Middle-class renters are generally required to pay rent on an annual basis; some landlords even require two years upfront from new tenants, on top of which the tenants also pay a lump sum to cover legal and agency fees. Further disincentives are the cost implications of having to provide your own electricity, security, and other public services, as well as the middle-class Nigerian ideaβwhich has only recently begun to very slowly changeβthat young people, particularly women, ought to live with their parents until they marry.
Imagine, therefore, being willing and able to navigate all of these challenges, only to then come up against a brick wall of literal gatekeepers who cannot comprehend female economic and social independence. Our society, at least on the surface, is ultra-religious, and its norms are extremely conservative and patriarchal.
Hundreds of millions of Nigerians believe that marriage is not just an important life event, but also a fundamental measure of responsibility, respectability and decency, particularly for women. As such, the social expectation of marriage to a manβpreferably by the age of 25βis a heavy burden that Nigerian women are forced to navigate, as it impacts almost all, if not all facets of female life.
Girls are groomed for heterosexual marriage from an early age, regardless of their sexual orientation, and women who remain unmarried are often subjected to a wide range of indignities, of which the discrimination that single middle-class women face when house-hunting is only one type.
Fortunately for them, Nigerian women who are married to men can often interrupt or even end these misogynistic abuses by invoking their status as wives. Many women, married or not, have anecdotal evidence of appreciable improvements in the quality of their social interactions when they wear a wedding band or similar jewelry on their ring fingers. This is because a married woman, taken at face value, fits most neatly into the narrow ideals of acceptable femininity prescribed by Nigerian norms, placing wives at the top of our hierarchy of womanhood.
