Ode to Ode: To Merry or to Marry
The majority of married people today had their wedding on a Saturday.
Don’t take my word for it. Check with 10 married couples closest to you.
Anyway, last Saturday, one of Dataphyte’s finest bachelors walked alone gently down the aisle a single man. He only had his last man, sorry, best man, standing behind him. 💒
Few moments later, he returned on that same aisle a married man with even gentler but more grateful steps, more measured to sync with the majestic moves of a bold and beautiful woman 👰.
Magic! To transform one’s demographic class from single to married in the twinkle of an eye, which occurs mostly on Saturdays.
On Saturday, July 29, 2023, Dataphyte’s renowned data analyst, Ode Uduu, was unavailable on the data spreadsheets. His mind was on some other sheets spread in the other sanctums.
The first newsfeed on the Ode and Nora nuptials came from Dataphyte’s Executive Reporter and Program Director, Adenike Aloba. Known for her stubborn demand for layered thoughts and synoptic analysis from staff writers, she herself reported Ode’s wedding in the teams slack channel, thus:
“This is Adenike Aloba reporting live from Markurdi in Benue State where the data analyst, after years of scraping all kinds of unusable data has found the one data point that rounds out years of analysis and today he is doing a public declaration of the culmination of his six sigma process.”
Poetic Justice in the Office
This ode to Ode transcends a poem and tends more towards poetic justice.
Ode’s wedding was long-awaited. But no one was sure who Ode was dating or if he was in any XY Convo at all. It was a column he hid on his data sheets for a long time.
Each time we viewed Ode’s extra-curricular sheets, we found no column with data entries of names of ladies he was dating.
Until a random romantic variable popped up from his hidden spreadsheet columns in the full glare of his colleagues (don’t mind the enjambment).
A messenger of love delivered to the Dataphyte Nigeria Office a breathtaking birthday cake, wine and other snacks and drinks. We found attached a card that contained the best love wishes we ever read since our high school days.
The love card, sorry, birthday card, and the packages were addressed to Ode from a certain beau named Nora.
Finally, the messenger announced to all that we owed her visit to a woman on Ode’s X axis that extended as far away as Lagos.
Then the happily surprised Ode fessed up: She is in Lagos! I never expected this…
We often joked that Ode, and three other chronic bachelors in the Dataphyte teams in Nigeria and the UK (names withheld) were no longer fit for either section of the old boys club.
The single men on the team feel the quartet ought to vacate the class of the free for them. While the married guys lured them in every way to join the class of the brave.
The ladies in the team always knock the likes of Ode and his cohorts who refuse to join the class of the brave as the reason why the single women in the class of the beautiful have not also joined the class of the bold, the married babe’s section of the girls club.
Who knows if the girls’ excuse is true or if the reverse is the case? Correlation, as we always remind ourselves in the team, is not the same as causation.
Who knows if it’s the reluctance of the beautiful girls that causes the delay of the free (single) men from emerging as brave (married) men?
That’s a question Ode and Nora can help answer when they sit with Adenike on the next episode of X and Y convos (listen to the first episode here).
We’ll wait till then to know the inter-gender causality of people’s reluctance to marry - who was more reluctant to marry between Ode and Nora, and so on.
In the meantime, we can explore the correlation between the reluctance of men to marry early and the reluctance of women to marry early.
Average Age of First Marriage across Countries (both sexes)
Source: Wikipedia
We can begin by comparing the shift in the average age that men marry and the shift in the average age that women marry.
To Mar or To Marry
Before we probe why lovers nowadays delay committing themselves to marriage, we need to get one thing straight.
It’s one thing to marry someone. It’s another thing to mar that person’s life.
Marriage can be too early such that it distorts a child’s process of full self-discovery and set them on a course of intergenerational poverty and integral pain.
According to the World Bank, “daughters of teenage mothers are at a greater risk of teenage pregnancy themselves, perpetuating intergenerational cycles of poverty.
“Teenage mothers are less likely to continue going to school, which prevents them from realizing their full potential and finding better economic opportunities, and often results in reduced lifetime earnings.
