Category Archives: marriage advice
Marriage Advice You Must Ignore Until You Find The Right Person
Marriage is a concept that is cherished across cultures. Marriage means many things to many people. It, therefore, does not come as a surprise that despite countless issues arising from marriage, more and more people seek to experience it.
However, Nigerian musician Banky Wellington known as Banky W for short believes individuals must decide for themselves when they deem right to settle down with a lifelong partner.
In his submission in an Instagram post, he touched on three salient concerns in connection with marriage – Pressure from society, inadequate without a partner or even being tagged incomplete.
He believes that primarily, pressure from society must not be the reason to marry an individual especially when either of the two parties is unsure of embarking on a lifelong journey with the other. Succumbing to pressure to marriage without any key desire to ‘leave and cleave’ will only spell doom for the couple.
Inadequate as an unmarried person: Maturity is relative, according to the musician. That is why Banky W believes that marriage does not guarantee that one will become mature.
The ability for a person to adequately contribute to society stems from maturity and unmarried folks could be even more mature than some married folks. If an immature person marries it doesn’t automatically make them mature.
Completeness: It is true that a home feels very complete when it’s hosting married couples and by extension children.
However, if one hastens to marry when s/he hasn’t found the right person. There is a high possibility of breakup which will, in turn, render one “incomplete” again.
So why rush to complete only to become incomplete in the long run.
Banky W has thus encouraged as many as are ready and has found the right person to go ahead and marry as it is a good thing.
But he also advises individuals against falling for pressure to marry when they are not ready.
“By far the best decision I have made in my adult life was to wait until I found my wife. People will pressure you and try to make you feel inadequate or incomplete.. all because you’re not living according to their own mental timetable. Ignore them.
“Focus on your journey, your happiness, and on making yourself a better person. My prayer is that you will discover like I did, that the right person is worth waiting for.
Mrs Wellington, I’m still amazed that I get to call you mine. Thank you for loving me. Thank you for building with me. Thank you for believing in me and for inspiring me to be a better man. My purpose partner, my rock, my destiny, my Shug, my wife, my life… Happy tradiversary Skuu. Love you SCATTER,” his post read.
Ex not sure whether to attend wedding
Adapted from a recent online discussion.
Dear Carolyn: I married my high-school sweetheart when we were both 25 – not because we were soul mates or even particularly happy together, but because we were imagination-lacking, co-dependent and afraid to let go. We stayed married for three years before I cried uncle and filed for divorce, with his agreement that it was the right thing to do. While it was painful at first, we have wound up more or less friends again, and share a social circle.
He is getting married again in four weeks, and I’m invited to the wedding. First marriage for the new bride. I’ve been perusing their wedding website and, maybe this is my glass of wine talking, but I’m having a hard time with all the quotes and hashtags that reference “forever.” She is so happy they will be together “forever.”
Don’t get me wrong, I hope their marriage works out, but that language seems ridiculous considering he has been married before, believing it would be “forever,” and it wasn’t. This is leading me to rethink attending their wedding – I’m afraid I might scoff my way through the ceiling. Any ideas to reshape my thinking?
– Feeling Discarded
Oh, but it’s so easy – you guys thought it was forever, but you were “imagination-lacking, co-dependent and afraid to let go” (now there’s a sign to have tastefully lettered and mounted over my sink), and this time the couple is mature and clear-eyed and in loooove enough for a lifetime.
Yeah, yeah.
But do you really want to live in a world where hope never triumphs over experience?
Read more:
And/or where a bride-to-be hashtags, #hopingitsticks?
I don’t. But if you do, or if you don’t but you’re not feeling it, and/or if you present even the slightest scoff risk, then maybe it’s time to back out. Doing so four weeks out is not the most polite move ever, but it beats the day before, and it beats eye-rolling the bride.
Re: Scoffing: She and her ex “have wound up more or less friends again,” but the letter suggests “less” is winning out. Skipping the wedding seems like a mercy.
