Marriage that no longer has to survive, by Stephanie Shaakaa

There was a time when marriage was not something you left simply because it had become difficult. You entered it knowing that money would sometimes be scarce, affection would sometimes become quieter, children would change the rhythm of the household and life would eventually bring illness, ageing parents, disappointment and responsibilities nobody had imagined on the wedding day. Marriage was not expected to make life permanently beautiful. It was expected to survive life.

That understanding of marriage is changing, and nowhere is the change more revealing than in Nigeria, where an institution once held together by family, religion, culture, economics and social pressure is increasingly being negotiated by two individuals who believe they have the right to decide whether the relationship still works for them.

It is tempting to look at rising separation and divorce and conclude that people no longer understand commitment. There is some truth in the criticism. We live in an age that can encourage people to mistake dissatisfaction for incompatibility and ordinary marital difficulty for evidence that they chose the wrong person. But that explanation misses the larger transformation: marriage itself has changed.

For the previous generation, leaving a marriage could mean returning to one’s parents, losing financial security, disappointing an entire family, facing religious condemnation or becoming the subject of relentless community gossip. In Nigeria, marriage traditionally involved far more than the couple. Parents, siblings, churches, mosques, elders and extended families could all have a say in whether a marriage should survive. Children, bride price, family reputation and economic dependence could make separation feel less like a private decision than a public rupture.

That system kept many marriages together. It also kept some unhappy people trapped.

We should therefore be careful about treating the low divorce rates of the past as proof that people loved better then. Some couples stayed because they possessed the patience, forgiveness and generosity that long marriages require. Others stayed because leaving was economically, culturally or socially almost impossible. A marriage that cannot be left is not necessarily a successful marriage.

The modern Nigerian marriage operates under different conditions. More women are educated, employed and financially independent. Young people marry later, often after building careers and identities outside the family structures that once shaped almost every major decision. Urban life has weakened some traditional controls, while attitudes toward separation have changed. A woman who once had to ask what would happen to her if she left can increasingly ask what will happen to her if she stays.

That freedom matters, especially where there is violence, coercion or sustained humiliation. No society should preserve a marriage at the expense of the person inside it. But once fear, dependence and social shame stop being the principal reasons people remain together, marriage has to find a stronger foundation.

This is where the modern marriage has become extraordinarily demanding.

We now expect one person to be our lover, best friend, emotional refuge, financial partner, intellectual companion, sexual match, co-parent and source of personal fulfilment. We expect marriage to provide security without becoming boring, intimacy without becoming suffocating and independence without creating distance. We have placed an extraordinary amount of our happiness in the hands of another imperfect human being and then become surprised when that person cannot carry all of it.

The person we marry at twenty-eight may not be the person we live with at forty-eight. Careers change. Children arrive. Businesses fail. Money comes and disappears. Faith evolves. Parents grow old. Some people become more ambitious while others become exhausted by ambition. Someone who once wanted to conquer the world may eventually want nothing more than peace.

The real test of a long marriage may therefore be less about finding the perfect person than learning to love the person your partner becomes.

That requires abandoning the soulmate fantasy. A lifelong partner is not someone who remains permanently compatible with every version of you. Both people will change, sometimes in ways the other did not anticipate. The work of marriage is learning to meet those new versions of one another without immediately deciding that the person you loved has disappeared.

It also requires treating the relationship itself as something worth protecting. There will be seasons when one partner is carrying more because the other is grieving, exhausted, raising a young child, struggling financially or simply lost. A marriage cannot survive if both people believe they must feel fulfilled at the same time for the relationship to have value. Sometimes one person carries more of the marriage until the other has enough strength to carry it back.

This matters enormously in Nigeria, where financial pressure can turn marital strain into something much deeper. Rent, food, school fees, transport, healthcare, unemployment and obligations to extended family can make money the language through which couples begin arguing about responsibility, respect and love. A husband may feel diminished by his inability to provide what he was taught a husband should provide. A wife who contributes substantially to the household may resent being treated as though her income is merely supplementary. Two people can still love each other and yet become exhausted by the life they are struggling to afford.

Social media adds another distortion. People see anniversaries, holidays, expensive gifts and carefully photographed family moments and begin measuring their private marriage against somebody else’s public performance. Nobody posts the argument over school fees, the silent journey home after a terrible disagreement or the night two exhausted parents sat awake wondering how they would pay the next bill.

The modern world has become very good at reminding people that they have options. It has been less interested in teaching them what to do with those options.

The answer cannot be a return to the old culture of shame. Some marriages should end, and people must be free to leave relationships that are abusive or destructive. But we also need enough wisdom to distinguish a marriage that is genuinely broken from one passing through a difficult season. Not every unhappy period is the death of a relationship, just as not every persistent conflict is something patience can cure.

Perhaps the future of marriage depends on recovering a form of commitment that is neither blind endurance nor instant escape. It means understanding that compromise is not always defeat, that sacrifice is not automatically oppression and that building a life with another human being is itself a profound achievement. Two people with separate ambitions have to keep negotiating how their dreams can coexist without destroying the life they are building together.

The old marriage often survived because people had no acceptable alternative. The modern marriage has to survive because two people, having alternatives, continue to choose one another.

That makes it more fragile, but potentially more meaningful.

Marriage no longer has to survive merely because parents demand it, because the church expects it, because the neighbours are watching or because leaving would bring shame. It has to survive because the two people inside it have found something worth protecting after the excitement of beginning has faded and ordinary life has exposed all their imperfections.

That is the harder standard for marriage in our time, but it may also be the more honest one. The question is no longer simply how long two people managed to stay together. In a world where the freedom to leave is increasingly real, the deeper question is this:After all the freedom to leave, what gave them a reason to remain?