The topic of how young Nigerians navigate romantic relationships with their earnings is a minefield of hot takes. In Love Currency, we get into what relationships across income brackets look like in different cities.
Interested in talking about how money moves in your relationship? If yes, click here.
How long have you been with your partner?
Tayo and I have been married for a little over four years. But we’ve known each other a long time. We actually met and were in each other’s circles for about eight years before we got married.
Aw, cute. How did you meet?
We met on Instagram. I was still in medical school and had posted a poem on my story. Tayo commented on it, then he put me in a group with fellow poets. We weren’t close in the beginning; I was getting to know other people in the group, just like him. It took about two to three years of being acquaintances before we actually started talking properly, sometime around 2015/2016.
And was that when the love bloomed?
Ha! No. We were still friends, and barely friends even. We’d connect, gist for a bit, forget each other, then reconnect. I schooled outside Lagos, so we didn’t even see each other physically for a long time. There was even a point in 2020 when we were supposed to meet, but it just didn’t work out.
Then, in 2021, while I was rounding up medical school, we started talking again properly. We naturally started dating and got married in six months. This was 2022, some months after I graduated from medical school.
Six months?
When you know, you know. I was drawn to his entrepreneurial spirit. He’s from a humble background, and from his student days, he’d already built multiple streams of income for himself: video editing, Photoshop, writing, and poetry. It felt like he acquired a new skill every time I blinked. I liked his ambition.
He’s also just a reliable person. Looking at what he built for himself despite growing up poor, I believed he could give me a secure future. Whatever happened, our family wouldn’t suffer because he’d find a way to take care of us.
He’s published books, done skits, and is always looking out for opportunities. Even before hustle culture was as serious as it is now, he was on top of everything. All this plus our shared love for writing? Of course, I married him.
Before we get to marriage, let’s talk about how you both navigated money in the dating days.
Very openly, actually. I always knew about gigs he landed, even if I didn’t know how much money they brought in, so I had a general sense of what he was working on.
He took me out often and paid for dates since I’d just left school and wasn’t earning yet. He’d also come over to my place sometimes — I lived with my parents then — and I’d cook, make sure there was food and drinks.
I don’t know how to ask for things, so it was nice to be given gifts unprompted. The only Valentine’s Day we spent together before getting married, he got me a teddy bear and flowers. I’d never received a Valentine’s gift before that.
Did this extend into your marriage?
100%. He believes in full transparency and splitting expenses, always saying, “Our money is our money.” I share the same belief, and I like our dynamic. We both just sort whatever needs to be taken care of.
Walk me through how you split expenses now.
Tayo handles rent, mostly. He handles our daughter’s school fees, though I chip in sometimes. He takes care of electricity, fuel for the car and generator, and mostly buys the cooking gas. When we go out, at least once a month, it’s roughly a 60/40 split between us, with him chipping in 60%.
I’m the one who plans and buys food and household stuff, partly because he was a bachelor who lived on ordering food out, so grocery planning was never his instinct. He also sends money for food and randomly sends me gift money, with descriptions like, “For yourself, not the house.”
He also supports my dreams. We both wanted to move to the UK, and we planned to go together. However, that didn’t work out.
Tell me about that.
I’ve wanted to practise abroad as a doctor since medical school. I took the IELTS in 2022, shortly after we got married, and it cost me ₦85k. Then, in 2023, I wrote my PLAB 1 — the first step to practising in the UK. That one cost me ₦225k. Tayo supported me through the process. In fact, he reimbursed me ₦50k for the IELTS.
I planned to write PLAB 2 (the second phase of the exam) in 2026, as the UK required candidates to pass the second phase within three years of PLAB 1, or the first result would expire. However, in May 2025, I found out the medical council had cut the timeline down to two years. That meant I had less than six months to write an exam that would cost almost ₦5 million, including the cost of travel to the UK.
That’s a lot of money.
Money we didn’t have. I was earning ₦350k/month at the time, and Tayo was earning about ₦600k/month from his freelance work, so I thought we could save for the exam that was in 2026.
