When you think deeply about it, Nigerians are deprived of love and overcompensated with trauma bonding. The symptoms and side effects of this abnormality in human connection are many, recurrent and debilitating. Social Media has done the good work of outing them, even as it aggravates them. Team A are women, a vast majority of whom love depends on the material bidding from their suitors—or toasters, as we say here. Team B are men, many of whom sex can be as trifling as eating your favorite snack. Men dey, even women dey. The latter, to collect for being just girls, the former to give, for being the odogwus.
A girl collecting Tesla's Roadster from her odogwu is not a crime, certainly not if he is Elon Musk himself. The man can afford it. He might even custom-make one for you. The problematic thing, however, is to assume that every man is Elon Musk. For context, that would be the Nigerian Yahoo Boy, or his many beta versions who are ungathered members of Dindinrin Association. Like the man who so nil-wittedly just celebrated a 6-month relationship "anniversary" with his baby with a money bouquet. He was not the first of his kind, not even the last (because that scene of give-and-take happens daily by the tell of virtual life; one just has to look around to catch the next ozuor).
His dumb- quite seriously -founded me in the misnomer of a 6-month anniversary. "An anniversary is a yearly celebration," I tagged a re-poster's post. I was recovering from that when a lady told the classic Gen Z story of rejecting a too-green flag of a spender for a blood-red flag who is an I-must-know-where-my-money-goes, at the end of which "men dey" was chorused by women like her. But language in any of these stories is the least of all problems here. If my relationship X archive from 2024 till date has anything to tell me, it is that the man's gesture, his crime of Naira mutilation, his crime against grammar and common sense, are not entirely his. Ditto the woman's chase after moneybags. They are only out there exhibiting their own symptoms of what is arguably a generational problem. "Why does a generation seem to know so much, to parse the mystique, about showering love and receiving it to the point of self-effacement or tomfoolery, yet struggle with marital prospects and life?"
Several weeks ago, a Nigerian lady was on social media to complain about her talking stage (the man she was virtually courting, so to speak) who only told her about his international travel when he was at the airport. Not long after, a couple outed themselves, the woman was dejected that the man might have used her for sexual gratification. The man's response revealed another story. One time, there was a series of responses to a tweet which had people tell "unhinged" stories, and there was a litany of raunchy tales, another one had asked them, "You knew you were a hoe when", prompting them to fill in personal stories. These are only a few instances out of tens of similar trends.
These trends, I would like to say, are reflective of two types of insufficiency, or sapa, in the country. The first is the sapa of money, which is what is in the primacy of the word. The second type of sapa is the sapa of feelings, occasioned by the first type of sapa. Some days ago, it was reported that Nigeria had retained its crown as the poverty capital of the world, with 17.9 million more citizens affected by multidimensional poverty.
You see, multidimensional poverty, according to Equality Insights, "encompasses the challenges, barriers, issues and adversities that people who experience poverty face in their daily lives including lack of access to healthcare, education, food, water, energy, family planning, as well as exposure to violence and threats to safety, and environmental hazards, among others".
As of 17 November 2022, 63% of Nigerians, which was 133 million people, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, were in multidimensional poverty. This figure stands at a possible variance to a similar report on poverty by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) on Nigeria in 2021, which put the figure at 33%, or 72.2 million Nigerians. Whether you choose to follow the OPHI or NBS report, one thing is clear: multidimensional poverty rises each year in Nigeria, and it may be grossly underreported. But this is not just about figures, it is about much more; about you, about me.
You, like me, are a Nigerian who is either in a family as a brother or sister to someone, an uncle or a niece to someone, or, worse still, one of the parents. In your family—and try to think of the relatives scattered all over the place—there are people who are affected. Or, to address the elephant in the room, there is you whose life fits into the definition of multidimensional poverty, as aforesaid. And no, it is not about the money you have (which is why our Romeo giving out money a bouquet is not spared), it is about what you are deprived of. In Nigeria, your needs are unmet, which is probably not your fault, but you owe yourself the responsibility of getting to comfort, if that is written in your stars.
The girl you want to ask out has a need for comfort, you also do. Yes, you need the money, you also need the sex. After all, a [hu]man shall not live by bread alone and there is supposed to be rahma between couples. The unfortunate thing for both of you is that you are Nigerians, and you are poor. Yes, poverty dey hold you for neck [sic]. That is what it means for you to lack access to healthcare, education, food, water, energy, family planning, as well as your exposure to violence and threats to safety, and environmental hazards (e.g. your Lagos floods, poor housing and road management systems). To get to comfort means to use your resources to create ease and pleasure for yourself, to have a desire for something fundamental to your existence and have it met.
