AntiChrist

If the bride price is paid, the contract is binding and is defined and recognized as marriage in Nigeria and not engagement. Daddy freeze says a man and woman can simply hold hands, prayerfully exchange vows, and proclaim themselves married. He claims the two parties involved do not need family members or witnesses to consider themselves married. He is a raving heretic. Marriage is a communal construct and affair, by its very definition.

rabzy:
Porneia is not just fornication or prostitution, por·neiʹa, a general term for all unlawful sexual intercourse. It includes adultery, prostitution, sexual relations between unmarried individuals, homosexuality, and bestiality.
Some engagement ceremony are actually marriages especially traditionally engagements, once a groom has paid bride price and other demands and the woman's family has handed over the lady to the man or his family which often happens in engagement ceremony, a marriage has been conducted and the couple can copulate.

Stephie123:
“the legally or formally recognized union of two people as partners in a personal relationship (historically and in some jurisdictions specifically a union between a man and a woman).” Dictionary definition!

the definition is not restricted to this alone.

This is another definition.
(1) : the state of being united to a person of the opposite sex as husband or wife in a consensual and contractual relationship recognized by law

That means the relationship can be CONSENSUAL or it can be contractual.
If it is consensual like bf and gf relationship it has to be recognized by the law

Now, every marriage relationships in bible were never contractual, they were all consensual.

Adam and Eve was consensual! Adam says this is the flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone the moment he saw Eve, at that point marriage started.
No formalities,
No bride price, no party, no church, no gathering of people.

Contractual marriages came up recently in the history of mankind simply because there was lack of trust among couples.

Essentially, marriage is a communal arrangement,

it shouldn't be because scriptures says whoever finds a wife finds a good thing, not whosever community finds a wife for people.

Why will a family or community find a wife for a man?
Find a wife in the sense that, why will a community, family or church reject the choice of a man or a woman as husband or wife?
Or why will they reject the union or not recognize it simply because it is bf and gf relationship?

It's a very wrong thing to do in the society

so in the Nigerian context, traditional, court, and church weddings are all legal and binding contracts depending on the preferred choice or common understanding among all concerned parties concerned

and the concerned parties are also entitled to their right of not involving the general public throwing party or involving the church or the court or any traditional institution, such is the case of bf and gf relationships which the two people concerned should be regarded as marriage and take the relationship seriously.