Published in Data Dive
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.
August 8th, 2023
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 👰.
Ode and Nora
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.”
The Dataphyte Team with the couple
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)
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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.
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.
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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.
