Ideally, two people who fall in love should be allowed to live happily ever after in peace, sustained by romance, mutual respect and occasional electricity.
Reality, unfortunately, is a comedian with a dark sense of humour.
Marriage is often advertised as a union between two people. This is technically correct in the same way that a football match is technically about twenty-two people chasing a ball. It leaves out almost everything that is actually happening.
Strictly speaking, there is no marriage—whether monogamous or polygamous—that contains only the people whose names appear on the marriage certificate.
Every marriage is a densely populated social arrangement. In monogamy, two people merely pose for the cameras. In polygamy, three or more do the honours.
The real occupants are an invisible community—a hidden crowd behind the curtains. Those who cannot or will not muster the emotional and psychological maturity and develop the skills to handle this crowd must do well to stay single and not mingle.
Even the gold-standard marital arrangement in many devout Christian circles, monogamy, is rarely a relationship between just two people.
There is a crowd of dead people who stubbornly refuse to stay dead. Their thought-forms and ideas continue whispering in the minds of the living.
Leading this ghostly congregation is the Apostle Paul. He is a classic example of how the absence of experience does not always invalidate moral insight.
He comes from celibacy, yet his writings continue to profoundly exert extraordinary influence over how many married Christians understand intimacy.
He never knew what it meant to share a bed with a wife, argued over household expenses, decoded the phrase "I'm fine" when it clearly meant the opposite, or even dealt with some of the sudden climate changes that hormonally occur in marriages.
Regardless of these, Paul’s opinions on sex, marriage, and divorce still occupy premium space in Christian conversations about intimacy in 2026.
Through a potent blend of Christianity, empire and respectability politics, rigid Victorian notions of sexual restraint and pleasure, as well as pseudoscientific beliefs that linked women's pursuit of higher education to threats to their uterus and mental well-being, continue to shape and constrain attitudes in some parts of the world.
In this moral universe, God sometimes appears less like the Creator of galaxies and more like a permanently distressed Victorian headmistress, forever clutching her pearls at the sight of female flesh pulsing, melting and yielding to masculine desire.
Sometimes, depending on the Christian denomination, the God of the Victorian era even gets worried about married couples enjoying each other on days they are expected by the church to abstain in honour of the Virgin birth or the Ascension.
Beyond Paul and Victorian influences comes an impressive crowd of popes, bishops, priests, theologians and many other Comstockian moral regulators.
Many of them spent their lives at a comfortable distance from marriage itself, yet developed remarkably detailed theories about how married people should think, feel, desire, reproduce, and occasionally refrain from reproducing.
Then come today's additions to the crowd: celebrity pastors, prophets, relationship coaches, YouTube counsellors, and self-appointed guardians of public morality.
Together, they patrol the borders of holiness and acceptable intimacy, packaging their opinions as divine wisdom.
They issue patriarchal doctrinal exhortations on everything— from proper courtship, the submission of women and even who they might pair their reproductive Bluetooth with.
Useful or not, every marriage comes fully furnished with ex-lovers, almost-lovers, would-have-been lovers, should-have-been lovers, secret admirers, former crushes, suspiciously loyal "best friends," and emotionally available colleagues.
Others in the mix are prayer partners with excellent listening skills, as well as those fascinating human beings who have never accepted that the words "husband" and "wife" actually mean "hands off."
As social creatures, we accumulate people the way old houses accumulate dust and furnishings. Some become emotional support staff.
Others become backup plans and power banks. Some become emergency exits disguised as friendships.
Others become fire extinguishers positioned at strategic places where they might be useful when we need quenching the most. A few become permanent residents in the imagination long after they have vacated reality.
This invisible community exists because of a deeply inconvenient truth: no spouse, however intentionally loving, intelligent, beautiful, prayerful, patient, fertile, emotionally mature, financially responsible and heaven-certified, can successfully play the roles of lover, therapist, best friend, financial aid officer, spiritual mentor, comedian, bodyguard and personal source of eternal happiness twenty-four hours a day for forty years.
That job description would exhaust even God. Fortunately, even the church and some of today’s men and women of God continue to join ordinary people to prove this fact with examples and endless gossip.
Consequently, most people spend their married lives carefully and skillfully arranging and shuffling this invisible population.
There are many genuinely harmless ones. These are placed within safe proximity. The dangerous ones are kept at a respectable distance—at least officially.
Unofficially, things become more interesting.
Some threats are easy to identify. They arrive carrying commercial quantities of charm and entirely too much free time. They laugh too hard at mediocre jokes.
Their eyes can pierce and read our souls. Their smile can be scented candles in our hearts and even neutralise the occasional toxic atmosphere in our homes.
They possess a supernatural ability to text at exactly the moment one's marriage is experiencing turbulence. Yet not all threats are rejected.
Sometimes the attention of such people resurrects neglected parts of ourselves.
Parts buried beneath school fees, postpartum depression, job losses, utility bills, pending house rent, household routines, and the slow attrition that wears the mask off the face of romantic love.
Sometimes their recklessness awakens our own. For some married people, danger functions like caffeine. Stability nourishes them but does not necessarily excite them. Safety protects them, but does not always energise them.
Every now and then, they find themselves peeking over the fence, not because they necessarily wish to leave their marital home, but because they miss the sensation of climbing and catching a view of sunset on distant landscapes.
Many would never admit this publicly.
The church would faint.
Their spouses would demand clarifications.
Their mothers would organise emergency fasting and prayer sessions.
Yet beneath the respectable surface of many marriages lies an uncomfortable reality: human beings often miss adventure long after they have secured stability.
And so they flirt with temptation—not always physically, sometimes emotionally, sometimes imaginatively, sometimes digitally—allowing certain people to orbit the marriage like curious American satellites searching for a place to cruise through the Strait of Hormuz.
The remarkable thing is that this entire drama unfolds inside societies that insist marriage consists of only two people.
It does not. It cannot. It never has.
Perhaps the greatest achievement of marriage is not that two people remain faithful to one another in isolation.
It is that they somehow work to manage the crowd—past influences, present temptations, inherited beliefs, private fantasies, social expectations, and competing loyalties—without allowing any of them to seize the steering wheel.
The miracle is not that marriage contains only two people or that two people should isolate themselves. The miracle is that, despite the crowd and the dense population, the two people can still find each other.
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