MzAgams

Don’t Marry For Love Alone

Falling in love isn’t just an emotional event. It’s a physiological function. When you’re attracted to someone your body release a cocktail of dopamine and norepinephrine which make you feel excited, energetic, euphoric, and can lead to decreased appetite and insomnia. At the same time your serotonin levels decrease making you impulsive and slightly obsessive. Dopamine lights up the same brain regions when you’re feeling attraction, when drug addicts take cocaine and when you eat chocolate. Withdrawal from love and from cocaine feels the same. Norepinephrine is also released when you’re stressed and keeps you alert. Once you get physical with the object of your attraction oxytocin and vasopressin are released and create attachment. Pure lust is driven by testosterone and estrogen produced by the testes and ovaries respectively and is completely unrelated to attraction and attachment. 

“Psychologists have shown it takes between 90 seconds and 4 minutes to decide if you fancy someone.

Research has shown this has little to do with what is said, rather-

55% is through body language
38% is the tone and speed of their voice
Only 7% is through what they say”

Knowing this why on earth would anyone chose to marry for love alone?

Most of us want to get married. While there are a growing number of people that choose to stay single, for the vast majority marriage remains a goal. Who you marry has the potential to make or break you. There is a lot of evidence that marriages are not fulfilling anymore and divorce is on the increase worldwide. In the west divorce has become so common that in some countries 1 in 3 marriages will end in divorce. In Nigeria the rate of divorce compared to the rate of marriage is still relatively low. Statistics are unreliable but less that 1 in a 100 marriages in Nigeria ends in divorce. Despite these low numbers there is a common consensus that divorce rates in Nigeria are rising. Various reasons have been given for this rise such as infidelity, financial problems, domestic violence and early marriage but all of these conditions have existed before. Some writers are of the opinion the rise is due to the changing attitudes of modern Nigerians who are less likely to put up with behaviour that their parents generation endured in marriage and who are also marrying for more superficial reasons. Personally I think is a mixture of both; the younger generation is getting married with less forethought as well as being less tolerant of certain behaviour.

The best way to prevent divorce is to choose your spouse carefully. Before colonisation in Nigeria all the ethnic groups that make up Nigeria had very specific processes for selecting marriage partners, rarely did this selection involve what we nowadays call romantic love, the most common reason for marriage now. Attraction was important, don’t get me wrong but attraction, or infatuation as it has been rightly identified by western philosophers and psychologists, was not considered sufficient reason to get married. Love is not that feeling of instant attraction a young man and woman sometimes feel for each other. Love is a verb and is the result of how people treat each other over time, not how they feel. Feelings are fleeting and temporary. How does one build a life on a temporary feeling? So no matter what you feel there are a whole lot of other things to consider before you decide to marry someone. While researching this topic I read a couple of articles that purport to guide how to chose a life partner or spouse. I must say I was disappointed. The Igbo girl in me disagreed with the excessive individualism and self-centredness. Where I come from marriage isn’t a union of two people, its first and foremost a union of two families, and sometimes even two communities.

Here are my recommendations for how to find a spouse, updated for the modern society and era but drawing heavily on the age old traditions that my tribal group, the Igbo of south east Nigeria, have used for millennia when choosing marriage partners.

A few common sense matters first.

What Do You Want?

Decide the life style you want. Where do you want to live? How many children do you want? Where do you want them to go to school? What are your values? What’s important to you? Basics first. You really have to think about it. Write it down. Writing helps clarify thoughts. I always talk about my cousin that married twice. His first wife was a socialite and a hustler, he was incredibly traditional, jealous and possessive. He wanted a stay at home wife. They divorced eventually and he met his second wife who was happiest staying at home cooking, cleaning and pregnant. Now your lifestyle includes financial considerations. A lot of people nowadays, both men and women, marry for money. Let’s not judge, if that’s what’s important to you go for it. What reasons do you have for getting married? Children? Security? Companionship?

Take an audit of your life situation. Are you an only son or daughter? Do you have an ageing or sick parent? Or special needs siblings? This is Nigeria and those things count. If you are an only child and your mother is a poor widow you will need to take care of her and you will need a spouse that will do this with you. Another cousin of mine ( I have more than one hundred cousins by the way) had one special needs sibling. When their mom dies she will have to take care of this sibling and anyone she marries will have to accept that. This is Nigeria, we don’t have ‘homes’ and such like for old parents or needy siblings. We do it ourselves, even if you have all the money in the world to buy care givers, they will need to be supervised closely. It is what it is.

Once you have the situation clear think about what you will want from a spouse. A nurturing person? A hard working person? A generous and compassionate person? A rich person? An important person? If you like fall in love with the class drama queen or the school jock, your responsibilities will remain your responsibilities. Like I said and will repeat again for emphasis, this is Naija, not Oyibo land where family ties are non existent beyond the first generation and the state does so much for you that you have no debt to your parents. In Naija they suffered to raise you as best they can and made sacrifices for you. You owe them. Period. (Then again if your parents didn’t do any of that for you or abused you then consider yourself free.)

