THE breakdown of songstress Tiwa Savage and her manager Tunji Balogun’s marriage kept the media engrossed for the better part of two weeks. It was, however, just one more failure in a long and widening line of celebrities’ broken marriages. Distressed marriage, or its more final variant, divorce, is of course not a staple of celebrities alone. You don’t have to be famous, live in poor countries, or reside in a developing or underdeveloped democracy to divorce. Virtually the same reasons that predispose the rich and famous and the bond and free to divorce apply among the poor and dispossessed as well as among those living in democracies and under dictatorships. Indeed, divorce is fast becoming the leitmotif of humanity.
Nigeria, for which this column can speak a little authoritatively, has found coping mechanisms for distress in marriage. From culture that frowns more at a divorced but sometimes innocent and decent woman and rhapsodises a coarse and brutish philanderer, to the law itself which is loth at every stage to weigh in with expert ideas and sensible interventions, and on to the admissibility of harems either through religion or native law and custom, it is all but guaranteed that there may never be a reliable statistics of broken marriages in Nigeria. But for many other countries outside Africa, statistics show that the marriage institution is under grave threats. More than half or two-thirds of marriages end in divorce in many developed countries, with Russia topping the list by some estimates.
So, whether Nigerians are shocked by the reasons Ms Savage gave for the collapse of her less than two years old marriage or not, or whether they frown at the seeming irresponsibility and childish tantrums of Mr Balogun or not, there is nothing extraordinary about their inability to sustain their marriage beyond a few beggarly years. They have laundered their dirty linens too openly for the relationship to heal. As most newspapers yesterday showed through copious reporting of celebrities’ failed marriages, that special group of entertainers has a difficult task keeping their marriages going. Not only do they wed in public glare, they are literally performing marital duties, down to its salacious contents, in pure and censorious daylight. And when the crash comes, thanks to an undifferentiating and lascivious social media feasting on their stories and lusting for blood and tragedy, the fall is often mighty and irredeemable.
This column has no interest in examining why Ms Savage and Mr Balogun’s marriage collapsed. It is a needless exercise. The damage is already done, and no celebrity, let alone an anonymous commoner, will learn any lesson. Were that possible, every celebrity would learn to pick and choose well after examining the grief a colleague came to. Indeed, how do you counsel someone who is by nature not reflective to reflect on a prospective partner? How do you advise someone whose testosterone is racing, and who is determined to give free rein to that untethered, high-pitched momentum till his 70s, to avoid a prudish lady of high breeding who has mastered her own desires? How do you prod an irreligious man whose every instinct and pore exudes polygamous fantasies to sustain a sedentary lifestyle revolving around one great and perhaps deep and professorial woman? The world is a fantastic pastiche of multiplicity and florid display of personalities. Success will always mix with failure, and evil with good, until utopia comes.
The marriage institution is today being redefined. In times past it could not exist except between a man and a woman. Now it has multiple and even legal and constitutional meanings. It is not yet known how far and wide the frontiers of marriage would be expanded; but perhaps in this generation, newer and more troubling definitions would become legally and constitutionally admissible. For the purpose of this piece, a traditional definition of marriage will be assumed. Furthermore, it will be assumed that a distinction between a peaceful or good marriage and a warring and unstable marriage exists. The unstable marriage may not always end in divorce if a spouse exhibits the forbearance needed to accommodate an unreasonable partner. But it is far better for a prospective couple to study each other beyond the surface to discover common grounds, common worldviews, and internal constitutions transcending the meretricious.
It is strange that the world seems oblivious of the danger constituted to the health of the community by dysfunctional marriages, whether in permanent instability, as seems the norm, or in regression to divorce. Whether the world likes it or not, the larger picture of politics or business is a reflection and projection of the smaller emblematic picture of marriage. The more dysfunctional families become, of which marriage is the cornerstone, the more the society becomes susceptible to vices and tyrannies of every kind. Scarred marriages leave lasting impact on nuclear and extended families, no matter how valiantly they attempt to transcend its troubling elements and consequences. Napoleon Bonaparte’s unrequited love for the hugely distracted Josephine was a factor in his rule, leading in the opinion of this columnist to an attenuation of his policy brilliance and genius, and serving as a trigger for his frequent eruptions and tenuous family attachments. Joseph Stalin’s lack of family mooring bordering on disdain for his wife, Nadezheda Alliluyeva, whom he drove to distraction, given his impatience with her bipolar disorder, might explain a part of his misanthropy in the name of industrialisation, economic growth and empire building.
In contrast, the quietude enjoyed by Charles de Gaulle on the home front buoyed by the couple’s compatibility might also explain a significant part of the success he achieved as a leader and the composure with which he took principled stand at key junctures of his life and politics, including his characteristic brinkmanship. Winston Churchill’s achievements, largeness and lofty principles are difficult to comprehend outside his stable and effervescent marriage to a woman, Clementine, whom he described as complex and formidable, especially given both his general disposition to gamble his future on the throw of a dice and the depression that sometimes wracked him. The marriage angle to successful leadership and politics may require more study, but this column has always been intrigued by a noticeable correspondence between some degree of stability and complementarity on the home front and the successful enunciation of great and visionary ideas and implementation of great and impactful societal programmes. The point is that there is of course no direct correlation between a good marriage and great leadership, but a potentially great leadership may be derailed or undermined by unstable marriage.
But far more importantly, every prospective spouse has a responsibility to choose a partner well, whether he is into music, entertainment, politics or leadership. Peace of mind is irreplaceable. Complementarity is great and profound. And to choose well is to find a soul mate in the idealistic sense who is dead or indifferent to materialism, who is unfazed by a spouse’s achievements, who sees sex not in the unrealistic and hyperbolic sense the world now sees it but as an expression of closeness, warmth, friendship and bonding. Today, every medium — from radio to television as well as newspapers to Internet — promotes sex in the lurid, prurient and detached and casual sense, sustained by a cornucopia of pharmaceutical concoctions, pornography and heights of pleasure that are either difficult to achieve or sustain without resorting to monstrosities and other forms of addictions. The celebration and glamorisation of sex have created disturbing diversions from its original and more sensible and restrained purposes, to explorations in uncharted and demonstrably unsustainable terrains. These in turn have led to either the redefinition, if not complete expunction, of the term ‘infidelity’, or its subsumption to indulgent, age-old cultural signposts. It has also led to men killing and priming themselves to please their spouses in the jackal sense, and women exhibiting themselves in the limiting and humiliating sense as objects of pleasure.
As Ms Savage and Mr Balogun are demonstrating by their very public and tragic falling-out, the consequences of a broken marriage go far beyond the obvious. In their flawed relationship, they mirror so many things about the indiscriminate morphing of Nigerian culture, the distressing and lascivious spirit of the age, the shifting understanding and redefinition of values in their relentless state of atrophy, and the overwhelming movement towards a global mean of marital fundamentals that conform lesser and lesser to the human species. For the marriage institution, global scepticism is giving way to global cynicism. And as bad choices mix with bad character and misshapen values, the world will gradually drift from anchor farther into a formless sea of moral turpitude exposing a yawning gap that cannot be bridged till the end of days.
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