I married a 20 something year old. Here’s what I learnt.

Wham! Did I get it? Nah!

That’s the sound of me killing mosquitoes. This is wrong on so many levels; It’s 3am and it’s my one year marriage anniversary. I should be cuddling and feeling all mushy-mushy. But no, I’m killing mosquitoes and pressing laptop.

On this day last year, I put a ring on her finger. A lady I had silently admired for the better part of 9 years but my introverted nature won’t even let me say hi. No thanks to that.

I’m going to share a few things I’ve learnt about being married but first the rules: this is not a love story and I’ll only touch the basics. Perhaps in 5 years somewhere in Moldova, I would go deeper on details.

First, let me start by saying getting married is one of the most difficult things you can pull off in Nigeria. Also, starting a business is one of the riskiest things you can try in your life. Doing both at the same time is magically excruciatingly harrrrd to pull off.

I did it.

You see I was running my business at a subsistence level before I got married. A few thousands here and there was enough to make me live comfortably. Dating wasn’t that hard, it was more of a long distance relationship and WhatsApp calls helped reduce the cost of communication. My wife wasn’t interested in ice creams alone so there wasn’t really need to send money over that much. She neither makes occasional nor frequent stops at places like bars, eateries, clubs or the likes so she was remarkably efficient to “manage” from a distance. She was brought up well.

When we decided to get married, I had a number of zeros right of the digit in my bank account so it seemed an attractive option to get married. Here is the thing: it wasn’t. Shortly after the decision to get married, business took a dip! But we weren’t going to call it off. We had faith and it came through. This is a story for another day.

The story for today starts with getting back to Lagos right after marriage. From up a number of digits to a painfully small account balance. We needed to have a high doze of faith, patience, belief and overnight work to lay hold on a bit of comfort.

Here’s what one year of being married taught me

Starting without the dates.

When myself and my wife were still dating, (disclosure: we dated just about a year before we got married) I noticed she was big about dates; date of anniversary, date of first call, date of first overnight 8 hour call, date of the first time we went out, date of when I first told her I love her, date of the first time I held her hand…and she expected me to remember all the dates too because she does. Well, I’m not going to do that. I studied History & International Relations in the university for four years, I passed without knowing a single date of significant events. Knowing the range or century is enough. Being in a relationship won’t suddenly improve my knack for remembering dates. This could cause major catastrophe down the road. So early on, I let her know I didn’t like the calendar especially for past events. She made it clear I can be forgiven for every other date except our anniversary and birthdays. That’s workable. Today is our anniversary and tomorrow is her birthday. Yaaaay! I’m doing great so far.

Lesson: what you can’t sustain in marriage, don’t promote during courtship.

Fried rice and chicken is cheaper

Before you put a knife to my neck, I’ll explain.

Let’s admit it, virtually all of us were raised with the illusion that fried rice and chicken are reserved for special occasions like Christmas and New Years, maybe birthdays and parties. Well, a month into marriage, because of the lack of a fridge, we literally bought foodstuff daily and ate only fresh food cooked same day.

Maybe this calculation won’t add up as the family grows but right now, since we cook daily, fish costs N200. Meat costs N400. Half kilo of chicken costs N500 and no kidding, we couldn’t finish the chicken. It went into both soup and stew. It was more and it gives off the “living the life” feeling. We use more chicken than dried fish because it turned out to be cheaper. It’s not luxury to eat chicken, it’s cost efficient for us. And we like things that don’t cost so much.

The same goes for rice, I don’t know the unit economics of this but in my one year of marriage, I’ve eaten more fried rice than my other years on earth combined. She says cooking fried rice is cheaper, just buy carrot, cabbage, green beans, pepper and onions all totaling around 300 Naira and you’re good to go: a full pot of fried rice whereas she posits it would cost a neighborhood of around 600 Naira to arrange regular rice and stew. I believe her…and I like fried rice. So yea

Lesson: This worked for us maybe because we cook daily. Find the most cost efficient way to eat and stick to it.

Raise your game, not your voice

I don’t raise my voice at her when I’m angry. I get angry quite a number of times: when there is no light, when I check my data balance and it’s less than 2gb, when I code and it breaks, when we are running late (happens quite often), when NEPA brings the bill, when NEPA takes light, when NEPA visits our street, when I pass NEPA office, when my phone battery is low because NEPA didn’t bring light, when someone asks for free work, when I remember we still don’t have a fridge…and related things.

My wife has learnt to accommodate my excesses in these areas. Most times I get cold; she simply asks: are you out of data? “Well yes, and I don’t even have 2mb self to recharge from my bank. I dislike USSD”. She then goes out of her way to recharge me and rubs my head. This calms me down. Soon enough, I start smiling again. By the way, I’m almost bald headed now, can’t tell why my hair is running inside. My forehead shines bright like a diamond under the Lagos sun.

My wife on the other hand gets angry on very few occasions, chief among them is “when I’m pressing my phone or laptop at designated times she feels I’m not supposed to”. For the sake of clarity, I’m not even sure when that “right time” to press is. I haven’t quite found the line between work and life. Both the same to me.

