As soon as a couple chooses to marry, their particular families move into high gear to “investigate” whether or not the match is an excellent one, but these investigations are concentrated very nearly completely on ferreting out of the social status and genealogy and family history of this possible in guidelines.
Typically, a agent from each household will go town regarding the prospective mate’s family members and inquire about issues such as for instance financial status, religious affiliation, and any records of or reputations for problems like criminality and illness that is mental. Towards the level that problems of intimate promiscuity might show up this kind of investigations, it can simply be when you look at the context of the scandal of women’s marital infidelity into the household, but because far while she was an urban migrant or a schoolgirl as I know these investigations rarely extend to inquiring about a potential bride’s sexual behavior. As a result, when you look at the most frequent pattern of Igbo wedding, it’s quite easy for a woman that is young hide her sexual past from her husband to be, their household, and their community.
While this describes exactly exactly how in specific situations women can marry and be good spouses without having the chance of a past reputation haunting them, it will not deal with exactly exactly how females conform to this change, or exactly just how men get together again the information that many women had concurrent intimate partnerships before wedding along with their objectives that their particular wives are going to be faithful. They were very difficult concerns to navigate in interviews. The things I report emerges partly from so what can be gleaned from interviews with younger married males and ladies, but partly from the things I have discovered through more informal conversations and findings over a long time of participant observation in southeastern Nigeria. (more…)