The subject of marriage and the way it is “performed” and "exchanged" in Africa, has stimulated theorizing among anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and gender scholars. Feminist scholars in Africa have long problematized the ways and manners in which African marriages are exchanged, performed, and contracted. Over the years, however, dominant discourses and processes of marriage are beginning to shift with much fluidity. Drawing on qualitative interviews and field observtions with older and young people in Ghana's Upper West Region, Dery argues that theorizing discourses on marriage requires a critical understanding of its shifting particularities in contemporary social theory. Within contemporary social theory, the impact of a range of intersecting variables such as globalization, mass media, age, and social mobilities and choices, requires a critical rethinking, especially on the ways, nature, and manners in which marriages are made and remade over time. In some situations, parents were reported to be minimally involved in the marriage and courtship processes of their children, while others were only involved at specific stages in the marriage process, especially determining the bride price. With the increasing presence of technologically-driven interface for courtship [via mobile phones] between prospective couples, the situation led to the collapse of the patriarchal hegemony that parents used to enjoy as unavoidable cultural gatekeepers in the marriage process. Parents, especially fathers reported some amount of masculinity crisis, moral panic, fear and confusion at the turn of events in which their roles as cultural gatekeepers have diminished drastically. Young people, on the other hand, saw this masculine confusion and identity crisis as a form of empowerment and social agency through which they earned their status as legitimate adults. This contestation for cultural hegemony between older and young people has many implications in rethinking through the nature and roles of agency as enacted and deployed by older and young people in Ghanaian marriages.