THE MARRIAGES WE WATCHED  

Written by Ifeoluwa.

I have watched my mother burn the midnight oil, praying at the top of her voice for our marriages, asking that any spiritual hindrance keeping her daughters unmarried be taken up and out of the way. I have watched the worry sit in her face. I have listened to a friend narrate the questions society has started asking her, the same tired ones, asked with the same fake concern, and I have wanted to tell both of them the truth. There is no spiritual attack. There is no uncle, no aunty, no village people, and no shrine somewhere holding anyone’s marriage hostage. There is only a generation of daughters who stayed close enough to watch and who saw something no prayer can undo.

I am the child who was left at home. The one who stayed. My siblings come once a year and stay two weeks, and for those two weeks they get to live inside the version of the family that still looks whole: the edited version, the highlight reel, the one that gets photographed and sent round the family WhatsApp group. And even if the cracks show, 365 unfiltered days can hardly fit into 14 days. They arrive to laughter and full plates and go home still believing the house runs on love alone. I don’t get that version. I live in the unedited one. I hear the stories that never make it into a two-week visit, and I have sat close enough, long enough, to know exactly what this house has cost the people running it.

What I saw, long before I had the language for it, was this: there are three bedrooms in the house I grew up in, and by the time I was old enough to notice, my parents did not share one of them. My mother has her own room. My father has his. My siblings and I split the third, and when they visit now, we lay mattresses in the sitting room instead. Two closed doors, every night, at the end of the same hallway: an entire architecture of coexistence, who eats when, who speaks first, whose silence gets accommodated and whose gets challenged, without ever quite building a marriage in the way the word is supposed to mean. This is what my mother’s prayers were never aimed at, because it never occurred to her that it needed praying against. It was just how things were.

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to turn this into a story about a bad marriage, and it isn’t that, or it isn’t only that. Nobody raised a hand. Nobody left. From the outside, the structure was kept standing: the children went to school, the family name was held up in public, and my mother showed up for the weddings and funerals. What I watched, growing up in the room down that same hallway, was something quieter than open failure: a slow erosion of priority. Somewhere along the way the marriage stopped being the thing either of them was tending and became instead the frame around everything else that had to be managed. The frame was still there. Nobody was watering what was inside it.

My mother had the chance to leave more than once, and she didn’t. She stayed and did everything a mother is supposed to do: made sure we were clothed, made sure we were fed, and made sure we got into the best schools she could find for us. She’ll tell you, if you ask her, that she stayed for us. What she has never known is that we begged her for the opposite, not out loud, not in words she could have heard over her own guilt, but in the small, quiet ways children beg. I would have taken half a life with her over all of a life with both of them. I would have chosen to live with my mother and visit my father on weekends, rather than watch him come home every night and ask, at the door, where his food was.

We’re taught that children from broken homes carry a damage that children from intact ones don’t. Nobody tells you the reverse can be just as true. A home can stay perfectly intact on paper and still be broken on the inside, and the children living inside that intact shell absorb something too, something with no name and no support group built around it. Just because two people stay together doesn’t mean nothing broke. Sometimes distance isn’t the wound everyone assumes it is. Sometimes it’s the mercy of leaving that a parent decides not to give herself because she was taught that love means staying, and nobody around her ever corrected that, which is.

This isn’t only my mother’s story, and it isn’t only mine. My aunt and her husband haven’t shared a room in over a decade. Some people say it’s about the children. Some say it’s something else. I’ve stopped asking which is true and started wondering what the use is of a marriage running as a divided front. I have a friend who keeps a list on TikTok: a hundred and something reasons not to get married, updated the way other people update a recipe box, each one specific, each one true to somebody. People call this cynicism. I don’t think it is. I think it’s a generation of women doing our own quiet research, because the women who raised us never got to. When someone my age says she isn’t in a hurry to marry, the explanation reached for by the older women around her is almost always the one my mother reaches for at her vigils: a spirit, an enemy, or a village somewhere holding a file with her name on it. Nobody considers the far less mystical explanation. She watched. She was in the house. She is doing the ordinary, unmysterious work of trying not to repeat what she saw.

It’s easier to blame an enemy you can pray against than to sit with the idea that the caution was inherited fair and square, passed down like a family trait, learned the way children learn everything – not from what they were told but from what they were shown. I was shown two closed doors and told this was simply what marriage became once the romance settled. I was shown a woman who ran a household with total competence and almost no one asking what she needed. I was shown a man who did not provide reliably and was rarely, truly present. And I was told, in the same breath, to want this for myself one day.

I want to say clearly, because it matters to me that this isn’t misread: this is not an argument against marriage, or against my parents, or against love. I don’t think my mother wasted her life, and I don’t think my father is a villain in it. I think they built what they knew how to build with the tools and the models they were given, and that it held in the only ways it could, which is nothing. And I am not apathetic to love. I don’t think I could be: the first three letters of my own name, Ife, mean love; it is quite literally the thing I was named for. What I’ve become wary of isn’t love. It’s watching people lose themselves, over and over again, and calling the wreckage a marriage.

What I want, if I ever build one of my own, is a marriage that gets tended on purpose: where love isn’t the frame for something else that grew inside of it, but the thing actually being grown. Where presence isn’t optional once the providing is handled. Where two people keep choosing the same room, not because tradition says they must, but because they’d rather be in it together than not.

My mother is still praying. Some nights I hear her through the wall, still asking God to shield us from an enemy that was never really there. I don’t interrupt her anymore. But if I could, I would tell her the truth as gently as I know how: nothing came for our marriages from outside this house. Everything we need protecting from, we already watched happen to hers. And if she wants a different ending for us, the vigil isn’t where it starts. It starts with one door, not two.