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Sexual Market Value, Divorce, and the Nigerian Couple: A Market Analysis
The SMV Framework
Sir Dickson's thesis on Sexual Market Value (SMV) posits that human sexuality operates like any other commodity market, labour, capital, or goods, where exchange occurs based on perceived value, and that perceived value is heavily indexed to age. Specifically, a woman's sexual desirability peaks in youth and declines with age, while a man's desirability peaks later, rising in proportion to his financial and social status. This asymmetry in the timing of peak value between the sexes is the engine that drives the market's dysfunction.
This is not mere theory, the evidence is visible in the growing population of unmarried Nigerian women aged 30 - 40, both in Nigeria and in the UK diaspora, a demographic reality that signals a structural breakdown in how matches are being made and sustained.
The Market's Two Transactions: Lease vs. Purchase
I expound on Sir Dickson's framework to distinguish two modes of participation in this market:
A. Leasing: short-term arrangements (flings, situationships, casual relationships) where value is exchanged temporarily, with no expectation of permanence.
B. Outright Purchase: marriage, where a man makes a permanent, legally binding acquisition, historically formalised through bride price and the biblical injunction that "a man shall leave his father's house" to seek a wife.
The critical insight, and the one that connects directly to divorce, is that these two transactions are governed by entirely different motivations, yet, they draw from the same pool of participants, and crucially, they do not happen simultaneously for men and women.
The Timing Mismatch: The Root of Divorce
Consider the archetypical case: a 33-year-old Nigerian man marrying a 32-year-old Nigerian woman.
Her journey through the market:
In her early-to-mid twenties, she was at peak SMV. Older, financially established men - "sugar daddies" and "big bros" - leased her commodity. These men, having already climbed the economic ladder, concealed the struggle behind gifts: phones, chocolates, trips, and attention. To her young mind, this generosity was maturity. She had no reference point for the years of grinding that produced it. What she absorbed instead was a standard - a baseline expectation of what men do, what men provide, and how men treat women. By 32, she carries multiple body counts, a finely tuned sense of entitlement, and a definition of male maturity that was written by men who were 15–20 years ahead of where her future husband currently stands.
His journey through the market:
Culture and biology conspired against his early participation. He was socialised to understand that access to the market is conditional on financial capacity, that is, without money, he would receive, at best, reluctant and loveless engagement (pity fuck). So he delayed, focused on building, and by 33, he is stable enough to participate meaningfully. But rather than leasing, which would have been the rational market entry point, he goes directly to purchase. He marries.
The collision:
Inside the marriage, she unconsciously benchmarks him against the men of her leasing years. He is found wanting, not because he is inadequate in absolute terms, but because he is being compared to men who were decades ahead of him when she knew them. She reads his stage of development as immaturity. He reads her expectations as unreasonable. When he raises the question of shared financial responsibility in the home, she meets it with contempt, because the men in her formative years never asked her to split anything.
She married to exit the market, He married believing he had finally entered it. Both are disappointed, and the divorce follows.
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