The Beauty of Marriage -By Adewale Kupoluyi

The importance of marriage took the centre-stage at a recent public lecture, delivered by a legal expert, Esther Pius Ekong, titled “The Beauty of Marriage: Celebrating Love and Commitment”, at St. Mary’s Catholic Cathedral, Oke-Padre, Ibadan, Oyo State.

The event was a special occasion for the faithful to come together as a community and celebrate the blessings of marriage and relationships. Ekong’s lucid presentation examined how couples can nurture their love and commitment to each other by sharing critical practical advice, inspiring stories, and biblical reflections that inspire and challenge them to build strong and lasting marriages while appreciating the Archbishop of Ibadan Archdiocese, Most Rev. (Dr.) Gabriel ‘Leke Abegunrin; Cathedral Administrator, Rev. Fr. Julius Akinyode; and the entire worshiping community for the opportunity given her to deliver the paper, as part of activities for this year’s harvest.

Ekong’s post-call experience specialty covers family law, property law, women and children’s right advocacy and criminal law. She is a member of various professional bodies such as the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), International Federation of Women Lawyers (FIDA), Nigerian Bar Association Women Forum (NBAWF), and National Association of Catholic Lawyers (NACL). She is equally the Principal Partner of Esther Ekong & Co, Co-founder of Pidgin Lawyer, and Member of the Board of Trustees of Network for Justice and Inclusion Foundation, to name a few.

According to the guest speaker, it is important to have a working understanding of the operative word in the topic, which is “marriage”. Coming from religious and legal points of view and relying on the legal definition, as proffered by Lord Penzance in Hyde Vs. Hyde 1866 LR 1 P & D 130, “Marriage is the voluntary union for life of one man and one woman, to the exclusion of all others”. Marriage is a contract, and the Supreme Court of Nigeria, in Hajia Umma Muktar Ahmed Mohammed Vs. Nigeria Deposit Insurance Corporation (2024) LPELR-62524 (SC), held thus: “The law is trite that parties to a contract are bound by the terms of the contract, and in determining the rights and obligations under the contract, the court must observe and respect its sanctity and not allow a term on which there was no agreement to be read into the contract”.

The lawyer revealed that on the wedding day, the marriage certificate, which is the documentary evidence of the marital contract, makes provisions for the couple’s parents, sponsors and priests to endorse, saying these classes of persons are core witnesses to the contract. The couple are joined in the celebration of love by their people. After the wedding ceremony that united the man to his wife, the celebration of love and the beginning of commitment kicks-off on the matrimonial bed. As a practitioner of law grounded in the certainty of contract, but more importantly, as a daughter of the Church grounded in the certainty of Christ’s covenant, she said the intersection of commitment and spirituality presents an enduring fascination on the discourse.

The professional sphere is dominated by agreements, contracts, and memoranda, demanding fidelity, precision, and adherence to terms. This worldly demand for faithfulness in human engagements serves as a powerful analogy for the ultimate, and unbreakable agreement. To speak of commitment is to speak of rigour, of duty, and of enduring presence – qualities the secular world attempts to capture in its legal documents, but which only the church can define in its absolute and divine context. The sacred nature of this union places a demanding obligation upon the participants, as Saint John Paul II wisely articulated that love, especially the love leading to marriage, is never something ‘ready-made’ or merely ‘given’. Instead, it is perpetually a ‘task’ set before the couple, and constantly ‘becoming’, meaning that marriage is a constant act of collaborative creation, sustained and perfected by grace while the depth of this commitment determines what the love ultimately becomes, she said.

Ekong disclosed that marital endurance is significantly fortified by the depth of the couple’s shared life and affection, just as St. Thomas Aquinas observed that “the greater the friendship, the more solid and long-lasting the marriage will be, as we are united not only in flesh, but in domestic activity”. This wise counsel underscored the crucial importance of the daily, mundane commitments – the shared household tasks, the patient conversation, and the mutual reliance in domestic activity that builds an unbreakable bond of companionship essential for weathering the storms of life. To fully appreciate the beauty of marriage, one must understand that it is fundamentally a covenant, not a contract – this is because a contract deals with commodities, services and transactions; but marriage is deeper – a covenant that expresses an eternal relationship between persons.

