Love and Relationship: What submission is not!

Many years ago, I heard the curious story of the untimely crash of a distant relative’s marriage. The relative in question was an aunt with a dark skinned glow and a height that stretched endlessly, causing her to tower over the stocky frame of the men in my village. To make matters more interesting, she had actually bagged a university degree. You see, back then, when a woman was fortuned with good looks and a western education, the result was the eager propositioning by men who were either traders in Lagos or Port Harcourt or involved in unknown enterprise overseas.

This aunt eventually succumbed to the pressure from kinsmen who wanted to ‘drink wine’. So she agreed to marry a business man from a not too distant town. Their Igba Nkwu (wine carrying ceremony) was the subject of conversation that entire Christmas holiday, a big deal, considering ours was a community where the average lifespan for gossip was about 48 hours.

Fast forward eight months later, this unsuspecting aunt, at the prompting of her husband, packed her bags in anticipation for a visit to her mother. And much to her dismay, it was the last time she saw that husband of hers. For on arriving in her parents’ compound, he switched into a comical rage, throwing her things out of the car and promptly announcing that he was done with the marriage, as he could no longer stomach the stubbornness of ‘nwanyi chalanya’ (an over-exposed woman).

A proper hearing revealed that the woman’s crime was her inability to do as she was told. Apparently, she was cursed with an opinionativeness that cost her marriage.

I cannot begin to recall how many times this story has been recounted to buttress the timeless virtue of the ‘submissive’ wife and to remind us (younger females in the family) that no matter how smart or well read we are as women, nature has sentenced us to a life of timid compliance necessary to secure the prolonged affections of the husband.

You might think this is another post from a fire spitting, man-hating feminist. But such conclusion, if you are guilty of it, bears no relation to my intentions. As a matter of fact, I do not have a problem with submission in any way. Yes, even with my perceived sense of progressiveness, I deeply believe no meaningful relationship can exist without at least one party submitting. I believe strongly that it is in the character of love to serve, and give, and compromise and to sometimes surrender. I am just not sure it is the woman’s prerogative to consistently bear this burden alone.  Yet, generation after generation, we have occupied this office, mastering the art of retreat under the brutal dictatorship of a culture that reels off scriptures about the importance of  the woman’s submission in marriage. A referral of convenience I might add, considering that a similar recommendation for the men to love to the point of death is often typically brushed to the side. But then, this is hardly the platform for that discussion.

And so recently, I found myself in a debate of what it means for a woman to be submissive against the backdrop of these very unsettling cultural prescriptions and the manipulation of one-sided scriptural references. I found myself shaking my head fiercely in disagreement and I decided to share some of my disagreements here:

1. Submission is not neatly tucking away your opinions in order to massage a man’s sense of importance. If you are with a man with whom you can neither speak your mind or air your disagreements, you are a slave and not a wife.

2. Submission is not quietly forsaking a career because it is expected of you. Because you see, love must be rational and sacrifice must be calculative. And the person for whom you make such decisions must value it, knowing that it comes at the cost of your happiness and preferred convenience.

3. Submission is not getting on your knees to serve food to a man, or avoiding eye contact, or giving him credit for your accomplishments or most ridiculously, appending ‘sir’ when addressing the person you are married to. Quite frankly, those are ridiculous African practices whose time have come and gone.

4. Submission is not accepting physical and verbal abuse or stomaching the outcome of bad financial decisions or being solely responsible for the economic stability of the home. (I once heard a group of people speak so glowingly about a woman’s nobility. A nobility attributed to her because she ‘submitted’ her entire salary to her 5-year unemployed husband and would wait patiently to be rationed a monthly stipend from it.)

5. Most importantly, submission is not subservience. Nothing should reduce the quality of your person-hood.  By all means, give, serve, compromise, but do not sell your conscience for a man’s approval.