In the throes of marriage

I saw a movie recently that described how bad not being married at a certain age as a lady in Nigeria feels. Of course the movie ended with the protagonist finding love but for me it was a reminder of how bad marriage has become in our country. The constant barraging of the female gender until she finally settles for one man, the extravagant weddings that cannot sustain the marriage or the me too first philosophy that eventually leads to divorce. Really, it seems in our day, marriage has become not just a relationship but a social bandwagon that everyone has to jump on. Marriage has become some kind of yardstick for success. A woman has to be married at a certain age or else she has achieved nothing. Every other thing she does or fails to do is linked to her inability to find a husband as if a husband is a commodity that she has to attract. Marriage is now the ultimate success for a woman not her dreams or her goals or her aspirations, her while life is based on whether or not she gets married and who she gets married to. We groom the female her whole life to cater to the needs of a man. I remember as far back as my pre-teenage years, my grandmother always told me,

‘Is this how you would behave in your husband’s house?’ Those words never failed to annoy me because it made me feel like the only thing I was ever good for was getting married. This is why Chimamanda Adichie often speaks on how girls are told to have ambition but not too much so you do not bruise the man’s ego. It is as if all their lives, girls are trained to be wives but boys never have any obligations. They are free to be whoever they want to be, whenever they are ready for it. Which usually means or often results in one gender becoming more mature than the other. It is why females my age prefer marrying older men as opposed to the ‘boys’ our age who are still growing up. It creates a widening gap that never seems to be bridged. It is an endless cycle that we really should stop.

We need to raise boys to be better, to be responsible with their freedom. We need to raise our girls to not have to conform to some standard of what is acceptable wife material but to be the best she can be in whatever work she finds herself. So that when she finally meets that man of her dreams, they are both ready to be married.

• She was fond of nagging; threatened me with knife —Husband

The other part of the marriage thing I cannot seem to wrap my head around is the wedding debacle. It feels like these days, the bigger the wedding, the better. The amount of money that goes into making a wedding happen is alarming and we do not seem to think of cutting these expenses. There is the ‘asoebi’ that is somehow supposed to be exclusive to family but is now more of a status symbol than a family tradition. It never fails to baffle me how we now put our own friends under extreme pressure to buy clothes they cannot afford all in the name of ‘asoebi’. We now have weddings where the couple spend all their money forgetting that marriage lasts for a lifetime. Weddings are supposed to celebrate a marriage not celebrate how rich the family of the bride is. In fact, there are no guarantees that a huge wedding will lead to a successful marriage, so why do we still do it?

Finally, there is the loss of value that we place on marriages. Too often, marriages are ending in divorce. I think it is because we have decided as a generation to focus on ourselves rather than the other person. Marriage is not about you and what makes you happy, it is about the both of you working as a team to preserve the unity of your union. As long as marriage is only seen in terms of its romance and what it gives rather than the commitment and loyalty and sacrifice for the other, then there will always be a problem. In this regard, we need to reexamine our values, change our narrative and step up as a people in order to have meaningful marriages that are able to stand the test of time because they are between individuals who are both well developed and trained to cater for themselves before setting out to be in a union, and marriages that are not overly celebrated for material sake but for the love between the two in the union and for the integrity and sense of togetherness that we adore in marriages. Marriage is beautiful and we should celebrate it but as long as we do not go into it with the right mindset and we do not get right minded people into it, there will always be a problem. It is time that we addressed and changed these negatives.

• Wale-Olaitan is of the Faculty of Education, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria.