₦airaland Forum

Oracle:
well it'll be hard 4 love to die if itz true love

If you don't work on your relationship, it will die.

allonym:
chemical castration for extra violent criminals? How about chemical castration for extra stupid people? retarded people? whores on the street?

You can only punish people for their actions, not for what they are or what they think.

And why do you add whoring into this?

The story of our marriage - part 2

We started our relationship, but I had no idea what I was getting into. First of all, after a few weeks, I was really falling in love and so was my wife to be. We were all cuddly and and very close. At that time I got to know more about my wife and also hear her story of how she fled the Liberian civil war, was attacked on the market and put on a hospital ship by the peacekeepers. One thing I noticed was that this story was a little too inconsistent and that she couldn't give me much details. I brushed that aside, as I attributed her memory lapse to the nasty head wound she was recovering from.

In the mean time, we were settling down in our apartment and the relation grew more and more serious. I could also see that there was something that was troubling her mind, but she really didn't want to talk about it. I was getting more and more interested in the Liberian civil war and started reading about it. I noticed that , even though she 's not really into politics, she hardly knew anything about Liberia. I decided not to push it too much as I knew she would come clean about it sooner or later.

After a couple of months she was pushing more and more in the direction of a marriage. If it weren't for her story, I would probably have been quite receptive, but it really bothered me and I didn't want to discuss marriage at all. I wanted her to come clean about it first before I could consider this. After about a year, she felt that she could trust me enough to tell me that she wasn't really Liberian, but that she used this story to get a residence permit as a refugee. In the mean time, we were trying to get the paper work in order to be able to officially marry. As she was Liberian, she could not possibly get any birth certificate, so we had to open a civilian court case to obtain a sworn statement asserting that she was indeed Liberian and the child of her parents.

This was actually a lucky coincidence as the Belgian Embassy in Nigeria was giving marriage candidates a really hard time when they wanted their birth certificates to be recognized by the Belgian government. This whole procedure could have lasted for several months up to 2 years.

Six months later we had received a positive decision from the court and could go ahead with our marriage. We had to arrange everything in a rush, as the refugee procedure was not turning out positively. Once we set a date for our marriage, I called the foreign office (which handles the administration for all refugee cases) ad they told me that a negative decision had been taken and that she would receive the order to leave the country within 1 week, just 1 week before our marriage. That decision would have made it impossible for us to marry legally in Belgium and we would have had to marry somewhere abroad. I pleaded our case with the woman from the foreign office administration and she decided to put that decision at the bottom of the stack, so that they would only send it after 3 weeks.

Now we could go ahead with our marriage. At that time, my wife did not have any source of income and I was just starting out, so we had very little money. As we had to marry in short notice, my parents could not get the money together for a [i]big [/i]marriage 5even though would make up for that later), so I had to pay for all of it. So, we just invited very close family and some good friends. Unfortunately, I got ill about one week before the marriage, so that didn't help us in organizing either.

But luckily, the marriage itself could hardly have been any better...

Stay tuned for part 3

4 the techheads:

Designing to Requirements and Walking on Water is Easy...
... As Long as they are both Frozen

allonym:
hmm. . I do agree with the BU website conclusion - that cohabitation is not exactly the problem, but the this/mis/un value . . .of marriage. They do point our that the studies show that cohabitation can be a marker for this - and I think some of the studies do show this pretty well.

Exactly. It [b]can be [/b]a marker for this. There is no evidence of anything beyond that

allonym:
However, given the political links which you have so far show (which I confess - if i didn't imply it before - i didn't bother to look into) I could see a big conflict of interest in the study which may affect the wording of the results. Though, the people who ran the study - specifically the one I cited, they would seem not to be a part of the political jockeying. . but then w/o research, I cannot be sure that a university prof's status as a scientist would necessary be enough for me to assume independence from political taint.

You bet they're not necessarily independent from political bias. I have first hand negative experience of this fact and it didn't do me any good
The problem is not that much in the studies, although I have some serious problems with their selection protocols, but rather in the implied conclusions, but more on that later

Quick intro first, detailed analysis follows later

* the site happinessonline is maintained by a member of the US religious right
* the study they refer to is produced by the National Marriage Project
* marriage.rutgers.edu is not directly associated with Rutgers University, but is the forefront of the National Marriage Project, an organization closely associated with the religious right and the conservative movement in the US. It is actually sponsored by Richard Mellon Scaife one of the main sponsors of conservative organizations in the US
* the site http://people.bu.edu/charris/marriage.html explicitly denies the causal relations that are put forward in the http://www.happinessonline.org/BeFaithfulToYourSexualPartner/p17.htm study you provided.

