Beyond The Vows

As an adult, I want to believe that the moment you become a parent, you would want to put your kids first and give them the best of everything that you can give, but you can't do that when you're unhappy, can you?

_{photo by Stephen Harlan}

As an African man, divorce is something that is highly frowned upon in this part of the world, but the world is evolving and everyone wants to do things the western way so we have people getting in and out of marriages these days like they're boyfriends and girlfriends.

Now, in as much as I'm not really a huge fan of people getting divorced, I will always pick that over remaining in a marriage that is abusive or makes you unhappy because at the end of the day, a marriage won't work out if any of you is unhappy in it. You could endure the torture and stay for certain reasons but like I said, it will just be torture.

Anyways, to the question being asked in today's contest topic, in as much as we know that both parents not living together as a family due to a divorce could have some kind of effects on a child, what I think will have a bigger effect on that child is you choosing to remain in an unhappy marriage.

And the reason why I say that is because I believe that the only way you can spread genuine happiness to someone else is when you yourself is happy. And if you happen to be in a marriage that just isn't working out (even after you've tried all you can to make it work) simply because you don't want your kid to have to go through the trauma of you guys being seperated, you're going to end up putting him or her into a bigger trauma, a trauma of watching his or her parents quarrel and fight every day.

And why that's a lot worse than you just choosing to end that marriage is that your child won't be the only one going through it, you too will, because you're choosing to remain in that marriage.

So at the end of the day, you would find out that the kid you're trying to make happy by being in that marriage isn't even happy because no child will be excited watching his or her parent fight all the time..

Meanwhile, you could get out of that marriage, heal yourself and hopefully go back to being as happy as you want to be, then if it turns out that your kid still feels sad from the whole divorce thing, you can take some of that happiness and transfer it over to him or her, because like I said, you have to first be happy for you to make someone else happy.

Also, a divorce isn't a death sentence, it's not like one of the parent is going to disappear or die. The kid could still have both parent in their life, the only difference is that they all won't be living under the same roof as one big happy family.