Interesting Read.
LETTER TO CHINYERE: SHOULD I GET A WIFE HERE OR GO TO NIGERIA TO MARRY
Dear Chinyere,
I hope you don't find my letter amusing, as I am very serious about what I should do about marriage. As a background, I am a 31-year-old Nigerian (of Igbo origin). I have attained a good education, as I have a Masters degree in engineering and have a very good job paying over $100,000.00 a year. I live in one of the boroughs of New York City, where I have a fairly decent and spacious apartment with two huge bedrooms. I consider myself tall at 5ft. 11 in; some of my friends have told me that I am handsome in some ways, and I work out quite a bit; so I am physically well built and have had some fairly beautiful girls as friends with benefits who I have not thought of marrying right now.
My mother who lives in Nigeria, insists I must come back to Nigeria and marry an Igbo woman. I have been giving her insistence considerable thought, until I began to read so much about the problem that Igbo men are having with women who they married in Nigeria and brought back to America. There has been vitriolic condemnation of Igbo women by some of the Igbo men on writings in some of the Nigerian listservs about how these women married in Nigeria have an agenda: to use their husbands to escape from Nigeria and once they get here, they start plotting how to destroy the man and inherit his wealth.
I have also read about how the men go back to Nigeria to marry registered nurses, doctors and lawyers, when in fact they are driving taxis here. All they want is for these women to come to America to be their slaves and meal tickets to financial success, a feat they have been unable to achieve on their own. When the women arrive in America, they quickly have one kind of training and put them out to work to start making money for them, as if they pimps and their wives are prostitutes.
I don't want to disappoint my mother. Her heart will break if I were to inform her that I was marrying here in America. But, at the same time, I want to marry a woman I am in love with – I don't understand how this arranged marriages work. Well, I ask myself, why don't I look at my own parents, their marriage was arranged.
After reading so much of the behaviors of our women, I am beginning to have second thoughts and I am beginning to think that I should concentrate on finding my love here in America, rather than going back to Nigeria to somehow hook up with a woman I don't know anything about escape that my mother approved of her. Even I understand that some of the women back home are no longer the so-called wholesome girls we used to dream about, the virgins, the 'no-open-eyes' girls.
As I said, I have a good job so I don't need to go back to Nigeria to marry a slave or as the Igbo women call themselves, ATMs for their husbands. So, dear Chinyere, I want to be madly loved and I want to madly fall in love with my wife. Please tell me what I should do.
FRUSTRATED IGBO MAN
Dear Frustrated Igbo Man,
I am certainly very proud of your accomplishments, but I am disappointed that at 31 years old you are not married and still looking to your mother to tell you who to marry. From what you wrote above, you have been gigolo. Who are going to marry these women you have defiled and abandoned?
Okay, with regards to the stories about Igbo women who were married in Nigeria and brought here, yes some of them have become tyrants and looking for one excuse or the other to slam their equally dubious husbands into jail so that they could take over the properties and maybe even move in with the boyfriends they earlier had before coming to America. So, there are two sides to the story – the men go back to Nigeria and begin flashing hundreds of thousands of Naira that they changed from $2,000 and deceive the women into thinking about the good life they are going to be living when they come to the U.S., only to arrive here and find the wretched lives these men are living. And when they finally begin to make their own money, they begin to wear two trousers and their vaginas becomes hardened penises.
But remember, not all stories are the ones you have read about in Nigerian discussion groups. A lot of the so-called arranged marriages are quite successful and the couples live happily ever after. You cannot use what have happened to some of the unscrupulous Igbo men and women to not listen to your mother's wishes, but in doing so would be marrying the woman of your heart? Wouldn't you be falling into the same trap: marrying somebody you hardly know and love?
All I can say is that it is time you make a decision one way or the other before the Igbo people start looking at you with funny eyes – thinking you are a homosexual. Ka udo dirigi.
Chinyere
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