By Ogova Ondego
Published January 3, 2023
“I am not married honey and I am not even planning to. Will tell you if I change my mind,” the woman, who says she is in her mid 20s, tells me at a Lagos club. “Marriage sucks! It doesn’t make most people happy. The cheating and the controlling of women makes it not appealing to me!”
Another woman, in Nairobi, says, “I am engaged, yes. If I still feel the way I do now in December I will get married.”
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As I am about to return to Kenya from Johannesburg, a woman I know to be married tells me she is now single.
What!
“I fell out of love. I realised that I needed more than just love to live,” she says, looking me in the eye. “Love is a beautiful thing but I was raised that as a woman, I need a man who can take care of me and my needs. There was a point in my life that I really needed someone to care and provide for me but my husband was not there. I work, I make my own money but why should I work my ass off when I have a man in my life?”
Back in the western Kenyan town, Kakamega, a middle aged woman shares the sentiments of the South African: “My husband understands that it is is his duty to provide for the family and he does it religiously. I really have no reason to or do anything that would hurt his feelings or jeopardize my relationship.”
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My mission in this article is to find out whether love precedes marriage and whether it is necessary in and for marriage.
I am aware that some men get their wives through bride capture or arranged marriages and that they nevertheless ‘live happily ever after’ regardless of how their relationship came about. Such couples get to learn how to live together, cooperating in carrying out family duties and end up accepting and loving their partners.
“My father and his friends waylaid and captured the woman who would become my mother as she went to the river to fetch water for her family,” a woman from Mumias in western Kenya tells me. She says her parents were happy together and had 10 children. Her mother died in 2021.
A man from North Maragoli, also in western Kenya, says his parents came together through arranged marriage; that his father’s sister brought his father the girl who became his mother.
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One can, therefore, logically conclude that marriages such as the ones just described weren’t based on love or on prior friendship yet they succeeded as proof that love and friendship grow out of marriage and not marriage out of love and friendship.
In fact, John Njoka, a sociologist at University of Nairobi, argued some time back that ‘you should not marry someone if you love them’. Simply put; familiarity breeds contempt.
Marriage, according to African Religions and Philosophy by John Samuel Mbiti, serves social, economic and political purposes. I dare add religious and sociological importance as well.
This could explain why throughout history, people have not been marrying on the basis of love, romance or feelings alone.
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That African marriage brings together not just a man and a woman but their entire communities of both the living and the dead elevates it to an almost sacred level.
No wonder Mbiti argues that marriage in African societies is not an option but an obligation which every adult should take part in. Failure to do this will signal rebellion against the community and in turn the community will reject such individuals.
Marriages that are based on romance, love, infatuation or feelings alone tend to get weaker as the romance, love, infatuation and feelings they are anchored on change. In Leo Tolstoy’s novel, Anna Karenina, the beginning of the end of the marriage of Anna Karenina occurs the moment she realises that Prince Stepan Arkadyevich Oblonsky, the man she has just married, has big ears. In other words, when her romantic feelings for the man wear off.
