For most of history, marriage never had to explain itself. Nothing else could do what it did. That is over now, and the real story is not moral decline. It is competition.
By Charles Obiajulu Ugwu
In many communities in Africa, before a traditional marriage goes ahead, the bride’s people hand the groom’s family a list. Yams. Goats. Cartons of drink. Wrappers, tobacco, kola. Money for the umunna, money for the umuada and other variants of “key stakeholders”. People from the city like to laugh at it. Some call it buying a wife.
That isn’t what the list is. Anyone who has sat through one of those evenings knows it was never really about the goats. The list was the price of getting into the one institution that gave a man everything at once: an heir nobody could dispute, in-laws who now owed him and whom he owed, a partner in work and in life, and his place as a grown man in the eyes of the village. The list was long because a lot came with it.
Now walk into a fertility clinic in Lekki or Maitama. They have a list too. It’s printed, and it’s priced. Egg retrieval. Embryo transfer. Donor sperm. Screening. A woman to carry the pregnancy, if you need one. A good part of what the kinsmen’s list used to cover is on that sheet, sold item by item to whoever can pay. No in-laws come with it.
I keep coming back to those two lists, because I think they explain what is happening to marriage better than most of what gets said about it.
You know how the argument usually goes. One side says we are in moral decline. Blame the West, blame Nollywood, blame social media, and go back to how things were. The other side calls it freedom. Less stigma, fewer women trapped, and good riddance to a vow that mostly served men. I’ve heard both a hundred times. They disagree about nearly everything, but they share one assumption: that marriage is being attacked from outside, by bad values or by better ones.
I don’t think that’s what’s going on. Marriage was always partly an exchange. The list proves it. Commerce didn’t just walk into the home last year. What’s new is that marriage has lost its monopoly. The things it used to be the only source of can now be got somewhere else.
Think about what marriage actually did for most of history. It made sex legitimate. It was the proper way to have children. It settled who raised them and who inherited the land. It tied two families together, and in our part of the world that was often the main point; the couple came second. It pooled work and spread risk. It gave you company. It was a vow before God, or the ancestors. And it made you a full adult. An unmarried man of forty was still, in some quiet way, a boy.
All of that came as one package for a simple reason. You couldn’t get any of it separately. If a woman wanted a child and her family’s respect, there was one road. If a man wanted heirs nobody would challenge, he married their mother. Nobody had to sell marriage. It sold itself, because there was no other shop.
Now there are other shops.
It didn’t happen all at once. It went piece by piece.
First the vow turned into a contract. No-fault divorce started in California in 1969 and spread from there. Couples now sign prenups before they sign the register. They plan the exit at the door. Once you do that, “till death do us part” stops being the deal. It becomes a default setting, something you can change later.
Then children got separated from the marriage bed. Louise Brown was born in England in 1978, the first baby conceived through IVF. Today it’s ordinary, here included. A child can come from one woman’s egg, grow in another woman’s womb, and be raised by a third. The father can be a number in a sperm bank’s catalogue.
Then chance became choice. You can screen embryos. You can pick a donor by height and degree and complexion, the way you’d pick floor tiles. Some of that is about sparing a child real suffering, and I won’t sneer at it. But something shifts when a child is something you specified. If you ordered it, you can be disappointed in it the way you’re disappointed in a delivery.
Then the community lost the right to decide. Baby mama, baby daddy. Twenty years ago that was gossip at a family meeting. Now it’s in the songs. Children born outside marriage don’t carry the shame they used to, and honestly, that’s good. Plenty of women got out of bad marriages once the shame lost its grip. But the same change means the family and the village can’t hold a man to anything anymore. They can see what he’s doing. They just can’t make him do better.
And the household stopped making things. We buy care now. Nannies, crèches, boarding schools, lesson teachers, counsellors, homes for the old. There are even apps selling companionship. The family is turning into a customer, and I’m not sure a family that only buys can hold people together the way one that worked together did.