– Merciful
Re: Ex’s Wedding: Don’t go. I have a few friends who have attended the wedding of an ex and it always turned out to be a bad idea. Not necessarily because they did something dramatic and embarrassing there, but because my friends came away feeling like crap. The nature of a wedding is just not designed to leave an ex feeling good about attending.
– Anonymous
Re: Wedding: I’m getting married soon. Three of my four bridesmaids are my fiance’s exes. Last weekend I was my best friend’s maid of honor. My date was my fiance, her ex-boyfriend. They’re good friends. It was a beautiful wedding and we were honored and joyous to be there.
I think “Discarded” shouldn’t go if she’s not feeling it, but it’s by no means a universal rule that you shouldn’t attend an ex’s wedding. If you’re actual friends – not just amicable former partners – you should go if you want to, without worrying that you’ll come away feeling like crap.
– No Bridesmaids for Me?
You’re right – and, may I say, gloriously entangled, disentangled and re-entangledish. Thanks.
Email Carolyn at tellme@washpost.com, follow her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/carolyn.hax or chat with her online at noon Eastern time each Friday at www.washingtonpost.com.
Read or Share this story: https://www.freep.com/story/life/advice/2018/11/19/wedding-ex-husband/2002512002/
Ladies' man turns out to be husband material
Velmarie “Val” Parker had heard countless times that she needed to meet Leland Callaway. Leland had heard the same from their mutual friends.
“But when we first met there were no sparks flying at all. He went his way and I went mine,” Val says.
The first time I saw my future spouse:
She says: “He is so handsome. He had dark black wavy hair — and a lot of it. He was just a handsome man. I thought I would never have that handsome a person as a husband. He was very, very handsome and he was very outgoing, somebody you could just fall in love with immediately — but it wasn’t the time.”
He says: “She was very cute, she was fun and she was outgoing. She was really a pleasant person.”
On our wedding day:
She says: “I was amazed at the number of people who came because this wasn’t where I grew up. This was the church that I attended and so many people from where I worked were there. I was amazed by the number of people who came to my wedding.”
He says: “She wanted it to rain — and it rained everywhere we went.”
My advice for a long happy marriage is:
She says: “Let Jesus be the center of your relationship. Don’t hold grudges. Be forgiving and don’t take things personally — realize that there are times in your life that you don’t feel as well as others and you might say things you wouldn’t say otherwise. And just always try to put the other person first.”
He says: “Both of you be Christians, that was one of the main things for both of us.”
Val had moved from near Glenwood, where she grew up, to Little Rock to go to nursing school just about the time Leland had left Little Rock for Jacksonville College in Jacksonville, Texas.
They both went to Temple Baptist Church — first Leland, and then Val — and they had the same group of friends there.
“But, of course, we did not know each other,” Val says. “Our friends would all say, ‘Oh, you’ve got to meet Leland,’ and then they would say to him, ‘Oh, you’ve got to meet Val.'”
When Leland returned to Little Rock for a visit and saw his friends at church on a Sunday morning in 1957, they made sure to introduce him to Val.
“We just met in the foyer of the church and everybody was there, people coming in and going,” Val says. “He had been to church there and everybody loved him and was talking to him. We said hello and then we just sort of went our different ways.”
Leland left to go back to Jacksonville right after the morning worship service, with no more than that brief introduction to Val before he left.
But when he was back in town a year or so later they met again.
Leland went to the Wednesday night service at church and afterward he joined his friends for bowling. His friends were also Val’s friends, of course, and she went, too.
“She was a good bowler. She was a real good bowler,” Leland says. “I watched her bowl and thought I sure would like to date her. She sure is cute. I called her the next day and asked her out.”
They went to a service at another Baptist church led by a friend and former roommate of Leland’s and afterward they went to his friend’s house.
“We just laughed and had a good time talking,” Leland says. “When we left and I took her home, to the dorm where she was staying, I told her, ‘I’m going to marry you.'”
Val’s response was probably not the one he had hoped for.
“I said, ‘You’re just like what I thought you were. A ladies’ man,'” she says.
Leland went back to Jacksonville, and he began writing to Val.
