By Charles Obiajulu Ugwu-PhD
At the last wedding I attended amongst the Kikuyus in Kenya, the bride’s father stood to toast the couple and said something that made the room go quiet: “Finally, she’s achieved what every woman dreams of.” He meant it as triumph. I heard it as eulogy. The woman in question held a doctorate in molecular biology, had scaled Kilimanjaro, had rebuilt her mother’s house after the floods. But here we were, gathered in a rented tent, applauding her for securing a husband as if all previous accomplishments were merely preamble. The groom, for his record, was a decent man who sold insurance and believed the moon landing was faked. This is not a story about her poor choice. This is a story about our poor accounting.
We have built a world where women can now freeze their eggs with the precision of military logistics, where men calculate the optimal age to marry based on dating market algorithms, where couples spend more time curating their wedding hashtags than discussing whether they want children. We have, in other words, industrialized the most intimate dimensions of human life while maintaining the fiction that marriage remains some sacred pinnacle of personal development. The dissonance would be comic if it weren’t so quietly devastating.
Consider what we have actually done. We have taken an institution designed for agricultural economies, for lifespans of forty years, for societies where women couldn’t own property and men died of infected wounds, and we have declared it the universal standard for adult flourishing in an age of artificial intelligence and globalized intimacy. We have kept the architecture but removed the foundation, then wondered why so many structures collapse. The divorce statistics are not failures of marriage. They are evidence that we are running obsolete software on modern hardware, expecting compatibility.
The ache beneath all this is not theoretical. Walk through any city on a Saturday evening and watch the performance unfold. The couples in restaurants conducting relationship maintenance through scheduled date nights. The single friends swiping through faces with the dissociated focus of casino gamblers. The thirty-somethings at fertility clinics treating conception like a project management milestone. Everyone performing normalcy while some essential quality of spontaneity, of genuine encounter, leaches out of the proceedings. We have become technicians of our own hearts, and we call this achievement.
What we rarely acknowledge is how deeply the marriage imperative has colonized our sense of time itself. The unmarried person in their thirties does not merely face social awkwardness at holidays. They inhabit a different temporal category, marked as developmentally arrested, emotionally suspect, potentially damaged. Never mind that they might be building companies, nursing parents through dementia, translating ancient texts, or simply learning to live with themselves. The calendar of respectable adulthood remains stubbornly nuptial. We have allowed a single relationship configuration to become the master narrative against which all other life choices are measured, and this is presented as natural rather than as the profound constriction of human possibility that it actually represents.
The economic reality is more damning still. Marriage functions as a wealth transfer mechanism, concentrating resources among those already advantaged while excluding the vulnerable from full social participation. The tax benefits, the insurance advantages, the inheritance protections, the immigration preferences all of these create a tiered citizenship where partnered status determines access to stability. We have constitutional protections against discrimination based on race and religion, but we maintain a system where your access to healthcare can depend on whether someone has agreed to love you permanently. This is not romance. This is architecture, and it is such that increasingly serves those who need it least while failing those who need it most.
But the deeper violence is existential. Marriage asks us to perform a paradox: to choose permanently while knowing permanence is impossible, to promise fidelity in bodies that evolved for novelty, to build a shared future in a world that renders all futures provisional. We are not failing at marriage. Marriage is failing at being what we need, because what we need has changed while the institution has remained fixed in amber, occasionally repackaged but never fundamentally redesigned.
The technological culprits such as egg freezing, genetic selection, AI companions, surrogacy markets do not represent the corruption of marriage. They represent the exposure of its functional core. When we can procure partnership, offspring, and care through means that don’t require lifelong contractual binding, we see that marriage was never primarily about love. It was about risk distribution in conditions of scarcity. Now that scarcity is engineered rather than natural, the institution reveals itself as what it always was: a practical arrangement dressed in sacred language, a way to manage fear through formalization.
This is not an argument against commitment. Commitment is beautiful, necessary, perhaps the only response to the terror of impermanence that doesn’t collapse into nihilism. But commitment does not require marriage. It requires honesty, which marriage often prevents. It requires choosing again each day, which marriage promises to make unnecessary through the magic of vows. It requires seeing the other in their full complexity, which the spousal role husband, wife tends to flatten into caricature. We don’t need more marriages. We need more courage to love without the protective fiction that love can be contractually secured.
