Commentary

Love wonderful love

Love is blind.

I don't say this because my girlfriend who is amazingly beautiful settled for me when she could have had any man she desired, but after being to Emancipation Park on a couple of Sundays now and having seen the newly-married couples there taking pictures, I am convinced that anyone afflicted with love does suffer a significant amount of visual impairment.

To say that these were handsome couples would be to lie because they were not. To say that they were would be like saying that Iraq is the safest place on earth and we all know that that is the farthest thing from the truth.

Most of the brides I saw were not beautiful by any stretch of the imagination and I am being kind. They had been in this world for a long time and had lived hard. Too many fights with the neighbourhood slut, and the many days toiling over hot stoves and scrubbing cold floors had obviously taken their toll on their faces and their bodies. The damage was so bad that there was little that make-up could do. Most of them looked like the zombies in Dawn of the Dead.

Their heavyset bodies were wrapped in wedding dresses made of enough cloth to make two, and their splayed, hardened feet struggled to break free of the new, narrow shoes bought for the occasion. It wasn't pretty.

Hard days

The husbands fared no better. Their weathered faces told stories of too many hard days and too many late nights and too much tobacco, and their stomachs were swollen from years spent consuming countless bottles of beer and generous helpings of jerked pork and fried chicken.

Also, for some strange reason many of the grooms were wearing off white suits and bowler hats which made them look like black Danny Devitos.

Most of these couples are going to be shocked when they get those pictures back. Boy, are they going to be in for a surprise. "Mi naw use da cameraman deh again. Im no know what him a do," will be the complaint. The reality is there was very little he could have done. The man is only a photographer not a miracle worker.

Watching them, I got the feeling that a few of the men were threatened, cornered, and corralled by their women desperate to shed the label of common-law wife. They had grown comfortable, coming home at all hours of the night to a hot meal and companionship that they eventually took for granted. When faced with the threat of losing all that and having to go courting again for women who nowadays are now even more demanding, getting married was the easy way out.

Ten years from now though, the men will be glad they took the easy way out. Based on my experience, these are the couples that make the best marriages; those who toil together through thick and thin, through the infidelity, the fights, the periods of uncertainty of what the future holds, and the periods of relative prosperity, all before they finally tied the knot.

And it really doesn't matter whether the woman looks like a beat up man and the man looks like a beat up man, what matters is how they feel about each other and what they went through together.

Yes, love is blind, but that can be a beautiful thing.