Family

                              WHAT IS FAMILY?

                             
What is family? This, he asks me all the time. Standard definition describes family as a group of people affiliated by birth, marriage or co-residence and /or share consumption.

Growing up, with reference to the Holy Bible, his Sunday school teacher made him understand that a family is basically made up of a father, mother and their children. In addition to that, he was told that there is the extended family which now brings the aunties, uncles, cousins and grandparents into the picture.

Primary school brought a whole new concept into his understanding of a family. His teachers then, made him understand that aside from what he knew to be a family, there was another complex aspect to it. Complex, he says, because as a child he had a very hard time adapting to life in a bigamous marriage.

 A bigamous marriage is where one man has multiple wives and each wife is unknown to the other and this is where his moved to, coming from the normal family structure.

From bigamous marriages, most gradually move to polygamous relationships where the wives in this case become aware of the other women they are with, in the same marriage. Polygamous relationships can be broken down into three groups;

         i.            Polygamous – in this case we have one man having multiple wives. This is the most common in many parts of the world.

       ii.            Polyandrous – here we now have one woman having multiple husbands. Rarely do we come across such.

      iii.            Polyamorous – in this case we have multiple females being involved with multiple males. Such cases too, are very rare.

Given a choice, I cannot support bigamous marriages or polygamous relationships, because with them comes a lot of disadvantages rather than the advantages. The situation is even worse when young kids are brought into the picture. This is because at such a young age they do not possess the ability to be able to cope with such situations. They are not able to understand how two different women are able to bring forth one child.

With time, many more issues arise such as: jealousy, envy, financial difficulties, greed and the like. Having seen all this then being in a polygamous relationship is not worth anyone’s time and effort.

Let us stick the basic family concept of father, mother and their children, for a stable family structure enables good upbringing of children.