I confess without reservation that I am drawn to the world of reality dating shows. “Shoot Your Shot,” with Bisola Aiyeola coaxing secret admirers into revealing their long-guarded affections. It fascinates me in ways I cannot resist. Equally captivating is “Date My Family” on Mzansi Magic, where bachelors or bachelorettes meet potential lovers through their families—an experiment that is both hilarious and revealing, like peeking into the living rooms of strangers and watching destiny negotiate its terms over dinner. For me, these shows are more than guilty pleasures. They are windows into values, desires, fears, and cultural expectations—stories of love unfolding with suspense and lessons, much like novels, except here the fiction is replaced with the unpredictable drama of real life.
Yet, whenever I watch, a question lingers: how much of this is real love, and how much is performance—fantasy dressed in bright lights and scripted dinners? Contestants often present themselves like carefully wrapped gifts, rehearsing smiles and cleverly phrased answers, hoping to impress not just their potential partner but also the invisible jury of millions watching from their couches. And in this parade of packaged romance, one truth keeps echoing: women, more often than men, boldly declare their desire for a rich man.
Let us not pretend this is new. Wealth has always been a magnet in the history of human attraction. Aristotle once observed that “wealth is evidently the greatest of the useful things,” and society has long treated it as proof of responsibility, masculinity, and capability. A man unable to feed himself, so the old wisdom goes, cannot be entrusted to feed another. I recall vividly from my secondary school days a teacher’s scolding of a lazy student: “This is how you will be useless and no one would want to give you his daughter in marriage.” Though those words were not aimed at me, they stuck like gum to memory. They revealed how parents instinctively measure a man’s worth by his economic strength—a cultural logic that remains unshaken.
But here lies the paradox. While history shows us that powerful, wealthy men often married the most beautiful women—and sometimes many wives—it was once seen as immodest for women to openly say, “I want a rich man.” Parents too, though secretly preferring wealthy suitors for their daughters, cloaked such desires with the garment of morality. Today, however, boldness has replaced subtlety. On TV, in interviews, on social media, many women proclaim it as their natural right: they will not settle unless he is rich.
Consider Nollywood actress Ayo Adesanya. In a recent interview, she admitted she would give love another chance only if she found a tall, handsome, and wealthy man. She was quick to add that true love mattered most, that the fear of God in a man was precious, but her words exposed a broader cultural shift: the normalization of demanding riches as a prerequisite for love.
Of course, there are reasons. Some women who say this are famous, successful, or wealthy in their own right. They see it as beneath them to marry a man of “lower” status. Others, regardless of their own financial standing, believe they are entitled to a rich man simply by virtue of being women. To them, dating or marrying a man without wealth feels like charity, as if they are doing him a favor. This orientation reveals the double standards of our culture. Men cannot openly declare they want rich women without being branded opportunists, but women can demand wealth without shame because society has long placed their upkeep in men’s hands.
The moral danger is that such relationships become transactional—based not on partnership or mutual growth, but on entitlement. If a woman’s role is only to receive, what happens to reciprocity, sacrifice, and shared responsibility? Relationships collapse when one party carries the weight while the other rests on the entitlement of gender roles. Sociologist Anthony Giddens, in his theory of the “pure relationship,” argues that love in modern societies should be based on mutual satisfaction and contribution, rather than external rewards such as wealth. Yet what we see instead is a return to love as a commodity, where affection is priced in currencies, cars, and houses.
And what of impermanence? Wealth is fickle. Businesses fail. Jobs are lost. Fortunes vanish overnight. If love is tethered only to riches, then the relationship dies with the bank balance. Character, humility, intelligence, moderation, and dependability—those quiet virtues—last longer than gold. They are the true treasures that keep admiration alive even when the wallet grows thin.
But many women still cling to the orientation that “a man must provide at all costs,” even as economic realities force households to depend on dual incomes. In Nigeria, where poverty stretches across nearly 80% of the population, how practical is this insistence on marrying only the rich? The irony is stark: with men statistically fewer than women and with declining life expectancy, women narrowing their options to the wealthy is less wisdom and more wishful thinking.
The bitter truth is that this mindset has not worked well, even for celebrities. Many remain single, divorced, or trapped in endless cycles of searching for yet another rich man to match their public image. Social media amplifies the illusion, but the reality beneath is often lonely and unsustainable.
Let us be fair—greed is not exclusive to women. Men, too, can be materialistic. The difference is that men rarely make public declarations of it, while women now do so with confidence, even applause. But what is the essence of wealth if it becomes the sole condition for love? True riches lie not in possessions but in contentment, in mutual respect, in the art of building together. For when love becomes nothing more than a price tag, it ceases to be love at all.
Bagudu can be reached at bagudumohammed15197@gmail.com or on 0703 494 3575.
