Nevertheless the typical pattern of how Igbo individuals marry is through far the absolute most factor that is important describing why you are able for females in southeastern Nigeria to make identities of the same quality spouses, irrespective of their intimate histories.
The process of marriage usually runs back through a woman’s (and a man’s) place of origin while women’s premarital sexual behavior tends to occur most often away from their natal communities. Although many Igbo communities are patrilineal and wedding is often lineage exogamous, in a wider sense Igbo culture is very endogamous. In Igboland, there was a preference that is strong expectation that folks should marry from neighboring communities with who their own families and communities have actually dependable and long haul ties.
High levels of out migration and also the blending this is the outcome of urbanization, co educational schools and universities, and livelihood strategies that take also rural residents to far flung locations have actually placed force with this pattern that is endogamous.
Increasingly more young adults look for to marry partners from far communities, and families are starting to identify that in a time of financial change, this could be an excellent strategy. Nonetheless, many marriages among individuals who have otherwise circulated commonly in Nigerian society during their young adulthood nevertheless occur between folks from equivalent local areas in Igboland. Future partners in many cases are introduced to one another on visits house through the xmas period, whenever all Igbos are compelled to see their places of beginning. Further, whenever young Igbos meet prospective partners in metropolitan areas, it’s through introductions by individuals from their area that is same of, as most people are mindful of this norm that such ties maximize stable marriages.
The practical consequence is numerous young adults understand hardly any about one another if they start to court, and it’s also quite easy for a girl to cover any reputation for intimate relationships from the husband that is potential.
As soon as a couple chooses to marry, their particular families move into high gear to “investigate” perhaps the match is an excellent one, but these investigations are concentrated very nearly totally on ferreting out of the social status and genealogy and family hot sexy naked blondes history regarding the prospective in legislation. Typically, an agent from each family will happen to be the city of this prospective mate’s family and inquire about issues such as for example economic status, spiritual affiliation, and any records of or reputations for dilemmas like criminality and mental disease. To your level that dilemmas of intimate promiscuity might show up this kind of investigations, it can simply be into the context of the scandal of women’s marital infidelity into the household, but since 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 marriage, it really is quite easy for a young girl to hide her sexual past from her husband to be, their household, along with his community.
While this describes exactly how in specific situations young women can marry and start to become good spouses without having the threat of a reputation that is previous them, it generally does not deal with just just exactly how females conform to this change, or exactly how men get together again the knowledge that countless women had concurrent intimate partnerships before wedding making use of their objectives that their very own spouses will undoubtedly be faithful. They were questions that are extremely difficult navigate in interviews. The things I report emerges partly from exactly what do be gleaned from interviews with younger men that are married females, but partly from the things I have discovered through more informal conversations and findings over a long time of participant observation in southeastern Nigeria.
