Roadside Encounters: Navigating Intimacy and the City

Chapter 3 continues to explore young women’s engagement with Pentecostalism by focusing on the advice given out by pastors about dating and marriage. Complicating analyses that suggest Pentecostalism’s popularity with young women across Africa is attributed to how the religious movement equips them with clear guidance on relationships, the chapter shows that this new ethical counsel only contributes to the uncertainties this group encounter in daily life in urban Nigeria. As the chapter’s ethnographic material details, against pastors’ very straightforward and frank advice, young women find that their relationships with men are often ambiguous. Not only are young women aware of the possibilities that the men they date might have other girlfriends, but they are also shown to participate in less than transparent activity as they engage in intimate relationships that are not intended to lead to marriage. Examining how young women engage in gossip and rumour to conceal their actions, which often take place in plain sight on the streets of Calabar, the chapter shows how young women use unverifiable information to forge their own image of respectability.