When God delayed fulfilling the promise of a son to her, she manipulated the situation and asked Abraham to have a child by her maid, Hagar. We all know the story as told in chapter 16 of Moses's Genesis. As the insult from Hagar became too much for Sarah, she blamed it on Abraham. The effect of the manipulation temptation which Sarah succumbed to is still obvious between the descendants of Ishmael, Hagar's son, and those of Isaac, the child of promise. In her book, Efuru, Flora Nwapa stated that marriage is like picking a parcel from numerous parcels. If one is lucky, one picks a valuable parcel; it does not depend at all on the length of the courtship. While I agree with Flora, I would add that if a person is able to pick one, the person should count himself or herself lucky because all humans are valuable. Some men and women have gone through life without being able to pick a partner. The Creator of the universe does not make mistakes; all one needs do is to look for and find the good He his somewhere in the person one picked. We should look beyond the present and envisage the future potentials of our spouses. The perfect individual is yet to be born. One cause of marital discord is what I will refer to as the "push factor." The Push factor starts developing in a man's head when he begins to under-rate the contributions of his spouse to the success of their relationship. He starts feeling that it is by his strength and intelligence that any progress they made over the years happened. He ignores the fact that even the peaceful home and moral support offered by a good housewife makes a great deal of difference in a man's growth and steady flow of income. Rather, with every problem that crops up, he starts imagining that he would have made it better with "Harriet" instead of "Joyce."
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