Ruth Kadiri says marriage phobia led her to keep wedding private with 50 guests
Nollywood actress and producer Ruth Kadiri has explained why she kept her personal life private, especially in the early stages of her marriage.
Speaking on a recent episode of the Dear Ife podcast, Kadiri said she had a phobia of marriage and was unsure whether the union would succeed, so she chose not to make it a public event. Her husband supported the decision and agreed to limit the wedding to 50 guests.
“I had a phobia of marriage. I was battling with the fear of the unknown and asking myself, ‘Am I going to make this decision and everything will now scatter?’ So, I wasn’t really ready to have a public marriage, and my husband was okay with it. Also, I didn’t want a lot of drama regarding my relationship.
That’s why my husband and I invited only 50 people to our wedding. Twenty-five people were invited by him, while 25 others were invited by me. If I were abroad, I guess we would have just probably walked to the registry and gotten married,” she said.
Kadiri and her husband, Mr Ezerika, married in a private ceremony around November 2018. They welcomed their first daughter in August 2019 and their second in July 2022.
The account treats privacy as a form of risk management rather than as secrecy for its own sake. Fear that a public wedding would add pressure and drama sat beside uncertainty about whether the marriage itself would hold. Splitting the guest list evenly and keeping the number small reduced the audience at the moment of highest doubt.
The later arrival of two children is presented only as subsequent fact, not as proof that the fear was unfounded. For a public figure, the choice to shrink the ceremony is also a choice about how much of a private decision the industry and fans are allowed to witness. Kadiri’s explanation is that the unknown felt large enough to justify that limit.