The alternative is not isolation. The alternative is plurality. Human beings need belonging, care, recognition, touch, shared purpose. These needs are real and urgent. But they can be met through configurations that don’t require the subordination of individual development to coupledom, that don’t demand we choose one person to fulfill every emotional and practical need until death, that don’t force us to perform a gendered script written centuries ago. The friend who shows up at the hospital. The co-parent who shares responsibility without romantic possession. The lover who remains beloved without becoming property. The community that raises children as collective treasure rather than private inheritance. These are not utopian fantasies. They are lived realities for millions who have found the courage to live outside the narrative.
What would it mean to take seriously the possibility that marriage, as currently structured, has become an obstacle to human flourishing rather than its vehicle? It would require us to stop congratulating people for engagements as if they had won something. It would require us to build social infrastructure housing, healthcare, eldercare, childrearing support that doesn’t assume a nuclear family unit. It would require us to tell new stories about what it means to live well, stories that don’t culminate in a white dress or a diamond ring.
This is not a call for cynicism. The desire to be known, to build something lasting with another person, to create and nurture new life, these are among the most profound impulses we possess. But we have allowed these impulses to be captured by an institution that increasingly serves institutional survival rather than human need. The wedding industry generates seventy billion dollars annually in the United States alone. The marriage counseling industry thrives on the inevitable gap between promise and reality. The self-help complex sells endless optimization of a fundamentally broken model. There is too much money in marriage for marriage to be questioned, which is precisely why it must be.
The personal cost is harder to quantify but easier to witness. The woman who stays because leaving would mean admitting failure to everyone who witnessed her vows. The man who never learned to articulate emotion because husbands are supposed to be strong. The couple who grow parallel rather than together, bound by legal and social obligation while their actual intimacy atrophies. The children who learn that love means endurance of suffering, that commitment requires the suppression of authentic self. These are not exceptions. They are the logical outcomes of an institution that promises too much, delivers too little, and forbids honest acknowledgment of the gap.
We need new rites of passage that don’t require romantic partnership to validate adult status. We need economic systems that don’t penalize singlehood or reward coupledom. We need languages for intimacy that don’t collapse into possession. We need to recognize that the family forms we treat as traditional are themselves recent inventions, and that inventing new forms is not destruction but continuation of human creativity.
The most radical possibility is this: that we might learn to love without needing to own, to commit without needing to promise forever, to build lives of deep connection without requiring those connections to follow a single prescribed shape. This is not fear of intimacy. It is the opposite. It is the recognition that intimacy is too precious to be managed by contract, too dynamic to be frozen in time, too various to be contained in one institutional form.
Marriage will not disappear. For some, it remains the right choice, the necessary container, the desired form. But it must become one option among many, not the default aspiration, not the measure of achievement, not the price of admission to full social dignity. We must learn to hear the phrase “still single” as meaningless as “still left-handed,” to see wedding announcements with the same neutral interest as announcements of new hobbies, to recognize that a life without marriage can be as full, as connected, as generative, as meaningful as any other.
The bride’s father was wrong. His daughter had not, in marrying, achieved the culmination of her dreams. She had made a choice, one of many possible choices, in a world that had convinced her this particular choice carried more weight than others. The achievement was not the marriage. The achievement would be, if it came at all, in the daily work of remaining human to one another in a culture that makes such humanity increasingly difficult. That work can happen within marriage or outside it. The institution is not the point. The courage is.
We are living through a transformation in what it means to be human together. Technology has not created this transformation; it has merely made visible what was already becoming true. We no longer need marriage for survival. We no longer need it for legitimacy. We no longer need it for companionship or reproduction or economic security. What remains is the question of whether we can imagine lives of meaning without it, whether we can build societies that support human flourishing in its full variety, whether we can love each other without the crutch of institutional permanence.
The answer is not yet written. But the asking is urgent. Too many lives are being lived in the shadow of an achievement that isn’t, measured against a standard that no longer serves, constrained by a form that predates their actual needs. We owe ourselves something better than this. We owe each other the freedom to find out what love might become when it is no longer required to justify itself through marriage, what community might grow when it is no longer organized around couples, what human beings might be when they are no longer defined by their success or failure at pairing.
The future of intimacy is unwritten. That is not a threat. That is an invitation.
About the Author
Dr Charles Obiajulu Ugwu is a contrarian thinker writing from Lagos
