maintain a certain level of hygiene, the fact is, she is your wife and since her present condition is one of the issues affecting your home, doing it will help your marriage stabilize.

On the issue of her sense of dressing, buy her the kinds of clothes you want her in. Insist she wears them for you because it would make you very happy. The fact that you are not complaining openly about her choice of clothes; only insisting she makes you happy by wearing certain clothes to please you, will in time moderate her choice of attires.
Most times, when you ignore someone, pretend that person doesn’t exist at all; issues like the person’s attitude, manners will cease to have the power to hurt. You notice she is rude and stubborn because you devote time to these issues. Adopt the attitude of walking away as well as total indifference to her when she gets into this mood. Overtime, she will learn to guard her tongue properly.
As long as she hasn’t gone back to her previous ways, rest her past life. Just as you have a past you are not too proud of, this is a side of her, you should overlook. Begin your assessment of her from the point you met her as it will be unfair to use her past to judge her.
Importantly, develop a real relationship with her through constant conversations. This way you would be building a culture of talking your problems over as well as keeping in touch with happenings in each other’s life.
Marriage isn’t a bed of roses; rather it is a thorny, bumpy and tortuous ride before it gets to the smooth part. Count yourself lucky to be experiencing all these at the kindergarten stage of your relationship and not atthe secondary or tertiary stages when it is most difficult to resolve.
What you are going through now is typical and if well managed by you especially; your marriage will end up being among the best. Learn to pray. God always listens. Divorce should never be the immediate option to any marital challenge. If you must consider it, consign it to the last option.
Good luck.