Unmasking the Nigerian marital institution: Why women are suffering in their marriages

Marriages in Nigeria and most parts of Africa are sustained by women. You can argue this with your village deity. Women in general, put up with a lot of bulls**t just to make their marriages work. From childhood they have been taught that a wise woman keeps her home. In order to keep their homes, they end up enduring a lot of ill-treatment.

Find any woman who has been with a man for donkey years and ask her if she would love to marry that same man over again in her next life. Majority would say no. This brings us to the point that most marriages are endurance marriages not happy marriages. Unfortunately, we are told that marital success is about duration.

A successful marriage isn’t about duration but happiness. If two people spend five years together, happily and add immense value to each other; if they decide to break up without fighting about it, their marriage can be rated as successful. Spending eternity together in sorrow isn’t the idea of success to me. It is what you do in the marriage that counts not how long.

Scan through the length and breadth of Nigeria and see the things women endure. This is not to say that women are very innocent. Marriage in Nigeria is quite disadvantageous to the women folk. Except you are lucky to have a man who has a good head. Infidelity, entitlement mentality, domestic violence, third party interference, patriarchal orientation are some of the things women bear up. How many women are willing to walk out of their marriages when they are abused? They want to keep their homes and status. They want to raise their kids. They don’t want to be seen as failures. The moment a marriage fails, everybody points at the woman. This in itself is psychologically abusive.

I have seen women who were beaten by both husband and mother-in-law. The degree of humiliation they go through in the effort to keep their marriage is inestimable. Everything wrong with the marriage, is the woman’s fault. Bad children are her fault. Failed business, failure to have kids, crappy sex, the man’s infidelity, the man’s arrogance towards his family members, his stinginess to people in general, his lack of spirituality, his night crawling attitude, his poor dressing, everything is her fault.

After all these years of matrimonial slavery, women are beginning to set their priorities right. It is becoming clear to them that the quality of the marriage is what matters. They have come to agree that being single and happy is more important than being married and frustrated. But men won’t let them be. The same men would abuse a woman for opting to stay single. Isn’t this insane? You are not ready to treat somebody right, yet you won’t let them be. You tell them how stupid it is for a woman to be single, but your mouth won’t utter a word to tell men that they should treat women better. These things are worrisome to me.

The women who are standing out and demanding for their rights as humans are being tagged with all sorts of names. We say all manner of things to dampen their spirits. We are citing them as the reasons behind the failure of marriages. What we have failed to see is that marriages weren’t successful as we were told. It is just that the women were covering up our nakedness just to make everybody feel that their marriages were perfect. The burden of covering up our masculine insanity has increased and they can no longer handle it. Recently, they have chosen to unmask the matrimonial institution and show the world what they have been hiding for ages. We are scared that our little secrets are being revealed. We aren’t as powerful as people thought we are. We are just cowards hiding under patriarchal privileges.

So the question is, how many men are willing to put up with a woman who would give them the same dose of madness they have been giving to women? Exchange the roles and let the men be at the receiving end. Men are walking out of their marriages for little things as who cooked food, she starved me of sex for a week, she slapped me, she was flirting with my boss, I met the house dirty. Very insignificant, compared to what women have been putting up with.

I would like you to judge for yourself. Who are the people sustaining marriages? Apart from a few reasonable men, most men marry without a sense of marital purpose, which is why they destroy their marriages themselves and blame their wives. Now you can see that we can’t even put up with marital challenges, yet we are always quick to say that women who walked out of abusive marriages were not willing to make their marriages work. If you are such a man, I wish you a very bad woman, and I hope you stick with her and make the marriage work.

I want a good woman. I cannot come and suffer for the sins of other men. Bad women should go and marry bad men. Let the good marry the good. I didn’t come this far to pay for the stupidity of other men. After abusing a woman I will now come to reap your madness from her.

I wish myself and all the responsible men out there, good women that would value us.