😂 This is painfully accurate. Bros will thank God, their village people, and the government before they admit a male friend helped them eat during the struggle.
But the moment a wife enters the picture? Suddenly she’s the CEO, the prayer warrior, the brain behind every move—even if her biggest contribution was cooking indomie and posting his wins on Insta.
The ego gymnastics are Olympic level. Men measure themselves by results, so pre-marriage it’s “I built this alone.” Post-marriage it’s “We built this” (even when “we” means she was busy shopping with the profits).
The real question is: why do we devalue the solid guys who actually showed up, but overvalue the domestic partner who benefits most from our success? Make it make sense, gentlemen.
Nigerian men are biased toward taking all credit for their successes - even in cases where such success was partly or majorly due to luck, friendships or the magnanimity of greater men.
That is until they get married and the same men who once believed they were entirely self made begin attributing every achievement to their wives.
For example, you could encourage a broke, struggling friend to relocate to a bigger city, or upscale neighbourhood, support him financially through the transition and put him on to opportunities, yet when, months or years later, he gets his big break, he will be inclined to view his prosperity as entirely self made.
There will be little or no mention of you or any of his other friends who may have been instrumental to his success "pushing him" or (jointly) creating the conditions that made that success possible.
But if his poor wife who has not done anything meaningful with her life, merely suggests that he make the same move (typically for her own selfish reasons of course) and contributes nothing materially to it, he is far more likely to instinctively credit her for his good fortune and see her 'advice' as the turning point that changed his life.
I understand the former bias - that is - why a man would be blind, willfully or not, to the instrumentality of external agency to his success
Men judge themselves on competence and material success is prima facie proof of it. So it makes sense that successful men would be biased towards attributing all their accomplishments to their hardwork, tenacity, courage, intelligence and basically, to themselves
I get it.
The part I do not quite get yet, at a sufficiently high resolution at least, is why that bias flips outwards after marriage and men who once insisted every win was solely a product of their own industry, suddenly become eager to credit their less competent wives for outcomes they would have previously attributed to themselves.