So people ask whether marriage is still worth it. I think that’s the wrong question. It treats marriage like a product whose price went up. Buy or don’t buy.
Here’s the question I’d ask instead. Take away everything marriage used to control and doesn’t any more. Sex, children, care, status, all of it. What’s left that nothing else can give you?
If the honest answer is nothing, fine. Let it go quietly. There’s no point keeping an empty institution alive out of sentiment. But I don’t think the answer is nothing.
The first thing left is a promise that holds after you stop being useful. Everything you buy is conditional. You pay, they deliver. You stop paying, they stop delivering. A marriage vow is supposed to hold exactly when the conditions fail. When she’s been sick for three years. When he’s lost his job and sits at home and is poor company. You can’t buy that. The moment you pay for it, it’s conditional again.
The second is belonging. A clinic can give a child a beginning. It can’t give her a name and a people and a story that started before she did. Donor-conceived adults keep telling researchers the same thing: they want to know where they came from. A catalogue entry doesn’t answer that.
The third is what staying does to you. When you can’t easily walk out, you have to learn things. How to apologise. How to hold your tongue. How to fix what you broke, slowly. Nobody learns that in a relationship they can leave after the first bad week.
The fourth is kin. Here especially, where the state won’t catch you when you fall, it’s family that pays the hospital bill, takes in the children and buries the dead. Marriage is how families get joined and how those obligations get made. You can buy insurance. You can’t buy in-laws.
There’s something people don’t say enough. Losing the monopoly might actually be good for marriage. When it was the only road, a lot of people took it because they had to. Fear, family pressure, money. For some of them “permanent” just meant stuck. Now it’s optional, so the person who marries today is choosing it with the other options sitting right there. Fewer people may marry. The ones who do may mean it more.
There’s a catch, though. In supposedly more developed countries, marriage has been drifting toward the educated and comfortable, while poorer people form families that come apart more easily. If that happens here, marriage turns into a luxury, the poor get the loose arrangements, and the children pay for it.
And in Nigeria none of this is theory. We already had three kinds of marriage running side by side, customary, Islamic and under the Marriage Act, often two at once for the same couple. Marriage here was never just two people. It was two families.
The new options came in fast, and from the top. IVF is there if you can pay. Surrogacy happens, some of it in proper clinics, some of it in places you wouldn’t want to look at. As I write, there is still no federal law on assisted reproduction or surrogacy. Bills have come and gone since 2015. In that gap we get the baby factories the police keep raiding: young women held until they give birth, and the babies sold. That’s what the market looks like when demand is high, poverty is deep and nobody is regulating. It doesn’t get rid of exploitation. It moves it onto the people with the least protection.
So we have a country that talks covenant in its churches and mosques and runs on market logic in its clinics and its music. Something has to give.
A real rethink doesn’t mean defending every old form, and it doesn’t mean throwing the whole thing out. It means building marriage around what only marriage can do, not around what it used to have a monopoly on.
It means asking, honestly, whether our weddings have become part of the problem. When the ceremony costs more than a young couple can earn in years, the party is keeping people out of the marriage. It means asking what the child needs, and not only what the adults want, every time we talk about surrogates and donors and co-parenting. It means a law that finally catches up with the clinics. And it means churches, mosques and families spending less energy guarding the rituals and more helping couples carry the weight once the rituals are over and the guests have gone home.
Go back to the list. Yams, goats, drink, money for the umunna. It always looked like a price. It never really was. It was what you paid to join something bigger than two people, and both families knew it.
The clinic’s list is a real price. That’s the difference. It sells you a child and nothing else. No in-laws, no promise, nobody who will come when things go bad.
Marriage isn’t dying. It just has to explain itself now, for the first time, because there are other shops. The marriages that last won’t be held up by custom or fear. They’ll last because two people knew what they were signing up for, and knew they couldn’t get it anywhere else.
Charles is a contrarian thinker writing from Lagos.
