There’s absolutely wrong with getting married. Marriage is a personal choice. But whats disturbing is how we look at marriage especially in Nigeria. Yes, we Nigerians are obsessed with marriage and for all the wrongs reasons. This only goes to show how mistaken we are about the vague idea of “settling down” but also proves how we trust things going on around us.
We discussed some of the ridiculous reasons why people decide to get married.
1. Talk to any Nigerian parent and they will make you believe that marriage is the ultimate solution to all of life’s problem. Is your son been a baby boy? Is he partying too much? Get him married! Is your daughter in a new relationship with someone? Marriage will set her right. The marriage union has ceased to be a scared bond between two people and now instead feels like a disciplinary institution.
2. Due to the religious frown to Pre-martial sex in Nigeria, Nigerian youths reach their mid-twenties with their sexual frustration skyrocketing over the ceiling. Let’s all call a spade a spade but a lot of Nigerians get married solely because they cannot wait to get laid. Yes, for many, marriage is nothing more than a license to have regular sex. And this is had resulted to more dangerous results than we can possible phantom such as marital rape. Men feel entitled to sex when they want it and the way they want it, no matter whether if they have the consent of their wife or not.
3. Marriage is a compulsion in Nigeria. We grow up witnessing everyone around us getting married and believing marriage is a stage every adult has to go through. Sometimes it feels like we were raised with the mindset that marriage is the ultimate goal in life. We never get the chance to form our opinion about marriage. And we end up taking the dive not because we want to, but because we think we have to because that’s what everyone seems to be doing.
4. The fear of staying single is one of the silly reasons why people get married in Nigeria. We’re made to believe that not finding ‘the one’ by the time you’re 30 then you are going to die alone. So because of this fear we rush to meet a handful of people and choose by the process of elimination. This is wrong on some levels!
5. Some Nigerian females actually think Marriage would set them free. While this might sound empowering it is actually weird. How can you enter a long term commitment you don’t believe in just so you can escape their parent’s house. No, they won’t move out and take control of their lives in their own hands. They’d rather marry the first guy they meet and seek his support in giving them the life they want. So much for women empowerment.
6. We believe so blindly in cultures and traditions, we assume that marriage means permanence. We get married because we’re not sure if we’d be able to commit to our partners otherwise, totally failing to realize that real commitment doesn’t require a piece of paper to validate it. We think there’s nothing that can go wrong between two partners once they’re married. It is almost as if marriage is the solution for every tumultuous relationship. We tie ourselves down in compulsion and spend the rest of our lives resenting each other and hating ourselves for taking a decision we didn’t really believe in.
7. And, of course, there are those of us who are so non-confrontational, we prefer living a lie by getting married to people we don’t even love instead of standing up to our parents and letting them know what it is that we really want in life. We get married not because we want to, but because it is our parents’ ultimate dream because we aren’t strong enough to live life on our own terms!
8. It is appalling to see so many women marrying men from rich families just because living off someone else’s money is the most convenient way of life. Yes, to break it out to you, there are a lot of women out there who get married because they don’t want to take up a job anymore. Screw independence, they just want luxury.
This brings us to the most important question – if not any of these, what should be the one reason to get married to someone? Tell us what you think!
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