By OLUMOFIN Kehinde Benjamin

I hope to bring to our understanding series of questions/discussions that are important for the stage we are, especially for those already in relationships, and to prepare as many who are trusting God for their partners, together by this lecture, we might begin to see some of the things that we may need to place some bit of emphasis on and not just pray about but act on them.

So among many other things and or questions we will be considering, for want of a topic, I picked out this particular one….”TELL ME ABOUT US”

No need to worry, they will all get clearer as we discuss now….

TELL ME ABOUT US?

Relationship is a very beautiful and emotional thing, especially when at its nascent stage. And because of the pleasurable excitement that often define a romantic relationship with that special person, a lot of emphasis are placed on the present happiness and less attentions may be accorded to things that may affect personal and collective happiness in not too many days ahead.
And Jesus who knew us more than we know ourselves forewarned us in Luke 14:28-30

“For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it Lest haply, after he hath laid the foundation, and is not able to finish it, all that behold it begin to mock him, Saying, This man began to build, and was not able to finish.”
Relationship is like a house, if you plan well, ask correct questions, you are likely going to end in the right place and with the right person but where planning is poor and information are insufficient, the possibility of running into error is high. This is not God’s mind for any of us.
When two people start off new in a relationship. It’s always very exciting, and full of hope. This new and happy couple-to-be may talk on many things and for many hours of calls, and in many special one-on-one meetings and yet many vital probing questions may be ignored and even when asked the joy of being in each others presence may overshadow the need to listen with the aim of getting the needed answers, even when the other person is doing his/her bit to provide answers that may make or mar the future they intend to build together.

This is more certain where and when touching and emotions are running high. The more engaging with romantic actions, the less heart-to-heart discussion will be prompting up. Soon, the possibility of getting tired of a relationship that’s not different from so many direction-less couples around.

However, as believers and followers of Jesus Christ, we should be more intentional in our dealings with each other in the way we manage our love life and in the manner of subjects we allow to characterize our talks each time we have the opportunity to share phone calls and special dates with each other. It is easy to get carried away from what’s important and less exciting romantic talks to those explosives pleasure ridden, “exciting” subjects most lovers find themselves entangled with, at the detriment of working at and building a formidable foundation that can stand the tests of time, when marriage and family responsibilities begins to set in.
Therefore, at the beginning of a relationship, there are face saving questions and or information that are important for a new lover to intentionally ask the other person with the aim of getting the right answers to them as best as possible, and as true as it can be.

It’s one thing to get information, it’s another to find out, the truthfulness of each and be sure they are worth your time and the rest of your life you are going to be committing to the relationship.

ASK AND IT SHALL BE GIVEN.

One of the most iconic statements of Jesus Christ in the Gospel is found in Matthew 7:7-8, which says:

“Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.”

This emphasize the importance of personal investigation and the need to seek out information that are likely going to be of great importance to the life the “couple-to-be” tend to build together. Information are expensive, and not always freely given unless asked. If you don’t ask him/her, you might be left with little or nothing to hold on to when you most need it.

To know you have to ask, and or investigate using whatever windows legally available for you including public and easy to access social media accounts like Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp groups, Twitter etc. Of all these medium Facebook and Twitter may likely have more information on an individual than others public social media accounts.
Many ladies are victims of emotional fraud already, many of them are church sisters and the men who took advantage of their gullibility are men they met in churches too. And since most are unwise enough to know the difference between a brother and a guy, they confused anyone in church as God’s children. There are too many stories that touches the hearts in this respect. Men too are not spared, some are victims of women who came and took advantage of their simplicity as well.

The bottom denominator is, “lack of sufficient information” to guide them in their decision making process.
So a glance through posts, pictures, comments and contributions on other peoples posts, posts liked, video watched and liked, and posts that have been shared by the person you are investigating or trying to know, are important tips on who his/her personality is, among other information of interest you might want to know about your new lover or the person showing interest in you.

Some of these information can be helpful when gotten early and in right amount.
None of these steps mentioned above should replace the need to pray and seek God’s mind concerning the relationship, and prayer should also not excuse the need for investigative questions and finding personal answers to them.

Take for example, at the onset of Facebook application, practically everyone with basic education opens up an account with Facebook, but as at today, many have deactivated their accounts for reasons best known to them, sometimes including the need to conceal important personal and prior relationship information etc.

It is important therefore to ask why if you discovered your new lover is not on such a platform having had an account prior to now and be sure his/her reason do not include a dubious tendency to keep away vital past romantic information or even worse.

Social media posts and comments are one major way to know someone. If somebody is good at closing and opening new account…..watch out!

Now the following are some of the important QUESTIONS YOU SHOULD ASK but often seldom considered by lovers.

