By Richard Dablah
(richard.dablah@gmail.com)
The viral headline says denying your partner sex can land you in jail. The WhatsApp group laughs. Men joke about breach of contract. Someone invokes polygamy as market competition. A woman replies with something far more serious: love is a scam, marriage is unpaid labour, and women should stop subsidising men’s futures with their bodies.
What looks like noise is actually a society arguing with itself in fragments.
The law speaks. Men joke. Women rage. Everyone is afraid.
Let us begin with an uncomfortable truth: sex has never been just sex in Ghanaian marriage. It has always been currency, reassurance, obligation, leverage, proof of loyalty, proof of masculinity, proof of femininity. The shock people feel today is not that the state has noticed this. It is that the state has dared to name it.
The men in the WhatsApp chat are not monsters. They are reacting from a position of contractual intuition. If marriage increasingly feels like a transaction, then withholding sex feels like breach. This is not romance; it is logic trained by scarcity. In a society where emotional labour is not taught and economic stress is constant, men reduce intimacy to the one variable they were told proves love. When that variable is withdrawn, it feels like sabotage, not communication.
But the joke collapses under scrutiny. Because if sex is a contractual obligation, then so is fidelity, provision, protection, presence, and emotional safety. The same men who laugh about breach of contract rarely want the full contract enforced against them. Selective contractualism is not seriousness; it is convenience.
Now the woman’s argument — fierce, historical, wounded, and dangerously seductive.
She is right about many things. Women’s labour inside marriage has been systematically undervalued. Childbearing permanently alters bodies, careers, time, and opportunity. Domestic work has no market price but enormous economic value. Many women have indeed helped men build lives they were later excluded from. Religion has often sanctified silence. The modern legal system does not know how to count sacrifice.
But then the argument turns absolute, and that is where intelligence must intervene.
When love is declared a scam, what replaces it is not justice — it is total suspicion. When marriage is reduced entirely to patriarchy, women are left with only two options: extract or withdraw. That logic does not liberate women; it traps them in the same transactional prison they claim to resist.
Notice the contradiction:
She condemns marriage for being transactional — then argues women should never contribute without guaranteed returns. That is not the abolition of transaction. That is hardening it.
This is where both sides unknowingly meet.
Men joke about sex as leverage.
Women threaten withdrawal of labour and intimacy.
Both are speaking the language of power, not partnership.
And power is always the language of fear.
The Domestic Violence Act was never written to criminalise negotiation in marriage. It was written to address coercive control — situations where sex is denied as punishment, humiliation, or domination. The problem is that in a society already allergic to nuance, law becomes spectacle. The police statement lands like a grenade in a room already full of distrust.
Now everyone feels exposed.
Men feel criminalised for desire.
Women feel criminalised for boundaries.
Marriage begins to resemble a courtroom where intimacy is evidence.
This is the real tragedy.
We are watching intimacy become juridical because it has already become economically unsafe. When survival is unstable, affection becomes strategic. When the future feels hostile, bodies become bargaining chips. When neither the state nor culture guarantees fairness, people weaponise what they control.
Sex. Silence. Money. Childbirth. Withdrawal. Compliance.
None of this is love. But none of it is madness either.
It is adaptation.
The woman’s invocation of ancestral systems is revealing. Not because the past was perfect — it was not — but because those systems understood something modern Ghana has forgotten: if you demand sacrifice, you must guarantee security. You cannot ask someone to give their body, youth, and future into a union that promises only sentiment and prayer.
At the same time, ancestral systems were not utopias of equality. They were structured, unequal, but explicit. Modern Ghana offers inequality without clarity. That is worse.
So where does this leave us?
With a terrifying insight: both men and women are responding rationally to a broken social contract. Men fear emotional deprivation and loss of authority. Women fear exploitation and abandonment. Each side reads the law as a weapon or a shield depending on where they stand.
The law cannot save marriage from this.
Neither can nostalgia.
Neither can mockery.
Neither can rage.
Marriage will either be rebuilt on honesty — economic, emotional, sexual — or it will quietly dissolve into parallel lives sharing a surname.
The most dangerous illusion right now is thinking one gender is awake and the other asleep. Everyone is awake. Everyone is tired. Everyone is guarding themselves.
And that, more than any court ruling, is the real verdict on modern Ghanaian intimacy.
*Ubi timor, ibi contractus.*
_Where there is fear, there is a contract._