The NACL member clarified that the Catholic church teaches that the Sacrament of Matrimony is unitive, open to fertility, and, unequivocally, indissoluble, which is line with the original plan or master plan of God. Though indissoluble, it allows for separation in extreme cases such as threats to life, and domestic violence. This permanence is the bedrock of the commitment, noting that “The church takes this lifelong nature with the utmost gravity. A break in this covenant contravenes the natural law instituted by God. The seriousness of this divine law is reflected in the canonical practice concerning those who divorce and civilly remarry; while they are not separated from the church, they cannot receive Eucharistic communion, emphasising the enduring spiritual weight of the original, and unbroken sacramental vow”.

In secular courts in Nigeria, the commitment to marry is taken with remarkable seriousness. The country’s law recognises the legal doctrine of “Breach of Promise to Marry” (BOPM), treating an agreement to marry as a binding legal contract. Under the Nigerian civil law, if a party reneges on a clear promise to marry, the jilted partner may seek legal remedy. A successful claim requires proving three specific elements – that a clear promise to marry was made, which cannot be inferred from mere romantic talk, but requires evidence like an engagement ring or accepted proposal – that the plaintiff relied on this promise leading to financial or personal consequences, and – that the promise was breached without justification. This illustrates that human law recognises the substantial investment in emotions, passion, time, and resources that precedes the wedding day, the legal practitioner added.

The non-negotiable indissolubility of the covenant serves a protective function. In some secular jurisdictions, such as that of Louisiana, United States of America, where specific legal instruments known as ‘covenant marriage’ exist, which imposes stricter rules and mandatory premarital and divorce counseling, limiting divorce to specified grounds like abuse or abandonment, unlike traditional ‘no-fault’ civil unions. She argued that the permanence of the sacramental commitment fosters trust, which is essential for emotional and spiritual health, and that every characteristic listed is an action, demands intentionality, effort, alongside what a lawyer would term ‘due diligence’; a constant, proactive choice to prioritise the spouse’s welfare and emotional stability.

The Principal Partner affirmed that true love ‘keeps no record of wrongs’ for it is a covenant where endurance is mandated and that committed partners must be willing to constantly destroy the evidence of past failings, preventing history from becoming a weapon, warning that inability to forgive is a failure to execute the primary mandate of the marital task, stating that a godly marriage prioritises fidelity, which must be guarded rigorously – not only in physical terms – but also emotionally and spiritually. These two qualities must be actively cherished and protected, as the most critical assets of the marital union, maintaining that without this unwavering fidelity, the necessary security for emotional and spiritual vulnerability is lost, and the marital covenant may begin to fray.

Ekong acknowledged the Catholic church’s role in stabilising Nigerian marriages, given the pressures exerted by contemporary life, financial challenges, and the cultural complexity of communal living, Christian marriages in Nigeria faces unique instabilities, and that the church has a necessary and vital role in reinforcing the commitment beyond the wedding day. She recommended that the church leadership must be proactive by organising mandatory marriage seminars for married couples, by stressing the use of non-violent approaches to family conflict. Similarly, intending couples must receive comprehensive education on family life expectations by providing this structured preparation to ensure that they are not ‘caught unawares when there is conflict’.

In the preparation for intending couples, there is the need to involve experts such as doctors, lawyers, psychologists, accountants, and teachers, among others. She cautioned that children should not become the casualties or the fulcrum of marital instability. Sadly, the opposite is the case, as they are victims. “The society we have today is the outcome of individual marriage … the church must offer targeted instruction on parenting techniques to both intending and married couples. This preventative education is vital for ensuring that the commitment of the parents remains stable, protecting the emotional and spiritual well-being of the next generation”, the guest speaker admonished.

In the final analysis, Ekong amplified that the joy of marriage lies in the beauty of perseverance, calling on all to embrace three unshakable pillars for enduring commitment – firstly, the commitment to grace that must rely on the sacrament for strength, realising that the standard is supernatural and cannot be met by human effort alone; secondly, the importance to constantly seek God’s help in prayer, knowing that when couples seek His will together, their marriage becomes a testament to His faithfulness; and lastly, the commitment to the marital task by accepting the reality that love is constant, intentional work by manifesting in patience, non-retaliation, humility, and the ‘commitment to permanence by honouring the vow as (being) indissoluble’.