Marriage in Dakar, Senegal, is a rite of passage: a social expectation that confers social adulthood, respectability, and legitimatises sexuality, thereby ensuring social reproduction. In popular narratives, marriage is thus upheld as a sacred and socially obligatory practice. But what about those people who do not wish to engage with marriage in socially conventional ways? Those who never-marry, those who chose to delay their marriages, or those with queer sexual subjectivities who do not fit into the heteronormative marital model? Accused of not belonging, of lacking cultural authenticity, or OF harbouring transgressive sexual desires, this presentation will ask: How do they navigate their non-normative marital trajectories - engaging with marriage in novel and queer ways, or refusing to engage with it all together - whilst still aiming to uphold their respectability? Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted amongst middle-class urban professionals in Dakar, Senegal, I will discuss the queer affordances around, and within, marriage that middle-class social status enables. Ultimately, through such cases, the normative value accorded to marriage will be queeried, as I show how such persons are respectable members of kin and community.