Is It a Must to Marry?

I just got off a date with a girl I got hooked up with by a mutual friend, and I feel so low in spirit. Every thing was going okay till she asked of my age. I told her, and the expression on her face was that of someone that had just seen an alien. Then came the endless questions..."Why ain't you married?" "Why don't you have a steady girlfriend?" "Why are you still single in your 30s?" Oh my God! I wanted to shoot myself. Why is it a must for a young man or woman to be married at a certain age in Africa? Yea, I know there are loads of benefits in marrying early. But what if the individual in question has some plans and has to sacrifice the beauty of early marriage for something else? Why must you make that person feel like there is something wrong with him or her?

I see it all the time online. Young successful ladies like Linda Ikeji, Rita Dominic, and Genevieve Nnaji get insulted a lot. They post a picture on Instagram, and then you see comments like..."Go and marry!" "All these money doesn't mean anything if you don't have a husband." "Success without a man is useless." Blah! Blah! And some more Blah! Don't get me wrong, marriage is a beautiful thing, but no one should marry solely because society sees it as the thing to do at a certain age. And no one should be looked down on because he or she is not married at the age society has set for such.






Divorce rate is going through the roof in the country. Married women are sleeping around with no atom of guilt in them it's scary. Married men openly joke about their latest conquest and how big her boobs are. I am not saying all these to make myself feel better about being single. I am saying all these to say that it is really disturbing that society sees the single man/woman of marriageable age lower than all the people involved in the atrocities I mentioned above.





We are all different with different goals, and some situations might have left some people single in their 30s and 40s. And to some, it might just be a choice. Maybe the person has weighed the advantages and disadvantages of marriage and feels he/she would be distracted from his/her chief goal in life if he/she marries early. The person might have set '40' as the age to marry. Or the person doesn't even have marriage in the agenda at all. It is a freaking free world. So, I ask, is this so big of a deal? Is it a must to marry?