Why More Women Are Choosing Not to Get Married or Have Children

From birth, it often feels like every girl in West Africa is being raised for two things: to be a wife and a mother. You learn early how to cook for a future husband and how to keep a home you do not yet have. Family members hand you their babies to carry, to feed, to soothe. When you ask why, they say it is for practice, whether you asked for it or not. And if you are not the youngest, you become a kind of stand-in parent to your siblings, quietly learning what it means to be responsible for another human being.

For a long time, marriage and motherhood were never really up for discussion. They were not framed as choices but as the inevitable. At a certain age and with enough reminders, you were expected to get married and have children. And if you didn’t, no matter what else you had built, it was seen as a failure. A life that had somehow missed its purpose.

But more women are saying no to this path and unsettling the idea that there is one way to be a fulfilled woman. On platforms like X and TikTok, women are openly questioning whether marriage and motherhood are as fulfilling as they have been taught to believe. Some are choosing to delay it. Others are rejecting it entirely. And they are not as alone in that position as it might seem. According to Afrobarometer’s 2024/2025 survey across 38 African countries, 75 percent of respondents said women should be able to decide for themselves whether and when to marry. The consensus is shifting, even if the pressure has not caught up.

The Institution of Marriage

For some women, the resistance is less personal and more structural. Beyond individual relationships, marriage carries a long history of expectations placed on women. There is a laid-down structure of what should be given but far less clarity about what is being received in return.

If the average man is asked, women get the better end. They get protection, financial stability, a husband, and children. But that narrative is not as straightforward as it sounds. According to a 2025 report by UNODC and UN Women, Africa recorded the highest rate of intimate partner and family-related femicide in the world in 2024, with an estimated 22,600 women and girls killed. That is three victims per 100,000 female population, the highest of any region. The home, for many women, is not the safe place it is promised to be.

In reality, most families are two-income households. And after the woman works, the weight of emotional, domestic, and familial care still falls on her. In sub-Saharan Africa, women spend 3.1 times more hours on unpaid care and domestic work than men, according to UN Women. In the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU) countries, young rural women aged 15 to 34 spend around 21.5 hours per week on unpaid care tasks, four times more than young men. For married or cohabiting women, that figure rises to 25 hours per week. For some women, the question is no longer “Do I want to get married?” but “What exactly am I agreeing to?”

Tinuade Mary O., a gender advocate working in the social development space, approaches the decision from that angle.

“I chose not to get married because I refused to buy into an institution that offers women a terrible Return on Investment (ROI).”

Her framing is deliberate. If marriage is stripped of its sentiment and examined as a system, what shows is that it has not evolved to serve women fully.

“Marriage was built to facilitate companionship and family labor, not the self-actualization of women.”

For Tinuade, it is about the roles women are expected to play and the ways those roles can limit them.

“I don’t date to marry because I don’t view a marriage license as the ultimate validation of love or commitment. I prioritize my peace over a contract that often demands a woman’s identity as a down payment.”

For women like Tinuade, opting out is not about fear or personal history. It is about recognizing that some systems, as they currently exist, require too much and give too little in return. Rather than entering them and hoping to renegotiate the terms, they are choosing not to enter at all.

“Women are making these choices because they are finally waking up to the fact that they are allowed to be selfish with their own lives. We are tired of being the primary ‘caregivers’ for everyone except ourselves. Whether it’s for financial independence, mental health, or the simple realization that they haven’t finished living for themselves yet, women are opting out of roles that require them to be small.”

The Power of Choice

There was a time when marriage was tied to survival. It offered stability, legitimacy, and in many cases access to housing, respect, and a certain kind of safety. Choosing not to get married was not just unconventional. It was risky. That reality is changing. In Nigeria, the proportion of married women declined from 78.4 percent to 70.1 percent between 1990 and 1999, and the country’s fertility rate has dropped from 6.35 in 1993 to 4.48 in 2023. In South Africa, marriage registrations fell by 28.5 percent over the decade from 2015 to 2024, and women initiated 57.2 percent of all divorces granted in 2024, according to Statistics South Africa. Fewer women are entering, and more are choosing to leave.

Doyin, a product designer, says her choice not to get married comes down to a level of commitment she is not willing to give. She extends that logic to motherhood.

“I don’t want children because the world is too messy and children are too vulnerable. A society that claims it wants more children isn’t doing enough at all to make the world safe for them. Beyond that, raising a child is expensive and demands everything; my energy, my time, my money. I understand those are a parent’s responsibilities. I’m just choosing not to take them on because I have that choice.”

Marriage and motherhood will always require certain things. It is fair to examine those requirements and decide whether they are worth taking on.

