If You Want to Marry Me, You Must Kill a Lion First

Yesterday I had an interesting conversation with my Uber driver. We got onto the topic of our travel experiences, how cultures differ among African countries, and eventually landed on the topic of marriage.

According to him (haven’t fact checked this, so forgive me if there are some inconsistencies), if a man of a particular tribe in Kenya would like to marry a woman, he has to kill a lion.

From my own, mostly Western, perspective, something like this sounds crazy and dangerous. And, also from my own female perspective, I wonder if this reinforces some harmful gender norms about men needing to be strong and powerful and women needing some sort of savior to come along.

But, I pushed these thoughts to the side for a moment and tried to look at it from a slightly different perspective. I have never been married, but I can imagine that this experience is not something to taken lightly. Marriage is about being there for another person no matter what shit goes down. It’s about being someone’s life partner even when times are rough. It’s difficult enough as it is to accept yourself fully, I couldn’t even begin to imagine the difficulties associated with doing that for yourself AND someone else (who might be completely different from you in every sense of the word). Also, you’re potentially with this person for the rest of your existence (sounds terrifying to me).

So, maybe it is necessary to prove that you’re ready for something as serious as marriage. If you go into it without considering just how difficult the experience is going to be, you won’t be prepared for the eventual problems that arise. You will shrink away in terror, avoiding finding resolutions, letting problems build up over the years, and maybe even getting divorced. Even if the divorce doesn’t come, your overall life satisfaction is bound to drop dramatically.

Maybe killing a lion is dangerous and scary, but it can also be a rewarding experience to face your own fear of death. Once you face the fear of death, you can handle anything that happens in life. Once you put yourself in a situation that could spell the end of your life, you finally start living it.

A man, in this culture, needs to prove that he’s worthy of such an important undertaking; and, honestly, the logic holds up. It got me thinking a lot about not only marriages, but any sort of relationship I may have in my life. Maybe I don’t want my future life partner (if I even decide to get married) to kill a lion to prove they’re worthy of me, but maybe we both need to face our demons and deepest fears before we are worthy of each other.