The unfortunate thing is of course that a wedding is not an end in itself. More unfortunate I suspect, is the fact that marriage itself is not an end. With the hyper speculation and general obsession Nigerians have with the state of matrimony, you might be forgiven for believing it is.

I’ve been pondering recently on the loaded question posed to the world in the early 1990s by the overweight lyrical luminaire, Heavy D (bet you thought I’d name a Nobel Laureate here…don’t sleep on the literary genius of hip hop!), “Now that we’ve found love, what are we gonna do with it?”

Good question. I haven’t found love just yet. I’m often unsure myself if love itself exists because I remain amazed at how something that appears at once so constant, may vitally mutate in the light of shifting circumstances. Yet when I doubt love’s existence, I can’t help but think how I feel about my sisters; how I would willingly sacrifice my life to spare them, give over my joys in place of their pain and sorrow, and it occurs to me that perhaps love might exist. But that’s another day’s discourse.

So, weddings and marriages and here the bride comes. In Nigeria, I think that there are only two real crimes; everything else is a mirage founded upon the pillars of these two offences. The first crime is the offence of Poverty. In our mammonistic nation, there is only one true god; money. Separation from god is death; life without money effectively equates demise. Influence, relevance, power are inextricably tied to wealth. Even the most basic human expectations and rights; to respect, kindness, dignity, fairness are tied to the possession of wealth. One might be able to live without influence or power, but a life without kindness and dignity, a life with an effaced sense of self-worth may be unbearable.

For women, the problem of poverty is grating; it fosters a dignity-eroding humility and forces a crushing self-doubt particularly for those who do not possess enormous vaults of strength, courage and contentment to draw from. For men, the situation is acute; wealth is the core of the spider’s web that measures status, access to women, respect, capacity and achievement. A man without money in Nigeria is impotent; the society at every turn reminds him that he is ‘…not a man’, as though a wad of crisp naira notes can recreate a penis, or the rich timbre of a man’s laugh, or his innate ability to distill situations and his inherent desire to lead and protect. Money is nothing, yet in Nigeria we exalt it to the status of everything.

The second terrible crime in existence in Nigeria is of course the sin of Singleness, followed closely by Barreness in married women (the fun truly never stops). Presumably due to our expendable ovaries, this offence is acute in women. We are reminded at every turn that “…the clock is ticking!!!”. I mean, so is Big Ben but that’s neither here nor there. Can we allow my Nigerian sisters breathe without choking on ticking wombs and stale eggs?

I’m lucky my parents are really cool and so the pressure to marry though present (hi Mommy!), is not cloying yet, but between my bosses at work, comments from extended family members and random humans, marrying as a means to an end of the noise, slowly seems like a viable option. For instance, the other day a random intern at work discovered that I am moving out of my current accommodation (at a friend’s family home, as my parents aren’t in Lagos) and into my own flat. Her candid and unsolicited advice was, “…men in this part of the world neither respect nor marry women who do not live in their parents’ houses”. This is a similar sentiment to her determination that by driving a car (a tiny Picanto-style car no less!), I would be chasing away suitable suitors and potential husbands. Faulty as I believe it is, I see the logic in her reasoning. And so in response, I assured her that the sort of man my husband will be, is one supportive of my hard-earned achievements and certainly not one that develops an inferiority complex simply because his wife is working hard to make a decent and comfortable living for herself. I thought however, how ironic it was that she was giving this advice to me while suffering in the struggle of public transport in Lagos traffic and living in cramped quarters, all in the hope of finding a man unafraid of her success…yet she was still as single as a grain of rice.

That situation assured me of something I have always known; there is simply no formula or guarantee to this marriage thing. So why not fully enjoy the God-fearing, God-loving, God-delighting life that He has ordained for you instead of limiting yourself to fit into a cookie-cut image of someone or society’s perceived idea of correctness? When I was younger, I worried that marriage might perhaps be a restriction, indeed the limitation or lessening and perhaps the breaking of one’s true self. But the older I grow, the more I understand that a good marriage is the blossoming, expansion and actually the building of a woman. It is that growing to fit even more snugly into one’s skin simply from the feeling of sincerely and honestly loving, and the purity of being loved in return. Perhaps marriage is less the reduction of self and more a willing compromise of self; a happy sacrifice and surrender of autonomy in return for something far more valuable. In marriage, unlike math, perhaps two halves do not make a whole. Instead, two wholes plug the holes life’s scars leave, not to complete each other but to complement and celebrate one another.

My parents may not always read from the same page or even the same book but they are so deeply connected that I am certain that whatever books they are reading, the content of those strange pages are the same. This sort of love doesn’t happen overnight, it doesn’t happen with pressure to fall for the first thing, it doesn’t happen with a self-esteem so broken from a society adept at condemning people for Crimes Out of One’s Control such as the dreaded offence of Singleness. It happens when two whole people meet. But we are creating a society of halves; half-wits, half-baked, half-decent women and men; people sacrificing dignity, intellect and self-worth in a fervent desire to acquire the ‘Holy Grail’ of wealth, status and/or marriage.

So, Mr. Heavy D , let me tell you what I am going to do with it when I find Love. I am going to cherish it; I will not take it for granted because I understand my worth and correspondingly love’s value increases because it has the wisdom to appreciate my worth. I will nurture and respect it and treat it with the dignity and kindness it deserves because I understand, in the volatility of our world, the preciousness of receiving a rare gift that was crafted especially for me.

Now that we’ve found love, what are we going to do with it?

I think I might also thank God for releasing me from the shackled chains of that most abhorrent ‘crime’, Singleness, formulated by a society so wrought with sin and stupidity that even life choices are elevated to the rank of criminality. Madness. Lol!