What Happens After

Not every woman who questions the institution does so from the outside. One woman, who asked to remain anonymous, got married at twenty-seven, had two children, and spent a decade inside the very structure others are choosing to avoid. She does not describe her marriage as abusive or even unhappy in any dramatic sense. She describes it as slowly disappearing.

“I did everything I was supposed to do. I was the wife, the mother, the person who remembered every appointment and every birthday. And one day I realized that nobody in my house knew what I actually wanted. Including me.”

She is now separated and rebuilding a life she says feels unfamiliar but honest.

“I’m not telling women not to get married. I’m saying the version of it I was handed did not have room for me as a full person. And I wish someone had told me that before I signed up.”

Her experience complicates the conversation in a necessary way. The women choosing not to marry are making one kind of decision. The women who entered the institution and found it wanting are making another. Both arrive at a similar conclusion: that marriage, as it is commonly practiced, asks women to set themselves aside.

The Conversation of Generational Trauma

But not all of these decisions start with choice and independence. Sometimes they come from experience. What women have lived through, what they have witnessed, and what they are trying not to repeat.

Oluwafumilayo, a tech sales executive, frames her decision as one rooted in lived experience.

“I choose not to get married or have kids because marriage benefits the man more than the woman. I’ve lived through the ordeal of marriage and I choose not to box myself or find myself in that situation.”

For some women it is not their own experience but what they have witnessed. There is a memory that has been created by relationships that left their mark.

Mira, a digital marketing executive, describes her decision as one rooted in honesty about herself. Her reasoning is tied to a specific experience that forced her to confront the possibility of passing down trauma.

“There was something that happened between my mum and I that really hurt me. And I realized that it might inevitably happen if I had children, I might do the same thing to my daughter. I am my mother’s daughter with my father’s anger.”

For Mira, motherhood is not only about desire. It is also a responsibility not to pass down pain. There are other fears layered into that decision, both emotional and physical.

“The concept of pregnancy is scary. I don’t want morning sickness. I don’t want my body to change like that.”

And then there is the choice she has made about relationships entirely.

“I want to be comfortable being alone. Because once you start getting used to having a partner, you start craving one.”

Another woman, also anonymous, offers a different angle. She wants children. She is not sure she wants to raise them inside a marriage.

“I watched my mother hold everything together while my father got to just be present. He showed up at dinner. She made dinner, cleaned up, put us to bed, and got up the next morning to do it again. I want kids. But I want to do it on terms where I’m not also raising a grown man’s self-esteem.”

She is thirty-four, financially stable, and actively researching single motherhood by choice.

“People act like that’s radical. But what’s actually radical is doing the same thing your mother did and expecting a different outcome.”

In a society that constantly nudges women toward partnership, choosing not to build that attachment, or choosing to build family without it, is its own kind of clarity. For women like Mira, the decision is about understanding themselves well enough to know what they are not ready for. They are refusing to step into roles that could cause harm, both to themselves and to someone else.

Redefining Selfishness

If there is one word that keeps coming up when women talk about choosing not to marry or have children, it is selfish. It is usually said as an accusation. A way to suggest that a woman is prioritizing herself too much, that she is unwilling to give, to nurture, to sacrifice in the way she is expected to.

But more women are beginning to use that word differently. Not as something to deny, but as something to own. Because for many, what is being called selfishness is actually honesty. It is the ability to look closely at what marriage and motherhood demand and admit, without guilt, that they are not willing to give that much of themselves.

Marylyn, a 22-year-old writer and model, puts it simply.

“I am way too selfish for both marriage and kids.”

But what she describes is not a lack of care. It is a clear understanding of what those roles require. Growing up, she watched the reality of motherhood up close. Not just the love, but the weight of it.

“I saw the sacrifices mothers had to make for their kids and I know that I can’t make them.”

“Society puts so much pressure on mothers. From the very day she becomes pregnant down to just assuming she has to be the better parent when the father of the child is moving weird. No accountability to the man in most cases. They expect her to leave her job and focus on her family and all that.”

Women are expected to compensate. To give more, often without acknowledgment or balance. In that context, choosing not to participate is not selfishness. It is a refusal to enter a system where the terms are already unfavorable. And perhaps more importantly, a refusal to pretend otherwise.

Oluwafumilayo agrees.

“I don’t want kids either because I am selfish and I think kids should be treated as eggs (pampered and cared for) brought to the world when it is serene enough to do so.”

These women are not issuing a verdict on marriage or motherhood. They are describing what they see when they look at those institutions clearly, without the softening lens of tradition or expectation. And what they see is a set of terms they did not write and do not wish to accept. That is not the collapse of anything. It is the beginning of a more honest negotiation about what women’s lives are actually for.

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