Anyhowness Is Expensive: Separation is not divorce. Knowing is not optional

The Closed Church Door

Years ago, a woman arrived at a church on her wedding morning to find the doors shut.

It was meant to be one of those society weddings a city talks about for months. Guests flown in from around the world. Every detail handled, every vendor paid, every expectation set sky-high. And then, at the door, an instruction. Not to the altar, but to a meeting with a senior cleric, who produced a letter. The man she was about to marry had been married before. He had divorced in court. But the church in question does not recognise civil divorce, and the first wife, while the city was busy celebrating, had quietly secured a religious ruling that his first marriage still stood. The second wedding was denied. The guests went home. So did the bride.

He believed he was free. He was free in one system and still bound in another. And nobody had checked.

I was reminded of that story recently, when someone shared a court judgment with me, and I said I found it gut-wrenching. When a friend asked why, I gave her an answer I have not stopped thinking about since. Because so many African women are living inside relationships whose true legal shape they have never confirmed. Situationships. Ambiguous arrangements. Marriages they believe are over and marriages they believe are real, neither tested against the only thing that matters when it finally counts. The documents.

A Judgment That Names the Problem

The judgment concerned the estate of a prominent man who died without a will. He had separated from his first wife years earlier. They lived apart, built separate lives, and to everyone who knew him, including himself, the marriage was finished. He went on to marry another woman, had children with her, built a home with her, and presented her to the world as his wife. When he died, both women came forward. After five years in court, a judgment came. The court found the first wife, long absent, to be the only legal spouse, and held that the second woman, who had shared his life and borne his children, had no spousal rights at all.

In the court’s finding, the marriage everyone believed was over had never legally ended, and the marriage everyone believed was real had never legally begun.

I am not writing to recite the law, though the law here is clear. Separation, no matter how long, does not dissolve a statutory marriage. Only a court can do that. Returning a bride price ends a customary marriage but not a statutory one. A religious institution may not recognise a civil divorce at all. These systems do not speak to each other automatically, and a person who is free in one may remain bound in another.

The Pattern Underneath

But the legal lesson is not my contribution. Any lawyer can give you that. My contribution is the deeper pattern underneath both stories.

Neither was a tragedy of love, or longevity, or loyalty. The women involved were not punished for any failure of devotion. They were undone by ambiguity nobody resolved, by a legal reality never confirmed while certainty was still possible. They lived inside arrangements they believed to be one thing, and the law, when it finally looked, found them to be something else.

This is what I have come to call Anyhowness.

The quiet, costly habit of building a life on assumptions you have never verified. Of proceeding as though something is true because it feels true, looks true, and everyone treats it as true, without confirming whether it is true in the only terms that will matter when the matter is finally decided.

Anyhowness is the most expensive way an African woman can live.

Choice Is Not the Danger

I want to be precise about what I am and am not saying. There is nothing wrong with choosing an unconventional arrangement. A woman is free to cohabit, to partner without marrying, to build a life on whatever terms she and her partner genuinely agree to. There is dignity in a clear-eyed choice. If you know you are not legally married and you have decided, with full awareness, to proceed anyway, that is your sovereign right, and you have designed your life on your own terms.

The danger is not the unconventional arrangement. The danger is not knowing which arrangement you are actually in.

It is the woman who believes she is a wife and is in fact a partner. The woman who believes his first marriage ended because he told her so, without ever seeing the documents that would prove it, in every system that might lay claim to it. The woman who has built a home, raised children, and organised her entire financial future around a legal status she assumed rather than confirmed. She has not made a choice. She has made an assumption. And assumptions, in matters of marriage, money, and death, are settled by courts and institutions with no interest in what anybody felt.

The Difference Is Design

The difference between the woman at the closed church door and the woman who keeps her place is not love. It is design.

To live by design is to know, precisely, the legal reality of the relationship you are in. To have seen the decree before you called yourself a wife, and confirmed it holds in every system that matters, civil, customary, and religious alike. To have written the will that makes your intentions law rather than leaving a rigid formula to decide for you. To have replaced every comfortable assumption with a confirmed fact, while confirming it was still possible.

None of this is unromantic. The most loving thing two people can do is refuse to leave each other exposed to a future neither of them can predict. The honest conversation, early, about what is actually true rather than what everyone has agreed to pretend is true. These are acts of care, not suspicion.

The court that delivered that judgment was clinical, as courts tend to be. It did not weigh the second woman’s years, her devotion, or her children’s love for their father. On the law as it applied it, it weighed the documents. The cleric at the church door was no different. He read a letter. In matters like these, sentiment has no standing. Only the record speaks.

A Note to Those Marrying Far From Home

There is a modern version of this worth naming, because it is becoming common.

The destination wedding. The ceremony on a cliff in Italy, on a beach in the Indian Ocean, in a venue chosen for its beauty rather than its paperwork. They are wonderful. But a ceremony and a legally valid marriage are not always the same thing. In some countries a symbolic ceremony carries no legal weight at all, and the couple is expected to complete a separate civil marriage for it to count. A celebrant in a beautiful setting is not always a person legally authorised to marry you. In some jurisdictions, including parts of the Gulf and many Muslim-law systems, the rules turn on the nationality and faith of the parties and are not interchangeable with a Western civil ceremony.

This is Anyhowness in its newest dress. The same failure to verify, only at the beginning rather than the end. If you are marrying far from home, find out, before the day and not after, exactly what makes your marriage legally valid where you marry, and whether it will be recognised where you live. Have the beautiful ceremony. Just make sure it is also a marriage.

What Every Woman Can Do

For every woman reading this, the instruction is uncomfortable but simple. Find out what is actually true. If a man says he is divorced, ask, gently but without apology, to see the proof, and to understand whether it holds in every system that could one day be invoked. If you are building a life with someone, confirm the legal shape of what you are building before you pour the years and the money and the children into it. Write the will. Verify the status. Resolve the ambiguity while resolving it is still within your power.

Because Anyhowness feels like ease in the moment and reveals itself as catastrophe at the worst possible time. At a closed church door with the whole world watching. Or in a courtroom years later, when the person who could have clarified everything is gone, and the only voice left in the room is the law’s.

A woman is allowed to choose any arrangement she wants. What she cannot afford is to not know which one she has chosen.

That is the whole difference. And it is the most expensive difference there is.

Udo Maryanne Okonjo is Chair of Fine & Country West Africa, founder of Radiant Collective Capital,

Postscript: the estate case that prompted this reflection is the subject of an ongoing appeal, and nothing here should be read as comment on its merits or its eventual outcome. I have kept the people in it unnamed deliberately. The point of this column is not who was right in any one courtroom. It is that years of life, love, and money are still being spent litigating a question that clarity, established early, could have answered quietly. That is the cost of Anyhowness. It is still being paid.