According to Sigmund Freud in his psychosexual theory and theory of the human psyche, sex is a need that all humans strive to meet. In his psychosexual theory, we develop through five stages, viz: the oral stage, which spans the first 18 months, the anal stage, which lasts until one is 3, the phallic stage, which rules till age 6, the latency stage, which stays until puberty. In other words, our sex drive and desire for intimacy is, do not be cunning about it, a proper part of being human, but the Nigerian child has another factor against them: poverty. It sits at the intersection of nature (the drive) and nurture (the environment) beliefs about human personality development.
According to the NBS report quoted earlier, 67% of Nigerian children are in multidimensional poverty. This means that they have parents who are just as poor or no parents at all. With no parents or poor parents, the concept of empathy and care becomes more distant. As they say in my area many years ago, ọmọ ṣé o yó kò sí mọ́, ọmọ ṣé o ti jẹun lókù- you no longer ask a kid if they have eaten to a fill, only ask if they have eaten. These days, the question has changed to "child, are you alive?" That is illustrative of a mental shift away from responsible parenting that we so need back on our societal syllabus. The children that Nigerian societies failed, and keep failing to raise, are not only in banditry, razing towns and villages down, killing and kidnapping; they are also in relationships committing emotional horrors and terrorism.
Going back to Freud for explanation, the human psyche is structured into three, each with a principle. There is the basic and most forceful id, which is guided by the pleasure principle—realised through desires for sex, for connection, for fame, for wealth, for control and exertion of force (like terrorists do), etc. There is the ego, which operates with reality principle, to realize the goal of the id in acceptable ways. And then there is the superego, which operates with the morality principle. The superego is constructed through ethno-religious values and is meant to be the ultimate regulator for id. The gap in Nigerian society is that the moral high ground has gone to ruin.
As already shown, responsible parenting, which should also instill moral values, is now an unpopular art. And the clergymen are either in proximity to moral and financial corruption or they are the culprits themselves. (Before you cast me out of the mosque, please see what the EFCC boss said here.) Effectively, these failed social institutions militate against the exercise of the ego and the superego. Men and women consequently embrace what the Nigerian society rewards: the lewd, the brazen, the loud and the dopamine-boosting. The id comes to play on social media. Social media, being what it is, continues to show these many areas in human connection where we lack substance and try hard to make up for it with what is available. What is available that we can see, what is available that we can touch, what is available that we can feel. Somewhere in this, there are two things interwoven: confirmation and recency biases.
The woman who ascribes total safety to your ability to provide is a fantasy, like the Men Dey girls, is, in the light of the available statistics on poverty, possibly responding to a signifier of escape from the trauma that beset her upbringing. If she were to know beyond your cash, you might not be with you. You may be a dangerous man, an underdeveloped adult who happens to throw enough money around. The man who ascribes connection to your body shape and bedmatics is possibly responding to the inner child in him bred through a paucity of care. You may be a very poor wife, a bad mother, or a girl trapped in the mirror of her beauty until the dusk of her life. None of this is to say that financial provisions and bodily connections do not matter. God forbid I say such things. My views are to the contrary.
I think that a young man needs to work hard and be the ultimate, if not sole, financier of his family's needs. If you can afford to drive the rest of the world away to Mars just so you can give to whom you love the world as promised, I think that is fair. We will visit your world with an interplanetary visa. But there is also leadership, there is also ambition, there is also gentleness of character and intentionality. These loaded words that we so easily throw around matter, but the obstruction that poverty creates to an average Nigerian life dumbs these ideas down to transactions. An intentional man therefore becomes the guy you keep rejecting but who keeps coming back to you, the man who orders you the latest iPhone, even though you have other men you feel for.
I think that sex matters, and sex appeals are super important. I think that it is important to learn about it in the myriad of things that it exists in—from everything before bodily contact, to philematology, the science of kissing, and the acts that can possibly come after. In other words, we need to decenter shame and coyness in a society where people learn so often through pornography and illicit affairs, in our music and skits. Should being horny be a reason why you enter a relationship or say yes to someone? What do you understand about how your body functions for sex? What forms of sexual play are in the territory of moral depravity? In short, sex education is important too. For us parents of the next generation, it is an area where we just do better than our parents.
What is wrong is not what we get—sex or money—or who is giving it to us; it is the condition by which they are given and received: a condition of lack. It is traumatic, and I think it creates a pestilence in bonding, which is either underwhelming or overwhelming and never just whelming: it is abnormal. In a less dystopic culture, where men have less paranoia and women have less addiction to narcissism, things would be better. We are struggling to connect and to be human, because we have accumulated too much suffering in the sapa-stricken and degenerate society where we live. An average Nigerian is looking for completion or restitution in relationships with unspoken religiosity.