While some see marrying kids and paedophilia as two different things, the statistics of Vesicovaginal Fistula (VVF) and maternal mortalities in countries and regions where child marriage is enforced by culture or statutes show that child marriage can be an equal or worse scourge than paedophilia.
If we attempt the difficult distinction between the two, this cleavage might suffice:
Paedophilia privately ruptures the tender emotions of little kids and ransacks their defenceless bodies. Child marriage is the public relish of such child suffering.
Marriage of children under 15 harms the child in every inhumane way, and the situation remains precarious even for girls who marry before or by 18.
“Pregnancy and childbirth are the leading cause of death among adolescent girls aged 15-19. More than half of the abortions that occur among adolescent girls are unsafe.
“They also face higher health risks than adult mothers aged 20-24, including complications from childbirth contributing to maternal mortality, low baby birth weight, and severe neonatal conditions, a World Bank research shows.
How can we watch children die for pleasure?
What do we gain from the confusion and misery of these innocent children?
As far as Daniel Halim and Sergio Rivera are concerned, child marriage is an act of violence. It follows then that it ought to be a criminal act, like paedophilia is.
“Apart from being a form of violence against girls, child marriage also has real economic costs with substantial repercussions on earnings, productivity, and consumption per capita; private and public expenditures; and non-monetary and social costs…. Ending child marriage is the right thing to do: socially and economically.
To Merry or to Marry
If child marriage is antisocial and uneconomic, does delayed marriage offer social and economic benefits?
First, two things are evident. The age when people marry for the first time is increasing, and marriage rates (the number of marriages per 1,000 people or other proportions) are decreasing globally, except for a few countries in South Asia like Bangladesh and in Sub-Saharan Africa.
This shows growing reluctance or/and refusal to marry among young adults.
Why is this so?
Why are the majority of adults, male and female, delaying marriage till later?
In the World Bank blog, Love, Marriage, and Development, Daniel Halim and Sergio Rivera attempted an answer:
“The likelihood of marriage can be influenced by marital aspirations, emotional attraction, pregnancy, and independence from kin.
“Social and economic factors also affect when people get married. Both dowry (bride to groom) and bride price (groom to bride) may incentivize parents to marry their daughters at an earlier age. However, a temporal income shock can change the incentive structure in these two different practices: delay (with dowry) and hasten (with bride price) the daughters’ marriage. And events like orphanhood also influence the timing of first marriage.
“Marriage is then a complex mish-mash of personal and family decisions, of economic and social factors.”
The story is the same in Nigeria.
However, when the marriage rates for women and men are compared, it shows younger men are more reluctant to marry than women.
In its commentary on Marriage, Our World in Data observed that “the increase in the age at which people are getting married is stronger in richer countries, particularly in North America and Europe. In Sweden, for example, the average age of marriage for women went up from 28 in 1990 to 34 years in 2017.
“In Bangladesh and several countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the average age at marriage is low and has remained unchanged for several years. In Niger, where child marriage is common, the average age at marriage for women has remained constant, at 17 years, since the early 1990s.”
If people are now marrying at older ages, what are the pros and cons?
Aleyna Gündoğdu and Sefa Bulut believe that when people delay getting married, they enjoy benefits such as time for growth, marital stability and adjustments, education and career opportunities, and good mental health.
On the other side, they identify disadvantages such as fewer births and irreconcilable differences between spouses as their fully developed individualistic rules hinder compromises. There’s also the wider generational gap between children and parents.
Finally, there’s one result of delaying marriage that is neither an advantage nor a disadvantage.
It is that when men are finally ready to marry, women are just fully emancipating to be merry!
Our analysis shows that the marriage rate gap between the genders is closest among adults 35-39. That is, men age 35+ become brave enough to marry and are ready to be in a steady marriage henceforth.
However, women ages 40+ then become bold enough to be free.
Just as the younger men treasure their freedom and independence before 35, the older women finally begin to treasure their own freedom and independence after 40.
Hence, we unravel the statistical secret of men who keep their 40+ wives committed to them in their marriage: these husbands prioritise things that make their wives’ bodies and souls merry.
When she’s 40+, don’t let her choose between her husband and her happiness. You know what she’ll choose, either statistically or silently.
We hope Ode is taking notes!
We wish Nora and Ode a very happy married life. It’s your time!