Well, either way, I never raise my voice in a way that suggests I am correcting my younger brother when I’m angry. She doesn’t raise her voice in a way that suggests heads are going to burst in a few minutes when she is angry. We’ve been able to keep ourselves in check. When I’m angry, I stay quiet but she won’t let that even happen. When she’s angry, she stays quiet. I let her be. Then we sort things out. No shouting, no breaking of TV, no smashing of heads. Just a calm conversation like married adults that have sense.

Lesson: Because I have to share what I learnt, I’ll say never let the sun go down on your anger. We make it a duty never to go to bed angry. We get headaches and bad dreams. It’s proven! So we iron out issues before sleeping.

Believe anyway

This deserves a mention. I’ve known my wife since when I didn’t know how to spell kafanchan but I only met her when she was entrepreneuring her way to the top of her fashion business.

Right from the start, we’ve always known we won’t have a guaranteed salary by the end of the month. Both of us are entrepreneurs. This goes against practical wisdom.

We’ve supported each other. One time, she had a shiny idea to start a business. I didn’t buy in but I gave her the money, two weeks later she had shuffled the idea and was looking to start something else. Madam! You just burnt through some digits 14 days ago and you’ve decided the idea won’t work? Puzzled as I was, this was going to occur quite frequently both with me and her making the same mistakes. This isn’t a sign of failure, it’s the entrepreneurs dilemma…and we are both entrepreneurs so we have an overdose of highs and lows.

One year down the line, we haven’t bought any islands yet. But we will, one day. We believe in ourselves.

Lesson: As partners, we both understand that everyday, if we don’t risk and take big steps, we won’t eat. We have had our days where we are just once, we’ve had days where we drank tap water. We’ve had one week of eating just yams. But we’ve scaled through always believing in ourselves — we are the partners we should be. Never stopping to believe again one failed project after another.

God

From the last lesson, belief is important. However, God is importanter. Yes, a full week of yams. What I didn’t tell you is that God has always been several light years ahead of us. We prayed the previous night, it’s a thing to pray almost every night so it’s normal. We were going to have a visitor the next day, when he called that morning and asked what he should buy, I wanted to say some kid-like stuff like ice cream and meat pie, my wife snatched the phone and said YAMS! Right after that, we looked at each other with disbelief. We have never bought yams, never ever since we got married. We don’t! But here she was requesting yams. This is a practical case of somebody misplacing priorities I thought to myself. I kept my cool. Turns out it was good and it was God, because we would run out of cash for the next two weeks and we would survive on yams and tap water. This is the point where I sound like a pastor- choosing yam over ice cream can only be God.

Letter to wifey; please feel free to always choose weird things next time. You’ve earned it.

Basically, God knows best. We take prayer seriously.

Lesson: I only gave one example but our lives have been nothing short of a miracle. We literally have never gone a day without eating.

Language

We resolved early never to use some words. Basically, anything that even remotely resembles curse, abuse or hate speech is banned. We never hate things, we dislike them. We never abuse ourselves or people, we don’t like talking about other people but we do in a reasonable way though.

Establishing boundaries for language is a big part of us. One day, because we do business together most times (she’s my Chief Of Staff), we went out to negotiate a deal with an old friend I knew from before. Being that when guys are in their groups, they are carefree with words, it was a regular thing to use insultive words on one another and it was totally ok. Then we met and the guy uses one of the playfully “offensive” word we usually use on each other and I laughed. My wife immediately rebuffed and said — nah, he’s not (insert former totally normal-to-me but terribly abnormal-to-my-wife word here). Needless to say, he didn’t get the deal. My wife won’t have it.

Lesson: You already know 😋

Agreement is agreement

Actually I meant to say agreement is everything. This sounds like I’m being playful but nothing can stop human will on earth. Look at the Tower of Babel, people agreed to surprise God one day by showing up in heaven unannounced and they almost succeeded. God had to take drastic measures. A few months into our marriage, we racked up debt close to a million Naira. Don’t ask me how or what I used the money for, a number of luxuries we didn’t need, couple of bad businesses and we were like the proverbial poor man the Bible talks about in the book of … wait for it, proverbs!

We determined it wasn’t good so we AGREED to get out of debt and literally owe no man. We prayed and got a lot more diligent in our businesses and soon, we got out of debt. This is just one example. We’ve come to realize that once people agree as touching a matter, it is 80% settled, just 20% is the work required.

We’ve used the power of agreement to raise investment, shut out sickness and now we are using the power of agreement to determine what to expect when expecting. Yea, there’s a bump but we are not telling yet.

Lesson: Human will is more powerful than Gods will on earth. There’s nothing more powerful than an agreement especially between Man and Wife.

Fine print: when she reads this and ‘commands’ me to remove some parts, I will because, peace!

After all is said, she is the most amazing person I could ever dream of spending my life with. She knows me inside out. She’s amazing and she knows what’s on my mind at every given moment. She is more than enough for me. I love her. She’s my success story!!!

I’m thankful for the gift of her.

This has been fun. Let’s capture progress in 5 years somewhere on an island 🌴