Marriage, the Elephant in the room

I mean, what do you mean you want to deny your parents, “Yoruba Parents” especially, the opportunity for that once-in-a-lifetime “Owambe” party? I mean, you are a “Yoruba Girl-Child” for that matter, and your marriage ceremonies (not one ceremony) are the creme-de-la-creme once-in-a-lifetime event for your “Yoruba Mother”, and some Fathers too.

Regarding the featured image on this post, that was a beautiful photo taken with friends and kids when we visited the Obasanjo Presidential Library in Abeokuta, we had joked that day at the beauty of that photo depicting a traditional household with many wives and children, haha.

A lot of people who do not know me well enough, and this includes those around me and those I don’t know automatically assume I got my heart broken by some guy in the past and this is why I am against marriage.

Well, this is not the case. From a young age, I saw relationship breakups from the standpoint of “it didn’t work out and two people go their separate ways”. There was always so much malice to see around then and now when people break up and I always thought why are you angry so much you wish the other party dead?

Before that young age and as a child, I used to always say “I would never get married”, and no this is not because I witnessed unhappiness in my parent’s marriage or saw a lot of unhappy marriages growing up, I don’t even remember seeing any unhappiness with marriages I witnessed, but this was just solely my reasoning and it has not changed.

I thought marriage was overrated then and I still think it is today. I do, however, maintain that Marriage “when done right”, is indeed a beautiful journey for the parties involved! But again, what do I know?

In class one day, I think we were in what they call Grade 11 or 12 today, we had an informal debate in Commercial/Art Class about marriage, while my BFF was on the bench; not for or against, it was only myself and another Art student that was against. You should know though, both of them are married to their amazing partners today and have beautiful kids.

During my postgraduate program at Babcock University, I was friends with several older folks; now that is a story for another day because for reasons I do not know, older people like my presence a lot, and there was this particular Grandma who would call me once a year way after our program and ask me “are you now married”? And of course, I would say “No”, and give her a lecture on why she needs to stop asking me that, to be fair I lectured her because she would go on with reasons to guilt me into why I should, like ma’am, reverse psychology don’t work on me, don’t even try, please, reasons like;

• What if you die alone in the house for days and no one knows; another Grandma asked me this one time and went on to tell me about her unmarried old male cousin who passed in his house and no one knew (me: ma’am, “a dead person tells no tales”, literally!)
• You are being unfair to your parents, pity them, they got married, you should too (me: okay, it’s still a NO)
• What do your parents have to say, you must get married for their sake, surely they must mandate you to get married (me: hello, mandate me to do so, because what? I am 16 🤦‍♀️)
• You are being unfair to your child, you need to get married; (me: sighs, whose life is it again?)

Sighs, marriage as a discussion never came up between myself and my father, he probably knew better. It came up only once with my Mother, and I told her that day it should never come up again!

No one knows tomorrow, this is true, I do know I am not married today too, and still have no plans to do so!

What else would you like to know? Ask away in the comments or send me an email and I might write about it.