But around the time I learned about the revised timeline, our income took a big hit. My husband’s freelance gigs dried up, and he lost a few other long-term clients at the same time. His income dipped lower than mine, to about ₦300k/month. Additionally, our car broke down, so Tayo took out a ₦1.5 million loan to fix it. We’re still repaying it.
I considered taking out a loan to cover the exam and travel costs, but Tayo was against it.
Did he share why?
He wanted us to try to raise the money ourselves first rather than go into debt, especially because his income was now unstable. We had a family friend who wrote the same exam in 2024 and still hadn’t landed a job in the UK after two years of trying. He didn’t want us in a position where we’d have to repay millions of naira for an exam that might not even lead anywhere for a long time. It felt like too big a risk.
Was the attempt to raise money successful?
No. I couldn’t meet the deadline. And it wasn’t just that exam; everything else ended as well. My IELTS expired around the same time, and my international passport expired too. Everything I’d worked toward since medical school seemed to collapse in the same few months.
I’m so sorry. That must have hurt.
It was one of the worst things that had ever happened to me. I felt like I was watching years of planning go up in flames. This had been my dream for years, and because of one exam, it was suddenly out of reach.
I understood Tayo’s point of view, but I was so hurt and very angry at him.
How did this affect your relationship?
It was a really low point in our marriage. That was the only period we’d ever had actual quarrels over money in the entire relationship. We argued constantly. It was bad. Not to mention that, at some point, we became close to a one-income household, since his gigs had dried up so much. We had to cut down expenses and live on a tight budget. To make ends meet, I stopped saving and fired my housekeeper. Only when the stress got me admitted to the hospital 3 months later did I hire another housekeeper. It was a genuinely tough stretch.
We also communicate differently. I’m the kind of person who broods and overthinks. I need to sit with things alone and cry before I can talk about them. My husband is the opposite. He wants to talk things through right away, because he feels like unspoken things spill into everything else.
So when I finally tried to communicate how hurt I was, I think it came across as me blaming him for not letting me take the loan. And even though I knew, logically, that it wasn’t his fault, because the money genuinely wasn’t there, in that moment, I felt like he hadn’t shown up for me when I needed him most.
Looking back, I think I really hurt him. He would kiss my forehead and try to comfort me when he saw me crying, and beg me, saying, “If I had the money, don’t you think I would have paid for the exam?” But it didn’t really change how I felt.
That’s rough. Did you guys get out of this rut?
We were in this weird space for about five months — starting in March. Eventually, I had to ask myself what else was possible if the UK didn’t happen. In August, I wrote my primaries, a local exam pathway into residency in Nigeria, and passed. It gave me a flicker of hope that I could still have the life I want.
I also had to look at the situation through his eyes: he wanted to help, the intention was always there, but the money just wasn’t coming. Once I stopped centring the UK as the only outcome, I stopped blaming him for it.
He also helped by reminding me of every other way he’d shown up before: paying for study materials, driving me across the country to sort out my passport, and being there through every previous exam. I understood that I’d forgotten how wonderful he is.
When you’re in the middle of a hard moment, you forget all the good things from the past.
I’m glad you guys are back in a good place. Is the UK still your plan?
No. Beyond the money, the UK has also tightened its rules. A new law now prioritises UK graduates for jobs, and residency spots have become much harder to get for international doctors. Starting the whole exam process over again just doesn’t make sense anymore.
So, what’s the plan now?
Canada. Getting into Canada as a doctor through PR is pretty easy. It’s when you land that things get harder with multiple exams. It’s less certain than the UK path was, but it now makes sense to both of us. Tayo is on board.
How do you feel about your relationship today?
We’ve been through good years and hard ones, but we’ve come out closer for it. There’s always been transparency between us, but we’ve had to learn to be even more transparent and understand each other’s communication styles.
I don’t know what the future holds, but right now, I know he’s my person. Whether japa works or not, I know Tayo is my future.
Interested in talking about how money moves in your relationship? If yes, click here.
*Names have been changed for the sake of anonymity.
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