In the news now is the 2.20.2020 Christian wedding of movie star and Army reservist Matteo Guidicelli with singer superstar Sarah Geronimo. The otherwise fairytale wedding would have been perfect had not Sarah’s mother arrived and created a scene feeling betrayed by one who was never good enough for her daughter. The almost “Itigil ang kasal scene” at Shangri-La Makati worsened as a bodyguard was allegedly punched by the groom for telling on the not-so-secret (no such thing) wedding to the bride’s mother.
Mommy Divine in showbiz circles is known for her “overprotectiveness,” and as far as she is concerned, her daughter, all of 31 years was not, never ready for love as she was too naive and trusting and did not have the right “relationship experience” her peers had. Like all mothers and some fathers feel, the “right guy” should be Godsent – a man willing to wait for her daughter, who would not ruin her life or her dreams. One she can count on forever. Purportedly insisting on a pre-nuptial agreement to obviously protect her family’s wealth all derived from Sarah’s industry, she should have known that money in all its forms, is not a legitimate consideration for passion and affection which ordinarily spring from courtship and requited love.
The dream wedding turned-national debacle proves that while there might be a thin line between loving your child and being overprotective, their story has been dissected out in the battlefield which makes it very interesting reading, but in the end, their ordeal would not result in an unhappy ending because as the true divine intervention says, love prevails.
The revered Justice Florenz Regalado left us with this poignant lesson in love when he awarded backwages to a 30-year-old teacher who was fired for marrying her 16-year-old student. (Evelyn Chua Qua vs. Tay Tung High School, Inc.Aug. 30, 1990). This is actually an illegal dismissal case. However, the circumstances surrounding it is mind-blowing, to say the least. Evelyn was a teacher at the school where she met the boy who would become her husband, Bobby Qua. When they met, she was 28 and he was 14. After two years, Evelyn, then 30, and Bobby, 16, got married.
Age does not matter as long as the matter does not age. Happened to our Boys High school batch Alex, now a doctor in Las Vegas who fell in love with our Biology teacher, Amy, and they lived happily ever after until she got cancer and passed on.
Back to Evelyn, the school said that she should be fired “for abusive and unethical conduct unbecoming of a dignified school teacher. Defying all standards of decency, she recklessly took advantage of her position as school teacher, lured a grade VI boy under her advisory section and 14 years her junior into an amorous relation and that her continued employment is inimical to the best interest, and would downgrade the high moral values, of the school.” She was suspended and eventually fired.
In the end, though, love prevailed and Evelyn won her back wages and separation pay. “If the two (persons) eventually fell in love, despite the disparity in their ages and academic levels, this only lends substance to the truism that the heart has reasons of its own which reason does not know.
But, definitely, yielding to this gentle and universal emotion is not to be so casually equated with immorality. The deviation of the circumstances of their marriage from the usual societal pattern cannot be considered as a defiance of contemporary social mores. As philosopher Blaise Pascal has so pithily stated of the profundity of human love, “Love has reasons that reason cannot understand.”
Indeed, love has reasons that reason cannot understand. Agasem met. Sigh.
April 26, 2024