There is something sickening about the mass failure to reach love, to acknowledge emotions and to feel the shamelessness of desire in our society. Worse still, a range of delicacies of poison are there online about relationships: love, don't love; talk, don't talk; call, don't call; text, don't text; game them, don't game them; if they do this, this is what it means; if they don't do this, this is what it means. It is disorienting, and at a point one cannot but see the ambivalence of social media freedom of expression.
The worst and perhaps quietly growing cultural disorientation in the romantic scene in Nigeria is the reliance on AI for emotional advice and support. Once a girl took the chats she had with her man to ChatGPT for advice, the other agent warned her sentiments until the man continued the conversation and gave a criticism, which ChatGPT subsequently agreed with. These days, it might just be very okay to know the mental wellness of whom you are talking to before you give in to rage and disappointment. After all, only just earlier, it was confirmed that 1 in 4 Nigerians is battling mental health issues by Dr Veronica Nyamali, the President of the Association of Psychiatrists in Nigeria. To put things in perspective, going by the latest multidimensional poverty report, about 3 in every 5 Nigerians are poor. That should impress how a 1 in 4 mental health patient is close to you.
Should we then continue to spiral? No. We should start making better admissions and fixing individual flaws. The first admission to make is that this generation lacks the ability to love properly, and whatever mechanism can help us should be made popular. The concept of alárinà (not to be confused with the pimp) is a great one. The individualism that a person can do whatever they want, however they want, creates the environment for the many tensions we have around us. The alárinà, lover's interlocutor, is a traditional marriage advisor, most likely a friend or family member who speaks on behalf of the person of interest.
Sure thing, there will be arguments that there are matchmaking platforms and people. A fair point, but an alárinà is not a matchmaker, not in the modern sense. To be an alárinà for someone, the person must first express interest in who you want to help them talk to. Matchmakers, that I don't think are necessarily bad, are in a business, not in a societal building process, not one they are consciously obliged to. An alárinà vouches for, investigates, and stays with the couple through their marriage as, possibly, a family member or a family friend. Matching a stranger with another is not different from finding a good buyer for a piece of land and overseeing the exchange of payments and documents. There is no commitment.
Another way we can work on the menace is to acknowledge personal flaws. I know your father might have called you a princess, but you are not. Mr man, you are not the best thing in the world. Sorry, but you are human, and flawed. That is okay, because every human is flawed, including real princesses and princes. What we do about our flaws, and how much of them define us, is more important than the existence of the flaws. If you have a daddy or mummy issue, you may first need to parent what is left of yourself and never ask anyone else to do that for you. If you have anger issues, maybe you need to go into therapy first before going into a relationship. If you have a commitment issue, maybe you need to take up personal projects that steady your mind. If you have a loyalty issue, maybe you should stay off dating for some time and define what you really need.
Abraham Maslow put the question of needs in an elucidating prism: Hierarchy of Needs. I think any Nigerian will find where they may have issues here. Basic needs, which include physiological and safety needs, are in jeopardy. How can you, in your own way, remedy your situation here? Instead of waiting around for a man to take advantage of the settings babe in you for these needs, why not make something of yourself? That way, you avoid the emotional baggage of attaching yourself to a farmer. Next are love and psychological needs. For anyone who has fixed their basic needs, I think it is important to create quick-fire questions about what you want. It is not enough to be able to paint a picture perfect of the love or lover you want without being able to picture what role is yours in their existence.
With a reputation for constantly taking, without fixing the traumatic void where you submit your core, you are trauma bonding. A little slip will hurt you more than it should, your emotions will betray you. Knowing what you want and who you are, and what strengthens it, also helps you decide very humanly with others if or if things would work. Maybe the best thing to take from that girl is a thank you, not sex. Maybe that guy does not have to be a bad choice just because he is fresh in his career and cannot press you money.
The final words I would like to say are these: Everyone you meet is either planning to marry into a replica of their family or marry against the replica of their family. In the Nigerian situation, the latter is often the case. If someone is not coming from kindness, your kindness may startle them, and if someone is coming from insufficiency, they may be insecure. And if someone is tied to what hurt or reduced them before, does not have their affairs ordered, or making efforts to, how can you decide that the rest of your life is headed where they want to go? Some other times, you see where things may head, but you must still decide. At the apex of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, there sits self-actualization. What do you want to become at the end of your life, even if that would be the next day? The answer to that, bluntly answered, may tell you how you should approach romantic relationships, decide who stays or if you stay, what you give, and what you accept.
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