1. Tell me about you. What will you want me to know about you?

You should expect to hear all personal details when you ask this type of question. And watch out for areas that are deliberately left out and bring them up. Answers you should expect include correct date of birth (this is very important). Anyone who plays smart and fraudulent with date of birth is not worthy of your time and life. Lie is the foundation for all other sins.

Others should include place of birth, brief family background, parents marital status (never assume someone has never been married before just by looking at the face), position in family, educational qualifications, likes and dislikes, current relationship status, possibility of any secret love child or adopted child (never assume also someone is not having a child out of wedlock. Ask before you get the shock of a life time after the wedding day) and reasons for not marrying the child’s other parent if any. Expect to know about his/her work and career status when you ask that question and many more personal details. Some of these answers may not come with one discussion, especially if the other person is taking his/her time not wanting to release too many information at once out of abundance of caution or the person is intentionally holding back certain information in order to hide something. Individual ability to read between lines as you listen to the answers being provided and your ability to pursue more information will determine how much you get each time you ask your questions. The bottomline is, don’t be too shy to ask and desire to know much about the person you intend to live the rest of your life with. A wise person will watch out for readiness to provide answers to probing questions with or without prior notice before asking or otherwise. This simply means where answers are deliberately avoided or unnecessarily delayed, may suggest some form of inappropriate intentions on the part of the party that is not willing to tell or say much. Once someone is in love, they become more transparent and open and are willing to share information with the lover of their lives. Where this is not so, one should try find out why.

2. Why are you not in a relationship? What happened to your last relationship? Or why haven’t you ever considered starting a relationship prior to my knowing you

Humans can be very trickish with questions like these, especially when there are so many things to hide. Someone of marriageable age who has never been in a relationship should have a strong moral or faith based reason to tell. Even at that, don’t just rush into him/her just because she/he’s available and free. It’s wise to want to ask why. Many have found themselves in complexity of unfinished businesses of past relationships of their partners and are made unwilling participants in romantic troubles they have no intention of being part of, just because they were either too trusting or too naive to ask the right questions before jumping headlong into a new relationship that is plague with issues they should never have been part of. If you don’t ask about the past, you may not get anything from the past that can be of help in the present and in the future.

You are not asking because you want to pokenose but because you want to be correctly guided in your present relationship. If you are too busy being in love to find out what happened with the past relationships, or where there were no relationship despite being matured and having good job, then you should not be too busy to face the consequence of being naive, if you don’t try to know.
Sometimes, getting to the root of matters like this can be very hard but that’s where matured counselors comes in.

It’s always safe if you carry someone more mature and more spiritual along once you start a new relationship. And having such person/s is useless if you also withhold information that can help him/her guide you.

3. Why did your past relationships fail? Why did you opt out? Why haven’t you married?

These are offshoots from the previous point. Why do relationship fail? Failure of relationships may not necessarily be because of insufficient love, or lack of commitment on the part of the other person involved but many a times, relationship failure may be associated with personal behavioral faults, annoying habits that are not attended to with the aim of making corrections that matters, family traits, among many other things that are personal to individuals.

Whatever brings a relationship to a crumbling end, if not attended to and taking care of, will still bring the next relationship to it’s kneel and so will the next and the next, repeating same over and again unless the faults are attended to.

This is why you have to ask, and find out why past relationships of your partner failed and why you are likely going to be the next victim on an ongoing chain of relationship failure and why you have to do something to avoid that, as best as prayer and grace and wisdom will permit you.

4. Any previous marriage? Any child out of wedlock?

I have briefly mentioned this already. Don’t wait to get the biggest shock of your life before you ask questions about prior possible marriages or love child of a potential partner.

The human heart can be deep and full of secrets but if we pray enough and ask God for help and make enough personal efforts at issues like this, the tendency to find out information that are enough to guide your footsteps safely into a marital bliss will be divinely made to come your way.

Like Joshua (in Joshua chapter 9) who was deceived by his neighbors into making an unwanted alliance in God’s Name, so also have many people been deceived into wrong marriages that are later discovered many years or months after the wedding date.

In many of those cases, the victims often agreed they did too little to investigate their partners claims because they were in love and so trusting and in some cases because they were simply mentally lazy to add few clues together, even though all the information they needed were just in plain sight but they refused to harvest them into meaningful use while it was in their power to do so.

5. Are your parents together, if not, why? Are you born out of wedlock? etc Do your parents have a cordial and happy marital relationship, if they are together or prior to the demise of one of them, where one or both are no longer alive?

People rarely talked about the marriage of their parents with a view to learn, pray and act on the information gotten until things starts happening that look like their parents experiences.

