Avoid getting pushed, rushed and shoved into marriage by Mummy & Daddy – Dr Steve Ogan
It is amazing how people have their own lives to live but would rather live your life for you. They want to choose what you do, where you go to and with whom you associate. This is okay for children who can’t take responsibility for themselves. They are, therefore, compelled to live by the choices made by their parents or those who stand in loco parentis to them.
However, the same should not be true for adults who should be responsible for themselves. They must be left to make their own choices and live with them, especially in matters concerning whom to marry and spend the rest of their lives with.
It is increasingly common today to find parents who interfere with the marital plans of their children. Again, there is nothing wrong with this if a “child” has decided to do a number of stupid things. No self-respecting parent should give parental consent to a child who wants to become a second wife, marry someone against their religious beliefs, especially one that practices and promotes polygamy, or get hooked up to a known criminal.
It is fully within the right of parents to withhold parental consent in such extreme cases. But no parent should manipulate, dominate or compel a child to marry under any circumstance, good or bad. It is stupid to be pushed and rushed into a marriage by mummy or daddy. You are the one who will live in the union, not they. Honouring your parents should not extend to allowing them to push you into a relationship you do not want.
Read: 7 mistakes to avoid before marriage by Pastor E.A Adeboye
REASONS WHY PARENTS MANIPULATE THEIR CHILDREN TO MARRY PEOPLE THEY DON’T LOVE
1. These parents have never learnt to release their children to make their own choices and be responsible for their actions.
2. They are ruled by the spirits of manipulation, domination and control with which they get their children to do what they want, not what God wants them to do.
3. They want to maintain tribal, ethnic and racial loyalties by compelling their children to marry people from their own “villages”.
4. They insist on maintaining a particular social status below which they do not want their children to mingle. (One father, a lawyer, threatened to kill his daughter if she disobeyed him to marry the son of “a common fisherman.”)
5. They use their children as trade-off for political, economic or financial favours done them by an important personality in society.
(Avoid getting pushed, rushed and shoved into marriage by Mummy & Daddy was written by Dr Steve Ogan)
