Whether they are “in love” (Obiechina 1973, Okonjo 1992, Smith 2001) as I have suggested, in Nigeria, as across Africa, evidence indicates that people are increasingly likely to select marriage partners based, at least in part, on.

Nevertheless the emergence of intimate love as a criterion in mate selection in addition to increasing significance of a couple’s individual and relationship that is emotional wedding shouldn’t be interpreted to imply that intimate love it self has just recently emerged in Nigeria. Once I asked elderly Igbos about their betrothals, about their marriages, and about love, I happened to be told many personal stories and popular fables that indicated a lengthy tradition of intimate love. Lots of older women and men confessed which they might have hitched an individual other than their spouse had they been permitted to “follow the heart.” Scholars have documented the presence of intimate love in Africa a long time before it became a commonly accepted criterion for wedding (Bell 1995; Plotnicov 1995; Riesman 1972, 1981). Uchendu (1965b) confirms the presence of passionate love in the research of concubinage in old-fashioned Igbo society. Interestingly, both women and men had been apparently accorded significant socially acceptable extramarital sexual freedom. As Obiechina notes: “The real question is not whether love and attraction that is sexual normal individual faculties occur within Western and African communities, but the way they are woven in to the material of life” (1973:34).

Precisely whenever Nigerians generally speaking and Igbos in particular started to conceptualize wedding alternatives in more individualistic terms, privileging intimate love as a criterion within the choice of a partner, is difficult to identify. In certain components of Igboland and in many areas of Nigeria, the social acceptance of specific option in mate selection continues to be simply beginning. Read More