WE LOVE, WE LIVE, WE DIE

When God made man and everything else for man to dominate, God looked around his works and saw that it was all very good. Then he added a bonus when he saw that man was lonely and needed a partner, so God made him a Woman. This is the premise where we all draw the fact that at one point in a man's life, he must settle down and like Adam with Eve, must bear children. So marriage is certified by God, a bond established by God himself for man and woman to procreate from generation to generation.

Today, the sanctity of marriage has been dragged in the mud with cheating, deception, lying, violence, polygamy, polyandry, disease, hatred and ultimately divorce. The most unsavoury part of marriage is the violence that seems to be a recurrent visitor among couples who were once smitten with one another. There has seen many cases this year of man killing wife, man pouring acid on wife, man throwing burning stove on wife, man beating wife to a pulp and so many unpleasant degeneration of loveless marriages. Some even claim to love so much saying it was the magnitude of their affection that made them descend into acts of violence against their partners to show how they felt.

Only a coward raises his hand to hit someone who cannot hit back as hard

This made me think of that period when a woman meets a man for the first time, it may be at the bar, at the club, in the church, at a friend's place, at a wedding (which is very common towards courtship) or any other social place. Usually, the man wishes to court the woman, she may refuse his advances and be staunch about it or she may initially put up a front until the man eventually thaws her out then she falls in love. At this point, there are two things involved when the woman agrees to be with a man, it is either the woman has signed up for a life of happiness or the end of her life as it may be.

I saw an episode of the popular series Criminal Minds recently and towards the end of the episode, I was sobbing like a sponge because I totally get the point in that particularly moving episode. Just one phrase made by a victim on death row in the movie made me see things from a new perspective. It was about a male serial killer who was married to a woman called Sarah Jean. Sarah Jean met this man who looked every inch normal to her and she fell in love with him despite the warnings from her mother as well as those who cared about her. As a result of her relationship with this man, Sarah Jean and her mother had a major falling out because the man alienated her from those she loved. After their marriage and one son, the husband who was a carpenter began to act funny. He had a workshop at the back of the house where he would work overnight and warned Sarah Jean not to disturb him or try to come in. He began to do horrific things in the workshop and no one knew what he was up to right in the middle of a residential area.

Apparently, the husband would go out to kidnap women and bring them into his workshop, his target were usually young ladies in their twenties, he would sadistically rape them then decapitate, mangle, eviscerate and do all sorts of inhumane things to them. Being into wood work, he would then bury these ladies in the buildings he was contracted to construct, no one would ever find the victims' remains. Now Sarah Jean suspected what her husband was doing but she could never confront him as he was violent towards her as well, so she turned a blind eye.

However, Sarah Jean began to fear for her son's life, he was like two years old at the time. Just like she feared, her husband asked her one day to get rid of their two year old son so it would be just the two of them in their own world. So Sarah Jean took care of the child just like her husband asked her to as her total loyalty was with him. Eventually, the police began to trace the continuous murder of young ladies and finally nabbed the husband. When they could not find the couples' son, Sarah Jean confessed that she had murdered her two year old son. The news of their atrocities reached the media and the whole world went into a frenzy calling for the couples' head. They were branded as pure evil people. After their arrest, police dug all over their house and found bodies of so many ladies. The couples were both sent to death row to face execution.

When it was some few days to their execution, the husband was all smiles and taunting the prison warden that the police did not find all the bodies he buried and he would continue his love affair and killing spree in heaven with Sarah Jean when they are both executed hours apart that day. It was a particular FBI agent that began to spend time with Sarah Jean during the investigation and noticed that she was soft-spoken, kind, obedient and subservient which led him to finding out that Sarah Jean never killed the son! She did like Moses' mother in the Bible, placed the very much alive son in a woven basket and put the basket on a river. When they traced adoption processes where the river led to, they found out that a very wealthy couple desperately looking for a child had adopted the boy from an orphanage that found him floating on the river. The boy who was now 17 years old just won a scholarship as a genius instrumentalist and was doing very well in life, oblivious of who his birth parents were. Sarah Jean protected her son from her mistake of a husband, giving him a normal life far from the clutches and stigma of a serial killer parent.

The FBI agent wanted to save Sarah Jean's life by calling the Governor of the State for a stay of execution because they had traced the son. But as the prison warden began to walk Sarah Jean to the electric chair, she begged the agent not to contact her son, to let her die with her husband who they had already electrocuted at the time. She said the son knew nothing about his parents but contacting him would bring the trauma of the fact that his father was a serial killer and that would make him a victim of her husband as well.

The FBI agent was devastated that the lady had suffered for nothing for this long, spending 15 years on death row and said to her "Sarah Jean, please let me save your life". Sarah Jean then replied in that phrase that I would never forget, she said "My life ended the day I met Jacob" Jacob was her husband. That phrase shook me up. She was later executed but she died smiling.

How many ladies today are still saying "I do" to a man not knowing they are signing their death warrants or torture cards? How many women have died from the violence metted against them by their husbands? How many women have been disfigured by a man who slept by their side every night? It makes one wonder, were these people ever in love? Did they go on dates, hold hands, looked into one another's eyes while professing their undying love?

We all remember that Nigerian Banker, Titi Arowolo, whose husband stabbed her multiple times and was found with her dead body in their home. I read the autopsy report recently and my whole body reverberated with disgust because the Doctor found 74 stab wounds on Titi's body. Why would a man stab his wife not once, not twice but 74 times?!!!! What could she possibly have done to die such a horrible death at the hands of the man who swore to love her for better or worse? I began to think, someone could have warned her, she must have seen the signs, she must have had a way out but decided to stay, so her marriage became the end of her life.

On a lighter note, there are some women out there, who have been lucky to meet their Prince Charming, their Knight in shining armour, their best friends, their soul mates. That man who changes their lives in a positive way, from rags to riches, from indecent to virtuous, from unfaithful to committed, from a tramp to a princess, from a destitute to a Queen, from a girl to a woman and will remain with them faithfully forever. I sincerely hope that all men will become the protector of their women as God instructed them, not the destroyer of the gift God has given to them and may strangers forever not become our partners for life. Share your thoughts! Thank you.