However the typical pattern of how Igbo individuals marry is through far the absolute most important aspect in describing why it’s possible for ladies in southeastern Nigeria to create identities nearly as good wives, regardless of their intimate records.
While women’s premarital sexual behavior has a tendency to happen usually far from their natal communities, the entire process of wedding frequently operates right back via a woman’s (and a man’s) host to beginning. Although many Igbo communities are patrilineal and wedding is often lineage exogamous, in a wider sense Igbo culture is highly endogamous. In Igboland, there clearly was a strong choice and expectation that folks should marry from neighboring communities with who their loved ones and communities have actually dependable and long haul ties.
High amounts of out migration and also the blending that’s the consequence of urbanization, co educational schools and universities, and livelihood techniques that take also rural residents to far flung hot redhead naked locations have actually placed stress about this endogamous pattern.
Increasingly more young adults look for to marry partners from a long way away communities, and families are starting to identify that in a period of financial change, this is good strategy. However, many marriages among those who have otherwise circulated commonly in Nigerian society during their adulthood that is young still between folks from exactly the same local areas in Igboland. Future partners tend to be introduced to one another on visits house throughout the Christmas time duration, whenever all Igbos are compelled to consult with their places of beginning. Further, when young Igbos meet possible spouses in metropolitan areas, it is through introductions by folks from their exact same section of beginning, as most people are mindful associated with the norm that such ties take advantage stable marriages.
The practical consequence is the fact that many teenagers understand almost no about one another once they start to court, which is quite easy for a girl to full cover up any reputation for intimate relationships from the possible spouse.
When a couple chooses to marry, their respective families move into high gear to “investigate” perhaps the match is a good one, but these investigations are concentrated very nearly completely on ferreting out of the status that is social genealogy and family history of this prospective in guidelines. Typically, an agent from each household will journey to the city for the prospective mate’s family members and inquire about issues such as for instance financial status, spiritual affiliation, and any records of or reputations for issues like criminality and psychological infection. To your level that problems of intimate promiscuity might appear this kind of investigations, it might simply be within the context of the scandal of women’s marital infidelity within 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. For that reason, when you look at the most common pattern of Igbo wedding, it really is quite easy for a young girl to hide her sexual past from her husband to be, their household, and their community.
Although this describes exactly just just how in specific instances women can marry and turn good spouses minus the threat of a previous reputation haunting them, it generally does not deal with exactly just just how ladies adapt to this change, or just exactly how men get together again the information that a lot of ladies had concurrent intimate partnerships before wedding making use of their objectives that their particular spouses will soon be faithful. They were very difficult concerns to navigate in interviews. The things I report emerges partly from exactly what can be gleaned from interviews with younger men that are married ladies, but partly from the thing I discovered through more informal conversations and findings over many years of participant observation in southeastern Nigeria.