“We had a dating relationship that way. He wrote a letter to me every day,” says Val, who wrote to him most days, too. “We dated through the mail. He is a natural writer. I can’t think of that much to say. I don’t have that much to say. But he would write two pages every time and it was all very interesting.”
He came back to Little Rock to see her when he could, and she visited him in Texas a couple of times as well.
“From that first time I said I was going to marry her I started working toward that end,” Leland says. “She was everything I had been looking for, both physically and spiritually. I was a ministerial student at that time and she was just fit in every way for that.”
They eventually started discussing marriage and made the mutual decision to exchange their vows.
“I was 24 so I was over the age of the average dating person and I was very interested in my work but I was also ready to have a husband and a family, so it was the right time,” Val says. Leland is 4 1/2 years older than she.
They were wed on June 5, 1959, in Temple Baptist Church, where they had met.
It was a rainy day — just what Val had prayed for — and the rain followed them all the way to Gulfport, Miss., where they honeymooned on the beachfront, then back to Little Rock to pick up Val’s belongings and then to Jacksonville, where they moved into their first apartment together as newlyweds.
“It rained, but it was romantic,” she insists. “I love rainy weather. It’s one of my favorite things.”
Val got a job as a nurse in the Jacksonville hospital and Leland continued his work at the college there, along with his ministerial studies. They moved from Jacksonville to Magnolia, where they live today, but there were a few other moves along the way. From Magnolia they moved to Lubbock, Texas, where Leland got a doctorate in business, then back to Magnolia.
“In 1990 he decided to quit teaching and just pastor so we moved to College View Baptist Church in Nacogdoches, Texas, and after about 10 years we decided to move back to Magnolia and we’ve been here ever since,” Val says.
The Callaways raised four children– Kelli Harwell, Khalin Callaway and Kyle Callaway, all of Magnolia, and Kevin Callaway, who died about five years ago. They also have six grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
“The Lord has blessed us in so many ways,” Val says.
If you have an interesting how-we-met story or if you know someone who does, please call (501) 425-7228 or email:
kimdishongh@gmail.com
Leland and Val Callaway met in church in 1957, introduced by mutual friends they met at separate times. “She was everything I had been looking for, both physically and spiritually,” Leland says.
High Profile on 11/18/2018
Ask Amy: Experienced advice for Sad Mom
Dear Amy: To “Sad Mom,” who was overwhelmed with love for her new baby, but not feeling any love for her toddler; more than 50 years ago I gave birth to three little girls within 2½ years. It was tough, even with two sets of loving grandparents nearby. There were days I never took off a flannel nightgown until dinnertime, when I was buried by mountains of diapers and baby clothes, stacks of dishes, a vacuum sitting in a corner and a load to put in the dryer downstairs.
My advice to Sad Mom is this: if there are any young teenagers (12 or older) in your neighborhood and you can afford to pay them for an hour or two a day two afternoons a week, right after school, hire them immediately to come and play/watch your kids while you go for a walk, take a shower or a bath, get a manicure, go grocery shopping, whatever you need to give yourself a break. It will be the best money you will ever spend. It will save your sanity, even your marriage.
If grandparents are nearby and willing, ask for their help.
You do not have to go through this alone. No money? Even if you and a neighbor trade kids for an afternoon, figure out a way to get help.
Your babies will be better off for it, and so will you. Been There
Dear Been There: Sage advice. Many people who responded to this situation noted how expensive child care is, but I completely agree with you that a “mother’s helper” or a neighborly trade-off will help.
Dear Amy: I just read this line in your column, responding to a person who was judging someone else very harshly:
“You should feel compassion toward someone who doesn’t have your expansive capacity.”
Amy, this brought tears to my eyes. This applies to so many different situations. Thank you. I’m going to remember this. A Fan
Dear Fan: Thank you.
I want you, and other readers, to know that over the many years of writing this column, my own compassion toward people with problems, large or petty, has expanded to fit the space.
This has been the most surprising impact of being an advice-giver: I may have many of the answers, but I still have problems and empathy for others who are also struggling.
