Sometimes on Nigerian social media, when a man and a woman have a verbal altercation and the man gets angry, he hurls the statement, “Stop Arguing. Go and Marry.”(especially if the woman is single). He seems to suggest that the woman has too much time on her hands because she’s unmarried, or that she lacks respect because she’s not used to submitting to a male figure.

I’ve often wondered that an individual who responds to an intelligent viewpoint with, “Go and marry”, may simply lack the mental rigour to respond to facts with counter-facts. Instead, he reaches into a malnourished mental arsenal for insults, instead of deploying well burnished tools of dialogue.

“Go and marry” is akin to an Engineer having a conversation with a Doctor about social issues and then the Doctor says, “Go and become a Doctor.” This neither relates to the conversation nor advances the discussion. It’s completely out of context. It’s even sadder when Christians resort to this depth of stupefaction. Their authorities on marriage – Paul and Jesus – never married nor did they have children. In fact, scriptural genealogy suggests that some people’s only contribution to society is that they “lived and died”. Some “begat and died”. But, others walked with God; built institutions and changed the course of history.

If you strip marriage from those who shout, “Go and marry”, I wonder what would be left. What achievements. What significance.

Ponder that.