Toyin was 28 and absolutely certain she was ready. She had a good job at a logistics firm in Kano, a clear head on her shoulders, and a carefully thought-out checklist of what she wanted in a husband: kind, hardworking, God-fearing, present.
What she hadn’t written down was a list of what she needed to watch out for.
So when Danjuma came along, she read every good sign she could see and quietly looked past the ones that made her uneasy.
Two years into their marriage, sitting across from her older cousin Adiza in a small kitchen that smelled of fura da nono and afternoon warmth, Toyin said something that stopped the room: “I’m not unhappy. I’m just permanently exhausted.”
Toyin put down her cup.
Marriage is not meant to feel like a second job you never applied for. But for a lot of people, that’s exactly what it becomes, because they chose a partner whose patterns made a sustainable partnership nearly impossible.
Let’s walk through this honestly, the way Adiza walked Toyin through it that afternoon, without judgment, without dramatisation, and without pretending any of this is simple.
1. The Partner Who Cannot Apologise
Danjuma had never, in two full years of marriage, said the words “I was wrong” without immediately following them with “but you also…” A person who cannot own their mistakes is a person who will make you carry the weight of every conflict alone. This is an absence of accountability, and without accountability, trust erodes slowly but completely.
2. The One Who Makes Everything About Them
There is a particular kind of tiredness that comes from always being the audience in your own marriage. The partner who turns every conversation back to themselves, who can’t sit with your struggles without redirecting to their own, who measures empathy by how quickly the spotlight returns doesn’t mean harm, but they cause it consistently.
3. The Partner Who Treats Money as a Secret
Financial secrecy in a marriage is distance dressed up as care. A partner who won’t be transparent about money is a partner with whom you cannot build anything solid.
4. The One Who Disrespects Your People
The person who loves you should not need to diminish the people who made you. That pattern, left unchecked, rarely stays verbal.
5. The Partner Who Is Still Emotionally Married to Their Past
Grief over a past relationship is normal. Carrying it into a new marriage as a permanent resident is not. If your partner constantly compares, references, or uses their past to excuse their present behaviour, they are telling you they have not cleared the space needed to fully show up for you.
6. The One Who Doesn’t Respect Boundaries
Musa, a friend of Danjuma’s whom Toyin had met twice at family dinners, had a wife who called their marriage “a negotiation she was always losing.” He read her messages without asking, showed up at her workplace unannounced, dismissed her need for personal time as “attitude.” Boundaries are the structure that allows two individuals to genuinely share a life without losing themselves in it.
7. The Partner Who Refuses to Grow
Growth means willingness. A partner who responds to every suggestion, every concern, every gentle nudge toward self-improvement with defensiveness or dismissal is a partner who has decided that who they are today is already the finished product. Marriages grow, and they need two people who are willing to grow with them.
8. The One Who Uses Silence as a Weapon
We’ve all needed quiet after a hard conversation. That’s healthy. What isn’t healthy is a partner who deploys silence deliberately as punishment, the withholding of warmth until you’ve “learned your lesson.” This is a form of control, and it is exhausting in the most precise sense of the word.
9. The Partner Who Doesn’t Prioritise the Marriage
Children, career, friendships, extended family obligations - life is full, and that is a good thing. But there is a version of this where everything comes before the marriage, every time. A partner who treats the marriage as the thing that survives on leftovers has opted out of the work that sustains it.
10. The One Who Is Unkind When No One Is Watching
How does your partner treat the waiter, the gate man, the junior colleague, the family member with no status? Kindness that only appears for an audience is performance. The person your partner is when nobody important is watching is the person you will live with for the rest of your life.
You deserve a marriage that restores you, not one that runs you down.
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