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I grew up with a single mother, so she shared chores among me and my siblings. There were no specific chores for my sisters or brothers; we all took turns preparing meals, cleaning the house, washing the dishes, washing clothes and running market errands. As the youngest, I was scolded whenever I went to the market and did not get a good bargain for whatever I bought. Whenever I made Amala and it was unfluffy, my ears would hear it full. “What kind of Amala radarada is this?” She would scornfully say in Yoruba. I was denied pocket money because I refused to wash the plates one morning before going to school. I never heard from my mother that certain chores belonged to boys or girls. Even, if I could remember well, my mother preferred my brother’s cooking to anyone else’s. “Dekunmi’s stew is always delicious,” she’d say.
When I grew up and realised that some men can’t cook, it felt strange. When I started living alone, I didn’t exactly feel the burden of deciding what to eat because at the least, I could boil rice and make stew. I can be particularly lazy to cook, but whenever hunger crawled in, I always knew the way to the kitchen. During Ramadan, I prepared my Sahur (morning meal) together with Iftar (evening meal). Living alone, or being a bachelor, never stopped me from taking care of myself.
I am like my friend, Abiodun Jamiu, who, after completing his degree in Sokoto, got a job offer that retained him there. We both shared kitchen chronicles and photos of meals that we prepared. Although we both ate in restaurants on many occasions, but, as we both say, “You no go cook keh? In this economy?” Our decision to cook wasn’t really about the state of the economy but how intentional we are about taking care of ourselves without relying or expecting someone else to take care of us.
It has now become a tradition every Ramadan where Muslim men come on social media and share why they need to get married because they don’t know what to eat for Iftar or Sahur. While I believe living with another person sometimes makes cooking decisions easier, cooking shouldn’t be the base of why you think you should get married. Before Ramadan, what were you eating?
I know some were raised in households where they were never expected to cook, clean, or take care of themselves, with the assumption that a woman—first their mother, sisters and then their wife—would always be there to do it for them. As a result, they grow up seeing domestic works as something optional, or worse, beneath them. But self-sufficiency isn’t just about cooking; it’s about responsibility. The idea that a man must marry to eat properly is simply a refusal to take ownership of one’s own life.
Tweets and posts with such intuitions shape how our society views women: a cooking machine. The decision to get married goes far beyond the thought of cooking. There are considerations before deciding to get married and sometimes, after getting married, your wife might not even like to cook, but that’s by the way. Cooking is a tasking role that gives little returns. It’s a huge burden to simply ruffle into the decision of marriage.
But tweets and posts like these are not just harmless jokes. They reinforce the idea that marriage is less about companionship and more about outsourcing domestic responsibilities, specifically to women. They subtly uphold the belief that a wife’s primary role is to be the household cook, rather than a partner with her own independence, ambitions, and perhaps, whenever the case may be, even a dislike for cooking.
The danger lies in how these narratives shape expectations and the idea of a wife or a woman. A man who believes he needs a wife because he can’t figure out his own meals is more likely to see marriage as a transactional arrangement rather than a meaningful partnership. And when these expectations become ingrained, they lead to resentment when their wife does not cook for them, entitlement because they see a woman cooking for them as their acclaimed right, and, in some cases, the devaluation of women beyond their domestic contributions.
Before you take my bull by its horn, I am married. And no, my wife doesn’t have to cook every day.
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Feature Image by Muhammad-Taha Ibrahim for Pexels.
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