Why people refuse to reveal suitor’s name

The wise thing now to do for the family of the bride-to-be is not to disclose the name and the family of the man she is going to marry.When I learnt of this strange thing, I asked why people hide such information from their relatives and friends. I discovered that it was because they were […]

The wise thing now to do for the family of the bride-to-be is not to disclose the name and the family of the man she is going to marry.
When I learnt of this strange thing, I asked why people hide such information from their relatives and friends. I discovered that it was because they were afraid that somebody would trace the man or his family and scuttle the marriage by telling lies about the girl.
“People really do it, so it is better not to give his name and where he works. Some even give false name if people ask,” one woman told me.
Still as further precaution, some prefer to decide on the date and everything they would do about the marriage before making it known to relatives and friends when the wedding is already close.
Now secrecy has entered into marriage where it is supposed to be open, fun and merry.
I used to know some cases where some men would observe the boyfriend of a certain girl in their area and go and advise him not to marry her, but certainly not to trace a person or his parents and scuttle the marriage.
This new trend, as expected is causing family disagreement as some feel that by not revealing the name and  other basic information  about the girl’s suitor, they are not regarded as  ‘relatives’ enough, therefore they  become less enthusiastic about the marriage they might have been looking forward to for a long time.
However, another surprising angle in this is that in some cases friends also go to the suitor and tell tales against the girl so that he would not marry her.
In one such case, the so-called close friend of the girl told the suitor that her friend had been wayward for years and so on. He believed her and confronted his girlfriend who denied the accusation, but he still had doubts and ended the relationship on the eve of the marriage, so to speak.
But I heard about another case that the man brought the girlfriend and her friend that told him tales about her together and asked her to say what she had told him. She was ashamed and confessed she had lied.
In any case, I feel that if a man receives such negative information from close relatives or friends of the girl he is going to marry, he should be suspicious of the messenger and investigate the matter, after all why should a relative or friend be the one to offer such information?
Besides, it is expected that before the courtship reaches the stage of fixing marriage days both sides might have done their investigation and become satisfied, so why this sudden information spring up from these people. Something must be fishy and   he should find out before taking a drastic action.
This is not to say that in some instances there may be genuine cases of vital information that was not revealed by the parties and if the marriage is allowed to take place, can lead to problems.
But according to many people, what happens is just sheer envy, so they truncate the marriage by fabricating tales about the girl.
Though, this telling of tales seems to only affect the girls or women as the case may be. It seems that men are safe from this wicked machinations in the sense that it is usually to them that tales are reported to about the girls, but tales are not reported about them to the girls that is why their names are not revealed.
Does it mean if such tales are told to the girls they would still go ahead with the marriage to avoid disgrace of opting out at the last minute?
Whatever the case may be, this is a worrying   trend that I hope would fizzle out soon, because it dampens the zeal of marriage and breeds ill feeling among relatives.
But meanwhile, a person should be wary of asking questions about the suitor of a girl so as not to be suspected of wanting to go and tell him tales about her to scuttle the marriage.