I’m asking you please to engage in cultural relativity here. You don’t have to like our practices, just temporarily accept them to understand this post.

We are from a culture where it’s customary that a dowry is paid when a woman is married – this a customary marriage(CM) and what one must do in order to start a life.

The CM serves many purposes:

it shows you that a man is serious about you

he’ll have worked to save and declare his commitment to you and your family

it joins your family to his; its the right way to marry a woman

it honours a womans parents, family and community, and it let’s the ancestors know you’re leaving the home.

The CM is one of the core principles of my tradition: we’re a family-oriented people and that’s how families are forged.

Now my sister decided to marry a man who’s not from our culture. He refused to marry her customarily because it was “demeaning”, “barbaric” and “backward”.everyone advised her not to marry a man who viewed her that way but she stuck to him and had a modern marriage ceremony. Our parents weren’t supportive but they did attend the church ceremony.

This is already a huge faux pas in our culture. To add insult to injury, her husband is consistently rude and disrespectful to our culture.

He comes into my parent’s home and refers to them by their first names. This is not done with anyone older than you, especially not your in-laws. My parents try to look beyond the absence of customary marriage and treat him like their own anyway, but he throws it back in their face each time.

He rejected core parts of someone’s culture, and then expect to gain full acceptance in a traditional family and expect to be invited to their customary/traditional practices.