I have countless friends who have gotten married for genuine reasons. A good number of them also have an outstanding reason and most of those reasons are highly financial.

However, you cannot blame them. There are many women who are conditioned or raised to believe marriage will end a lot of their financial problems or offer them some instant glorious happiness.

So in effect, many young women grow up glorifying marriage in their minds and looking for the quickest opportunity to get married and live that fairy tale life. It does not matter if the man they are marrying is the right man for them, it doesn’t matter if he treats them right or if he is interested in their mutual growth as a facet of society, it doesn’t matter if he will be a good father.

As long as he is marrying them that is all there is to think about. They will marry him! Other important factors will be dealt with latter.

I dare say this is even one of the main reasons why many young marriages are breaking up. Young women have been raised to seek marriage at all cost, forget happiness and personal ambitions, marriage is the ultimate. When she gets married, she has arrived and is above any other young woman who is not married.

So when a woman grows up, she does not aspire to be anything beyond a wife and mother (mind you, I am not condemning motherhood) but why is this the yardstick for every young woman’s worth?

We do not even care about love anymore. Most young women quickly grab the first person who proposes marriage to them without considering anything else. He wants to get married, that must be an honourable man! He is a good man then. Period!

So what happens after they get married? The expectations are huge. A jobless, unhappy woman meets a man and expects that soon as they get married, all her life’s problems will be over. And what a big blow it is when they realise that indeed, whatever problems they had before marriage are not solved by getting married, most actually are compounded. And most end up unhappier than they were before the marriage. Then the women begin to resent the men. But indeed, nobody caused it but the women.

I will tell you a short story about a lady I know who married a soldier. She had a boyfriend before she met this soldier but because the soldier came to her and proposed marriage, she jumped in.

According to her, that was what her mother told her was more important. So within months, she married and moved in with this soldier. This lady had been out of school for about 3 years and didn’t have a job yet. The first thing she did was get pregnant and had a baby. And through the pregnancy and after, things were so bad she had to be borrowing money from relatives to take care of herself.

Even money to buy clothes and body cream was difficult to find, let alone to go to the hospital. When she complained about her upkeep to her husband, he told her to go out and get a job that will take care of her the way she wants. And you cannot blame him. She married him with the expectation that her life would get rosy immediately. And imagine compromising more important things for financial gain only to be disappointed in that respect too.

Marriage comes with a responsibility, it comes with compromise, it comes with added duties especially financially and it comes with hard work. So if you cannot take care of yourself while you are single, if you cannot make yourself happy while you are still alone, tell me, what makes you think you can do better in marriage? It is not an ‘idealistic’ institution, it is a ‘realistic’ institution.

So I ask you again, what are you getting married for? To solve your problems? Well, think again.