 Strange institution called marriage. Another couple bites the dust. We work up to the news that the 27-year-old marriage of the founder Microsoft and the fourth richest man in the world was over. Soon to be, ex-Mrs. Gates Melinda had filed for divorce on the premise that the marriage had broken down irretrievably. Despite the high-profile foundation that both established and had been running for the last 20 years, the good work they are involved in could not save their marriage. The question to ask is what exactly was so bad that a 56-year-old woman and a 65-year-old man three decades later in the absence of adultery, gender-based violence, and threat to life could not work out. There is a lot to unpack in this advocacy. In our climate, getting married is perked as the greatest achievement any individual must aspire to. We celebrate marriage with all our hearts. From the time a man goes to ask for the hand of the woman in marriage to the attendant costs that go with the wedding. With time, we have seen the erosion of the true values of what marriage should be. As more emphasis is placed on the wedding rather than on what ingredients are required to build and sustain a marriage. Be patient and be available, prepared to sexually satisfy your husband while provide and tolerate his wife and put everything that she does down to the fact that she's a woman, which often is translated as irrational order and a mystery, are the foremost pieces of advice given to the female and male respectively. Marriage is not a one-size-fits-all. And the back end of what will constitute a good candidate for marriage is worth taking into consideration. What's time spent on guiding the person to find out who he or she truly is is the person, even the marrying type. However, a lot of people are pressured into getting married with most driven by what we see and hear not by what we experience. Has the experience been about the totality of the person without the clouding of lust and manipulations? Marriages have become co-existing spaces with repressed people roaming mindlessly in marriages. Why do people change because they signed a piece of paper? It is not the paper that makes you married. It is the commitment, the balance, the communication, the growing together that makes the marriage. While seasons will come and go, each one will go through a process of change, but the fundamentals of who you are will not have changed unless you have been pretending. Intimacy rather than sex is what couples should work on. There will come a time when both go through the betrayal of their bodies as ordained by nature. The man will not be the stud he wants was, not the woman, the eager, anticipating recipient. So if the parties have not learned how to work on intimacy, when that period comes, there will surely be a disconnect. In closing, marriage is likened to a business, and as with businesses, it is not meant for everyone. So if you happen to be the marrying type, then remember it requires hard work. If you apply hard work to keep your customers happy, improve your customer service, reward customer loyalty, offer discounts, customer recovery process, improve your products, introduce new products, introduce innovations, upgrade facilities in a business to be successful, then we must apply the same amount of sacrifice and hard work to make the marriage successful. Marriage is a beautiful thing, but a divorce is an option. People need to stop playing to the gallery. People play to the gallery and stay too long, shocking everybody when they split 30 years down the line, making marriage look unattractive. People should go through trial separations where they find they are struggling and use that type of a way to see if they really want to give it another shot and stay together or go their separate ways. I think we will get more honesty. Wow. Yes. I'm sorry. You deserve it. I deserve it. You deserve it. I'm sorry. I think my key takeaway there is the marrying type. Are you the marrying type? Yes. A lot of people are actually not the marrying type, but they've been programmed to get married. I have a friend who once said that the kind of marriage you would like is, with his spouse being outside the country, he lives in Nigeria, they get to see maybe every three months or every six months and that was going to work for him. Because of the kind of person he is. Now, I think it's one of those few people that understood who they were and understood that being tied to a person all the time would cause a lot of conflict. So are we, are you the marrying type in the question that anybody who aspires to get married should honestly answer? Yes. Well, for me, taking off from the Begates divorce, of course, the immediate lesson to pick from that is that what keeps the marriage is not in tangibles. They're actually in tangibles. Anybody who has not been able to learn that, at least that particular case has actually taught it that we must go beyond the material things when we, in every human relationship, because I've come to realize that what keeps the bond actually does not lie in material possessions. It comes down to the issue of building that connection which has to be, which must be forged. There must be that constant commitment towards it. We, it's enough lesson for all of us, but we have to do it for those of us who haven't married to actually learn from us. Well, don't let that discourage you. Okay, I have been married 13 years now and a few weeks ago, I still literally wake up at night and I think about this statement. I heard a few weeks ago in the office, I was recently transferred and the lady sitting opposite me in the new office calls herself a prophetess, okay? And she came to the office one day, said they went for an event over the weekend. And one of the women that came to that event to talk to other women about marriage, sex, intimacy and growing as a woman made a statement and that statement can't seem to leave me. She said, I'm going to be 70 this year and for 30 years, my marriage was hell. That's right. 30 years of your life, you sit back and you waste 30 years of your life. Are you kidding? It's a society. There's no life at all. We shouldn't play to the gallery one and marriage is not a one side fit all. That's what we mistake with me. And I always believe that in marriage, when you're marrying, it marries to me, it's like it's a business. It's like a merger of two companies. And you're saying, so you cannot merge a bank with an insurance company. Neither can you merge a bank with a microfinance. You see that, it take over. There should be compatibility. You get it, there should be compatibility. So I think once you marry and you're not going in the same direction and you're not seeing the same things, I'm not saying your behavior has to be alike, but you're not, your thought pattern doesn't develop each other. You don't see things to benefit from. But you know we actually want change. Exactly. Not the same, that's where the interaction doesn't change. Then the interactions. Because listen, if I know that, I've always told you, for example, I don't like a family where everybody's living apart, then we're going through financial crisis and I get a job that says, okay, I'm sending you to Somalia for two years. Both of us will change. Because we'll know that, hey, we need to finalize this and make some money. So it's all about interaction and the need. And that's where once you don't try to impose what he or she is feeling on the other. That's where you have a lot of challenges. Final note, I'll go to give this quick story. So a young man gets married and decides that he's having issues in his marriage already. So he goes quickly to an older aunt and says, look, before my uncle died, he told me that there are two things and I'm coming to you as a woman to find out if it's true. That there are two things that I need to do to keep my wife, if I want her to be happy. The first one is that I have to golf her well. I've golfed her so well that she will be, when she hears my car coming, she'll be, hey, oh, this man is coming. I'm finished. Keep her satisfied. So that even if another man chases her, she'll tell him, look, look, my friend, I have not finished with the one at home. Is it you? The second one is she asks you for 15 and I make sure you double it. All right. Social media feedback. Esteemed viewer, your contributions are integral to this program. Please keep sharing your thoughts and everything we discuss here. These are some of your comments. On a previous advocacy on the need for an electoral college in Nigeria, underscore DA.MINI underscore says, we don't need electoral college in Nigeria as it partially rules out government by the people. If this democracy is not even the problem. Emu or Wubete says, state of origin is not man made. It is God made. It cannot be taken away. What we need is a constitution that will promote equity and fairness. A nation where everyone in the country will have a sense of belonging. Then where you are from within the country won't matter. Follow us on our social media platforms on Facebook, plus TV Africa, hash the advocate NG or on Twitter and Instagram at plus TV Africa, hash the advocate NG. To catch up with previous broadcasts, go to plus TV Africa dot com forward slash the advocate NG. After the break, Kaede is saying the country is not as bad as we imagine. We hope he remains alive.