More to follow

Context is king. I need to know a little more before I could even start to think about what it means.
If you give me some , I'd be happy to share my insights

@allonym
I won't find the time today. It will have to wait untill tomorrow.

@ allonym

The last study you linked to is most definitely politically motivated or influenced. I'll come back and make my case later today

ocho:
promiscous, cheating, what's the difference?

When you're cheating, you're being unfaithful to someone you promised to be faithful to. This a breach of trust and thus not acceptable
When you're promiscuous, you're just sleeping around and as long as nobody's hurt it's nobody's business

WesleyanA:
it's okay to cheat on your partner when you're practicing an open marriage/relationship

Then it's not cheating , but rather sports

How did we meet?

This was actually rather strange. One time, I only started working for about one year and I was taking the bus back from my work to my student room and I saw this black girl rushing to get on the bus. She could just catch it and I noticed that the driver was giving her a hard time. I was rather annoyed and went to the front of the bus to see what the fuss was about. I noticed the insensitivity and racism of the bus driver and I confronted him as the girl was not very fluent neither in French, nor in Dutch. The racist bus driver gave in and gave her her ticket after I said I would report him if he continued his behaviour. At that moment some people in the bus started clapping to show their approval of my intervention.

Now we started talking the usual chit-chat and decided to make an appointment for the next day. I wasn't really falling head over feet but I was intrigued and wondered to what it could lead. We met again the next day and I took her to a pasta place close to where I was living. At that time she was not acquainted with European food and struggled to eat the pasta with fork and spoon. Anyway, from that moment onward we started dating and 3 weeks later we decided that she could move in with me. Soon thereafter we left my student flat and moved to a real apartment.

When she came to Europe she'd gone through some bad ordeals and she really needed a sympathetic person to trust. The people she was living with at that time were just tolerating her and she was an emotional wreck. I took things very slowly and tried to gain her trust from the start. The first thing I did after about 2 weeks was take her over to my parents. I knew that I had to show that I was for real and that she wouldn't end up in an environment that rejected her. Luckily I knew that my parents were very tolerant and that they would never have a problem with an inter-racial relationship. That's just the kind of values they instilled on me.

The thing is that when you're confronted with a country in which you have no-one, no support structure at all, a society that is indifferent at best and hostile in many cases, you are quickly drowned emotionally. I think I just came at the right time and I gladly accepted my role

to be continued ...
next chapter tomorrow

allonym:
that is fine. I can see where you are coming from. However, the studies of which I speak are scientifically sound.

They started with two groups C1 and C2. C1 - divorced couples C2 - couples that are married and then they ask - did you live together before marriage. They find that if a couple were a member of C1, they were more likely to be a member of group A1 - couples that lived together before marriage as opposed to A2 - couples that did not.

That could indeed give a significant and meaningful correlation if the sampling was done correctly, i.e. if they properly weighed the different group proportional to their representation in the population, if that the sample size was big enough and if they properly controlled for other possible factors that can influence the divorce rate. Anyway, from what you present me, the results may be valuable, but I would need to know a more about how the studies were conducted to understand whether or not they're sound.

As you may or may not know, there's a lot of research done in the Social Sciences where they explicitly ignored these kind of control factors in order to achieve the desired result. Unfortunately, scientific fraud is much easier to do in Social Sciences that in the Exact Sciences. A good example of one of these skewed studies is the infamous Bell Curve by Herrnstein and Murray

allonym:
However, this is a very bad summary of most of the studies - because they typically study more factors that just these two. Also, the questions are not as simplistic as the one I just posed. But the studies tend to show that couples who live together tend to have higher divorce rates than those that do not. They also give their reasons for this - ie many children of divorce tend to think they should "test" out people before marriage - yet they still harbor the feeling that their marriage will not work out - due to what they experienced before.

This last statement makes me think that these studies are politically motivated: you can never establish a causal chain with that many factors with any degree of certainty. This is just bad science.
Again I have to come up with my same remark. Correlation? Yes, possibly, but only under very strict sampling conditions of the test subjects. A causal link? Not in your (or my) lifetime.

allonym:
So, the question of whether or not to live together before marriage is very complex and a simple yes or no answer is not satisfactory. In one of my previous posts, I copied 10 suggestions for couples considering this step. The suggestions do a good job of covering many of the factors that could lead to unsuccessful marriages (as found in the studies) and would (if used/applied honestly) probably weed out those who could be at risk for something which may not be good for their future relationship.

