The Secret: Love, Marriage, and HIV

Introduction

1 Introduction Adultery is the foundation of society, because in making marriage tolerable, it assures the perpetuation of the family. —Henry Gauthier-Villars Chigozie and Ihunanya married in 1994.1 They first met in Lagos, Nigeria’s huge commercial capital, where each had been a young migrant struggling to find a better life in the city. To hear them tell their story, they married because they fell in love, though they both acknowledged that it had been easier to convince their extended families they were a good match because they hailed originally from neighboring Igbo-speaking communities in southeastern Nigeria. By 2004, they had four children, had moved back to Chigozie’s natal community, and had managed to cobble together a modest living through Chigozie’s small business of selling medicine in his semi-rural community’s urbanizing marketplace and Ihunanya’s low-level civil service job in the nearby state capital. In extended interviews conducted separately with husband and wife, each described their marriage as solid and stable. Their individual narratives emphasized the joint project of raising and educating their children, the goal of developing their household economically, and the challenges of meeting their obligations to kin and community. Both described the union as a “modern marriage,” drawing many contrasts with their parents’ marriages. On the question of love, Ihunanya and Chigozie each said that they had married for love and that they still loved each other. Most details of their respective accounts of their marriage coincided remarkably , but their stories diverged on the topic of extramarital sex. Their accounts differed on the facts as well as on the significance of those facts—specifically, on whether men’s infidelity reflects men’s commitment to their marriages. Ihunanya was emphatic: she had never had extramarital sex and said she believed that Chigozie had been faithful during their marriage as well. In contrast, Chigozie admitted to having had more than one extramarital sexual relationship; he also indicated that he knew that in at least one instance Ihunanya had suspected as much. Their accounts deviated even further when Ihunanya said that cheating would be an unacceptable breach in a love marriage, while Chigozie strongly asserted that the fact that he had had extramarital sex did not mean that he did not love his wife and family. His discretion, he said, was itself evidence of his dedication to the mar- 2 The Secret: Love, Marriage, and HIV riage. Both husband and wife agreed that men’s extramarital sex was common— and much more common for men than for married women. They concurred that a man’s infidelity was not necessarily sufficient grounds for divorce, though Chigozie insisted that his wife’s infidelity would be. Similar stories turned out to be common in southeastern Nigeria: of couples who characterized their marriages as modern and based on love; of husbands who cheated on their wives but remained committed to their marriages; and of wives who said that their own husbands had not cheated on them, even as they acknowledged that men’s infidelity was rampant. As anthropologists and other scholars have long noted, marriage is a fundamental economic, social, and cultural institution in almost every known society—an institution that most people anticipate, engage in, and evaluate both individually and collectively, no matter their cultural context, social class, country of origin, ethnic group, or religious background. Further, the institution of marriage sits at the nexus of large-scale social processes and intimate life, between the concrete tasks of economic subsistence and the biological and social imperatives of reproduction, and in the unfolding of an individual’s life course. As such, marriage is the focus of pragmatic strategies and behavior, and the locus of intense moral scrutiny and social preoccupation. Across the social sciences, marriage has always been a topic of great interest, both because of what it reveals about universal aspects of the human social condition and because of the tremendous diversity of marriage customs that characterize the world’s societies. In this book, we build on anthropology’s tradition of engagement with marriage, providing a comparative perspective that draws on long-term research in five countries: Mexico, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, Uganda, and Vietnam. Beyond examining the common and divergent aspects of marital customs, relationships, and experiences in the societies we have studied, we also explore how marriage has been changing in each of these settings, how these transformations have intertwined with new conceptions of and aspirations for intimacy as well as with enduring...