Ask any student on any Nigerian campus what a relationship costs, and watch them do the maths in their head before they answer.

Transport to see her. Data so the conversation does not die. Something small on her birthday, which is never actually small. Food when you go out. Hair, sometimes. Contribution when there is an emergency at home. Nobody writes it down. Everybody knows the number.

We have decided as a culture that saying this out loud is unromantic. So we do not say it, and then people get into relationships with no idea what they have signed up for, and it ends badly, and everyone acts surprised.

Campus relationships have a budget. The only question is whether we are honest about it.

The Thing Everybody Knows

Here is the arithmetic nobody puts on a slide.

A student living on a fixed allowance has a fixed amount of everything — money, time, attention. A relationship draws on all three. That is not cynicism; that is just what it means for something to be real. Friendship costs too. Family costs. Nothing that matters is free.

The difference is that we permit ourselves to discuss the cost of friendship and family openly, and we have decided that discussing the cost of romance makes you a bad person. So the cost goes underground. And things that go underground get worse, not better.

The broke student feels it hardest. He is not less loving. He is less liquid. But because the conversation is forbidden, he cannot say I cannot afford this month, can we do things differently. He has to either pretend or disappear. Most choose disappear. Then he gets called a runaway, when what actually happened is that he ran out of money and had no permitted language for it.

The Case That Money Talk Ruins It

Now, the argument on the other side, and it is not stupid.

Once you make a relationship explicitly financial, something breaks that does not repair. If every gesture becomes a line item, affection turns into invoicing. People start keeping score. I bought you this, so you owe me that. That is not a relationship; that is a contract with feelings attached, and it usually ends with somebody feeling bought.

There is also a real danger in normalising it too far. When money becomes the accepted language of romance on campus, students under financial pressure get pushed toward arrangements that are not relationships at all — the older man with the car, the transaction dressed up as courtship. Those situations hurt young people, and they hurt young women disproportionately. Anyone who has been on a Nigerian campus has watched somebody get damaged by one. Being casual about the money conversation can quietly grease that slope.

And the plain point: some of the best relationships people have at university happen on almost nothing. Walking. Talking. Sharing one plate. Nobody remembers what it cost. That is not naivety, it is evidence.

What We Are Actually Arguing About

I think both sides are right about different things, and the confusion comes from mixing up two separate questions.

Question one: do relationships have costs? Obviously yes. Pretending otherwise is a lie that hurts poor students most, because they are the ones who cannot quietly absorb it.

Question two: should the relationship be about the money? Obviously not. The moment provision becomes the actual product being exchanged, you are in a different arrangement entirely, whatever you are calling it.

Honest budgeting and transactional dating are not the same thing. We keep treating them as the same thing, and that is why the conversation goes nowhere.

The real culprit is not romance and it is not greed. It is an economy where a student's entire monthly allowance can vanish on transport and data before anything else happens. Under that pressure, ordinary young people are asked to perform a version of romance that is priced for a country they do not live in. Then we blame them personally for struggling with it.

What Honest Actually Looks Like

The people I have seen do this well are not the ones with money. They are the ones who talk.

They say early what they can and cannot do. They agree what outings look like when the month is tight. They do not make the other person guess, and they do not make them beg. It is deeply unromantic for about ten minutes, and then it removes an entire category of resentment permanently.

The alternative is the thing most people do instead: overspend to keep up appearances, get quietly bitter, and blame the other person for a pressure they never told them about.

So Where Do You Stand?

Should students be openly discussing what a relationship costs, the way you would with a flatmate or a business partner? Or does putting money on the table poison something that only works when it is unspoken?

And the uncomfortable one: have you ever ended something, or been ended, over money that nobody was willing to name?

Comments. I want to hear from students especially — and from people who have already graduated and can see it clearly now.

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