Yes, and that was very good, hands on advice

@ Sir Kay
Thanks for sharing.
I see you are a happy man. You were lucky. I sincerely hope your happiness will last

@ everyone
My take is that what you see in Sir Kay's account is openness, communication and honesty (even when it's painful). This is what ensures that your initial love doesn't die out and that your marriage succeeds

My account follows later today

layi:
I've been married to my mum for 23 years. I got wealth of experience. Can I share them?

Why don't you. This could be an interesting story

allonym:
no what isn't? You are saying that divorce leading to some people having distorted views about relationships with opposite sex leading to bad marriages is not a causal relationship - do you really know what you are talking about? Or are you looking for a direct link like - like getting stabbed in the heart, shot in the head with a 22 gauge shotgun and electrocuted will result in death?

Actually that's not what I'm saying at all. Your starting point is divorce, mine is living together without being married.
My point:
A: couple lives together before marriage
B: The couple marries
C: the couple divorces
Some people say: A & B = C rate is higher. I say that that is not established
Some others say: C rate equal for both (A & not B) and (A & B) thus (A & B) is not better than (A & not B), I say that you cannot draw that conclusion, because data for A is coming from different couples than the data for C
Forgive me for being so wordy, I don't know the formal logical notations anymore, it been too long ago

allonym:
it is going to be hard to provide causal links between living together before marriage and divorce rates, so I'm not going to try. What I will do is provide link to another interesting study:

http://www.happinessonline.org/BeFaithfulToYourSexualPartner/p17.htm

I read through it all and it provides links between divorce and how it effects children, relatives, and friends of the children of the divorce and how that shapes their future decision - this maybe the closest to a causal relationship for you neferyn

No it isn't. I know a divorce is bad. Hell, I was the victim of a divorce myself. I am not going to deny the negative effects.

What I am disputing is that living together before marrying has any negative effect on the success rate of a marriage. I have a gut feeling it's rather the opposite, but there are no studies supporting my point of view, so I don't make any bold claims. Saying that living together increases the chance of a failed marriage though is wrong. This has not been established

I suspect that in a conservative environment the people that enter a relationship prior to marrying already have a more casual, relaxed view on what a marriage should be and thus don't think there is anything wrong with breaking up the marriage. Anyway, this is just speculation, just as much as the causal link between living together and divorce rate is speculation.

I call her baby [/i]or [i]shorty [/i]in a more private environment
She calls me [i]honey, darling [/i]or [i]sweet

IAH:
[SNIP]
What if you find out that you are not compatible after you have lived together? In this case, it's the lady that looses more. She moves out and tries to hook on to another man, huh? Would you, as a man, love to marry someone that has lived with probably 3 different men while running compatibility experiments here and there?
[SNIP]

Why would the lady have to move? Why not the man?
I wouldn't mind marrying someone who has been with other men before, but it doesn't apply to me, as I'm happily married. What's so wrong with that? Men do it all the time, why wouldn't women?

Here's that correlation/causation thingy popping up again, Seun.
The only thing that's established is correlation, we need a little more to have a causal relationship between the two facts.

@ Mr.Africa

Can you give me a definition of a real man, maybe some characteristics?
I'm happy to talk about my marriage, I'm proud of our accomplishments and our kids, nothing to be secretive about .... but all of that will be for tomorrow
g'night

vexxy:
No. I would never risk plastic surgery to improve my looks.

1. I have no problems with the way I look

Nor would I, if I were you ... Actually, even not being you, I have no problems with the way I look, so I concur

vexxy:
2. I don't like the thought of someone slicing my flesh to insert something unnatural

That's a little irrational, isn't it? We go through unnatural things all the time, e.g. would you consider a cesarean section or an epidural during labour? Both of these procedures are very unnatural

vexxy:
3. It's too expensive!

Indeed, that alone would set me off , it's not covered by my ordinary health insurance, nor by my hospitalization insurance and paying the full price for a medical procedure is just insane if it's not strictly necessary

I will take you up on your offer, but not tonight. I'll come back after a good night's rest and after I've finished that thing called work tomorrow

allonym:
Actually, I'm a Christian and currently don't live in Nigeria. I would feel inhibited speaking my mind with people 15 or more years older than I am. [SNIP]

You really shouldn't feel inhibited. As long as you're respectful, there is no harm in it. I would have liked to have more wise people around me when I was younger, they might have given me more perspective on things. If you're younger, you are bound to make your own mistakes and sometimes that can be hard to endure. If you can rely on the wisdom of older people, you could end up making less mistakes.

The only real problem you may have in talking with older people is that they don't understand our currently fast evolving society and that it is more difficult to make the intellectual connection that way.

WesleyanA:
That story about Sleeping Jonah and the Whale is interesting and entertaining. I recommend it to anyone who has little kids or enjoys bedtime stories.

You got me lost here. Why are you bringing this up?