By Douglas Anele

Indigenous Nigerian cultures, Christianity, and Islam recommend marriage for everyone. For instance, Christianity teaches that he who finds a wife finds a good thing, and obtains favour from God (assuming that such a being exists). Because The Holy Bible appears to have been written from a fundamentally masculine perspective, there is no mention of a wife finding a good thing if she gets a husband. Islam also encourages marriage, while according to native customs and traditions, an unmarried state for both men and women is an abomination.

Marriage has some advantages over remaining single; but it does not follow that everyone ought to marry. The benefits of matrimony are obtained at a heavy price. Albert Ellis, in his highly entertaining and informative book, Sex and the Single Man, discussed the advantages and disadvantages of marriage.

Now, since majority of Nigerians are convinced that marriage is good and that it is an institution established by God for human benefit there is no need to belabour its advantages here. Instead, we shall highlight its disadvantages to encourage those considering marriage to reflect deeply and dispassionately before crossing the Rubicon, so to speak.

One of the most serious disadvantages of marriage, particularly monogamy, is the restriction on sex, companionship, and love. We have already identified the instinct for sexual variety in humans, which make lifelong fidelity to one’s spouse difficult despite the exhortations of religious teachings. Let us consider the issue of companionship and love.

Hypocrisy and self-deception aside, in majority of cases the intensity of love and desire for companionship with which marriages begin tend to dissipate with passing years due to a number of factors, most especially the deadening effect of excessive familiarity with each other as a result of living under the same roof for a long time.

As a result, many married people feel suffocated by the expectation that it is their duty to love their spouses “till death do them part”. However, to feel it is one’s duty to love so-and-so is one of the surest ways to stifle love, since love can only flourish when it is free and spontaneous.

Oftentimes close friendships end abruptly because of marriage, and matrimonial restrictions against intensely emotionally satisfying affairs and friendships with others make marriage a prison that nourishes jealousy and deceit.

Other drawbacks of matrimony include economic inconvenience (especially for husbands who are usually the breadwinners, although these days an increasing number of women are assuming that role), the extremely challenging burden of raising children, curtailment of extracurricular activities and adventure, legalised bondage, intrusion into one’s privacy and private space, difficulties from in-laws, and marital unhappiness.

This leads us to the second fallacy, which is that the dignity and honour of a woman resides in her husband. Certainly, a successful marriage is one in which the husband and wife (or wives) enrich each other’s life. Still it is a simplistic hyperbole to assert categorically that having a husband necessarily dignifies a woman.

Although relevant statistics about the condition of married women from different social strata in Nigeria is difficult to get, there is no doubt in my mind that a large number of Nigerian men do not have the qualities needed to sustain marriage which can override the disadvantages highlighted above.

The same thing, mutatis mutandis, is applicable to Nigerian women also. Far from “living happily ever after”, marriage is usually an exceedingly difficult and miserable endeavour for a sizeable number of women because of temperamental inadequacies of their husbands.

Many husbands are neurotic, unintelligent, intolerant, stingy, arrogant, untidy, overbearing, dishonest, violent, impecunious, lazy, and immature in love. Some of them see themselves as God’s gift to their wives, and believe the ancient superstition that women are innately inferior to men and, therefore, must be submissive to them at all times. To be candid, some husbands are just impossible.

There are innumerable cases of women either killed or maimed by irascible and drunk husbands; in other instances, some husbands have forced their wives to abandon successful businesses or careers just because of stupid jealousy and possessiveness.

Indeed, some men are so insecure, so afraid of their wives being more successful than themselves that they compel them to be complete homemakers. Hence, rather than bringing dignity and honour to their wives, a significant number of husbands bring hell to the unfortunate women.

Unfortunately, women have been brainwashed through religion and intimidated by unfair customs and economic dependency to endure bad, boring and unhappy marriages. On the strength of what we have said thus far, it is clear that only a tiny percentage of marriages are genuinely happy or successful.

There are just too many pressures connected to living together as husband and wife such that fulfilment is rare in marriage. Fulfilment in life depends on the extent to which an individual is able to unfold his or her productive powers in work and in love without undue interference and oppression. It connects with the ability to meet one’s legitimate goals and aspirations.

Thus, it is evident that a single man or woman with the appropriate mental, intellectual, and spiritual dispositions and skills can lead a fulfilled life, whereas it would take much more for a married person, with all the difficulties associated with matrimony, to achieve the same feat. Let us now summarise the essential points of our discourse.

Marriage is an important social institution created by human beings at the dawn of civilisation to cater for their biological, economic, and emotional needs – it is definitely wrong to attribute its origin to a divine being. Religious conceptions of matrimony are inadequate for our time because they stem from antiquated superstitious conceptions of humans and flawed understanding of the need for intimate relatedness between man and woman. Marriage has advantages, especially in the cooperative effort of parents to produce responsible offspring.

However, because of its numerous restrictions and the high demands it makes on privacy it leads to frustrations and unhappiness. For men and women with the right mental dispositions, marriage can enhance the quality of their lives, provided they establish strong emotional connection and compatibility as good friends before they decide to tie the knot.

Nigerian women tend to become strongly attached to an unhappy marriage, to desperately want children, to feel that once they have been supported by their husbands for a number of years they cannot stand on their own feet economically if the marriage breaks up, to care too much about their marital status after a certain age – and for other silly reasons – to hang on to a bad marriage.

The wrong notion that everyone must marry, that a woman is incomplete or without honour if she is unmarried, and that fulfilment in life requires matrimony has led to many hasty marriages that ended disastrously. Therefore, marriage is not compulsory at all; but if you must marry please look very carefully before you leap or else you might not even live long enough to regret it. CONCLUDED.