A good example of not being clear about what you want from life is Marla Maples, Donald Trump’s second wife. She complained that the man did not stay home with her and be her companion. But she married a man that was perpetually hustling and making business deals. Now it’s okay to marry a man (or a woman) for his or her money. But if your future spouse has to always be on the go making money it’s not likely that he or she will have the time or the inclination to sit around holding your hand and listening to your stories. Not all rich people are rich enough not to work and some are too restless. Melania on the other hand accepted that her husband will not only not be there for her all the time but that he will cheat on her with other women. She wanted the lifestyle, not the man. Be informed about the choice you make. I knew one woman that stayed with a violent, abusive and unavailable man for decades because of the lifestyle he gave her. Be ready to pay the price.

I am not a supporter of long live in relationships. Why not? After dating someone for several years you will invariably find all of their character flaws, by then the love chemicals that make love a blind mans bluff will have subsided. It’s too easy to let them go without any obligation or protection. Now for a woman whose objective is marriage do not go dating a guy for years. If your objective is not marriage and the other person knows this then carry on. But don’t go stringing someone along just to drop them. It could end badly, like someday you will run into someone that will stick you with a shive at night or just give you bad karma. Don’t play with people’s feelings. And don’t play with a families feelings either.

Get to know your intendeds family as soon as possible. What are they like? Don’t diminish the impact of family dynamics. How your intendeds father treats their mother is a clue to how he will treat you and vice versa. Know this and be free. No need to start complaining about it after the marriage. Are the family close? What kind of boundaries do they have? I knew one family like that with absolutely no boundaries. They didn’t respect locked doors. They took each others things without permission. Guess how they treated their brothers wife? And she didn’t like it all.

Do not be afraid to enquire about the family’s medical history. Is there any history of mental illness? And physical illnesses too. Is there a history of cancer or diabetes or heart disease or alcoholism? Addiction has been shown to be linked by genetics. Things like this will not only affect you because of the care requirements it will also affect the children of the marriage. I know a lady who says the most horrible things to her children like “I hope you’re not like your uncle or your aunty.” The uncle is autistic and the aunty has schizophrenia. Makes you almost wish her children are too just to teach her a lesson. And yes, she knew before she married her husband. The whiff of money overcame her good judgment, unfortunately. In Igbo-Nigeria one never married into or from a family with a history of mental illness or certain physical illnesses known to be hereditary.

Where will you meet your future spouse?

I don’t know. But here are a few places to try. Social events, like weddings, think of that aso ebi as an investment. You could meet your future spouse at a funeral too. In Nigeria we do big funerals as well as big weddings. Christmas in the village. At work. At the sports club, museum, gallery or coffee shop. I wouldn’t marry someone I met in a night club. That’s just me. I also wouldn’t marry someone I met in church. Its just too obvious and everyone else is on church looking for a spouse too and everyone knows this and just goes to church and pretends to be righteous. I would rather meet at a charity event they are volunteering at. Or in the library or bookstore.

Once you’ve met this person don’t rush into physical intimacy. Don’t rush to have sex. This is not about playing hard to get. It’s about those pesky attachment hormones, oxytocin and vasopressin. Have sex with someone often enough and you will start to form an attachment that will make it harder to break up if you find out that marriage is not after all on the cards. Take your time to explore and investigate this person before having sex. Let the sexual tension build up but don’t let it blind you. I know, easier said them done. Try your best. Another good reason to delay sexual gratification is that good old economic principle that says anything that is too available loses value. Ask Chioma, Davido’s baby mama. When he was carrying her upandan she thought she was the best thing since sliced bread. I know it’s a cliche but its still true, why buy the cow if it gives you free milk?

Talking about becoming a baby mama, pregnancy will not guarantee you a wedding or a marriage. Forget Jubril Okoya’s recent baby drama and rushed wedding. Not only is the couple young they hardly had time to really think about what they were doing getting married. And I think the marriage was forced on them by their parents, maybe both sets or just one set of parents I don’t know. While I wish them well the fact is probabilities are against them. Remember Mohamed Babangida’s first marriage that was pushed on him by his mother? He’d been having a relationship with Umma Wali for years before his family insisted he marry Rahma Indimi. When problem developed between him and Rahma he quickly married Umma as second wife. Both marriages suffered eventually although the word is he is reconciled with Rahma.

Once you found someone that seems to tick the boxes play this game with them. Being vulnerable with another person can be exceedingly difficult, so this exercise forces the issue.

Good luck anyway. You’re going to need it. Marriage can be a real gamble no matter how carefully you prepare and plan for it. Plan for it anyway, it will increase your chances of success and fulfilment.