History often have a way of repeating itself unless they are addressed in prayers and personal efforts are put in place to break the chain of events, especially where they are considered unpalatable and unwanted. Whatever happens to the marriage of your in-laws can and will be repeated in your marriage if you fail to pray and act on things that can help them get repeated in your marriage, if they are things you don’t like and the good ones too will not automatically get fixed into your home unless you pray and work on them in yours.

A person raised by a single parent may likely have little or no understanding on how to relate with the opposite gender in a family setting having not lived to see the parent relating with the other parent who was absent all his/her growing years. Marital life and family behavior are half learned from one’s parents marriage and where that lessons have been missing in ones growing days, to replicate same in marriage will take a long time consuming personal efforts to pick up, if at all.

This is one major reason to ask questions. It prepares you ahead for what to expect in the marriage from your partner and how best you can handle them in love to avoid making same mistakes parents made and repeating same experiences that make or mar their relationships.

6. Tell me about us.

Now here we are. This is one of the most important request you can make from a potential marital lover and his/her response will keep you abreast of his/her mind and will for your relationship. And if by chance someone you just got into a relationship with ask this question, consider it as the person is not willing to waste his/her time and will like to know which direction the new ship is heading to before getting too far and going back become too difficult.

Many people don’t know what they want or why they are in relationships, ours as students on this page should be different.

So the need to ask in order to know. If you don’t ask, don’t expect to know.

It is also not enough to ask and expect to be answered. Your ability to carefully listen and process the answers is also very important. To be mentally lazy and overly trusting may not be too helping at this point. Be sure the answers you are being provided are what they say they are. Prayers and having a good counselor, preferably a matured elderly believer will be of great help here. If you walk your journey alone without the services and assistance of God sent counsellors, you might find yourself in an unwanted end where you may discover you have not done enough with information you had prior to marriage. So be careful.

Aside asking and receiving answers to what the other person think about your relationship, you should also be mindful of active and achievable plans in the answers you are given.

And please don’t ask this question unless you yourself, you’re almost sure you are going all the way to be married to this person, provided his answers and intentions matches yours. To build a white elephant castle is to waste personal time and resources. You should and you must have had your own plans for the two of you before you ask “What are your plans for us and how you intend to make us achieve those plans with God and grace on our sides” is one other information you can do without.

One way to know someone that has no plan is that he/she will throw the question back to you. It’s a tactical way to gather points but if I’m you, I will say, if you don’t have answers now, I can give you this or that time to make ready your answer for us and I will then say mine too.

And while you wait, please pray that God will guide you to know the truth from just words of mouths that hold no substance.

Sharing with a mature believer your experience at this stage will help you greatly. Mind you I say matured believers, especially elderly married person or couple.

It’s not enough to have plans, it is also important to know how and what should be done to make good thoughts come to pass, and in record time. Do try emphasize that in your talk.

If you do your part, God will do His, if you ask in prayers and matched your requests with actions. Shalom.

Questions and Responses:

+234 708 392 8…: May God help me ooo,bcs to open up and tell someone about my parents marriage looks somehow to me,

My Response: Everybody feels the same, especially when they are not together or when the story is not too nice. Yet, if we don’t learn from their experiences, we are most likely going to repeat them and we can’t learn unless we talk about them.

+234 708 392 8…: But I can learn from their mistakes without sharing with anyone????‍♀️
+234 708 392 8…: Let’s say for example, someone’s mother committed adultery and that led to divorce from the husband, no child will be bold to tell his or her partner about it o.

My Response: Yes but the lesson will be limited to you. He too needs to learn from their stories just as you need to learn from your in-laws stories too.

Take for example, if the reason for chaotic marriage for a couple is behavioral, their children too may likely have similar behavioral deficiencies, though they may not even be aware they have them.

Now if a partner sees such behavior in the person he/she is in a relationship with, he may have ways to help correct, retrain in love or simply learn to cope with it kindly and in love and so avoid repeating similar experience at home.

We are to learn from those ahead of us, and our parents are our best templates, just as our children too will surely learn from us someday.
And moreso, there are things about our parents our lovers should be aware of, especially when we have settled in our minds we are going all the way with them for the rest of our lives.

Otherwise he/she may find out someday and the fact that you did not share such prior to his/her finding out may spell trouble on its own.

For example if one of someone parents was a divorcee before marrying the person’s dad or mom and the info was kept from the other person until marriage.

When such is discovered, especially if he/she has treated both as one time marriage lovers. Such discovery might be considered a deliberate withdrawal of vital information and that can spell some wahala
Sometimes we refuse sharing information because we think the other person might abscond or later use them against us. Whatever the fear is, NOT sharing at all is even worse. There are things we shouldn’t hide. Yes, there are information we should just bury and keep away. The later are in extreme cases, and where in confusion, please ask your counselor.