In her article “Marriage: Moving Out of Reach for Sisters, Mutti raised many valid points and in the end actually sought advice on how sisters looking to join the marriage train could actualize their dream. Her article appeared to focus mainly on women who desire to find a life partner but are yet achieve that goal. I have read the over 80 comments so far on the site and very little suggestions came forth in response to the issues raised by Muttii’s her article. This article initially arose out of a need to address some of Mutti’s concerns but has evolved at addressing some of the responses generated on that thread as well . However, two comments in the many varied responses caught my eyes the first is that by “WHAT” who says and I reproduce the quote here:
“The truth is that other women will not tell you the secret you will then turn around to snatch their men. Instead they will counsel you to give your reasonable boyfriend hell in the name of "equal rights"(while treating their so-so husband like a prince), or tell you to be patient with the "big boy" that is married with girlfriends all over town. It's a jungle out there.”
This was in response to Mutti’s allusion in her essay to the seeming conspiratorial silence by married women in advising single girls on how to get a man. Hear her:
“They must be doing something right but our married sisters are not telling and the men in our lives are saying even less.”
Then we had tatafo firing this salvo as if angry as well about the advice, or lack of, emanating from the married women cadre. She states:
I find this quote by "What?" quite apt. Many of those (women) whom I continually hear advising their fellow women to be single and happy are usually the married ones. If they think being single and happy is a better alternative, why don’t they just get divorced and live the single happy life they so advocate. Or better still they could have easily turned their husband's offer of marriage down. After they each get married, they turn to life coaches on how marriage and companionship is not for everyone.
Rather than these married women telling you how they caught their men, or trying to hook you up, or tell you issues that they find their men most particular about, be it grooming, cooking, personalities, or careers, they tell you to be content and satisfied with being alone, afterall that's what God wants for you.
Apart from those who go into the convent or take a vow of celibacy, it’s not easy to remain alone and depend on family and friends for companionship. Let me make it clear here that the issue here is not just sex and intimacy, but also the prospects of a life long companionship. It’s harder than any one thinks to remain alone, and live life to the fullest even by the standards of "investing in communities, in jobs, and in families...."
All of the above are simply investing in other people's life.... and very little in yours... Sometimes you want a bit more and should try different techniques to get it... After all if you were unemployed but are qualified, would you cease looking for a job and depend on friends, family and community?
Abegi!!! its a lonely life out there.
Go Get yours (Apologies Obugi)
I find myself resonating to some extents with both commentators. This idea that marriage is not for everyone who wants it, or that not everyone who seeks marriage will be successfully is a defeatist theory. It flows almost synonymously with that somehow illogical and shallow reasoning that education is not for everyone who seeks it. Both reasoning are hollowed reasoning in my opinion. The truth is that marriage is not for those who do not want it (like Oprah Winfrey) and school is not for those who do not desire it (like Bill Gates). I find it a bit perplexing that we women tend to subject ourselves to some misguided reasoning of things that are supposedly unattainable. These unattainables have taken many varying shapes in different generational cycles. First it was education in the era of our grandmothers, then it was certain professions in the era of our mothers and now it is the turn of marriage in our generation.
For those who desire marriage, my advice is please keep trying, likewise for those who desire an education despite the odds and the financial challenges keep trying, and for those who are job seekers but who continuously get those glib rejection letters, please keep seeking. Yes! there are no guarantees that you will get that which you seek, but it might well be because you are not employing the right strategy (ies) that will help you attain your goals in finding a husband. I will attempt to answer Mutti’s query by explaining why I think a lack of strategy belies the reason for many unmarried sisters in this day and age.
Planning to meet the man?
To begin with, it sounds absolutely ridiculous to me that we invest so much effort in other areas of life but once it comes to the arena of finding a man, the mantra becomes that we are trying too hard, or that you are killing yourself. My advice is, please try harder. Does it not smack of hypocrisy that qualified candidates continue to seek to further their education and get their dream jobs despite the odds that they face in the process, and yet when it comes to marriage for women, we now sing the mantra of be satisfied with your single life and live it to the fullest.
Besides let me digress and make a moot point here by saying here that it is in every other married woman’s interest that single ladies who desire husbands, find a way to get their own men and get married. Many single marriageable women who might have given up looking, more often than not settle into a life of mistresses or second wives or end up as girlfriends to other people’s husbands. Quite a number of my female friends in their mid thirties and early forties who remain unmarried, get to that stage where they stop looking and begin to seek a different type of relationship at this stage. They also begin to want children at all costs, at least before menopause sets in. These women who have technically given up finding their own men, later end up having kids for other people’s husbands and then we the married ones turn around and complain that they are husband snatchers. Why else do you think there are many mistresses around these days? Why are many big girls having two or three kids out of wedlock? Why are they always having these kids mainly for married men? It cannot be solely for material purposes, because these are women who can certainly take care of themselves and any child they bring into the world on their own. The simple fact is that a single woman, whose desire is to find a man, only fulfils that frustration through other avenues
How else do we expect single marriage inclined ladies to survive a lonely life that we often consign them to through our misguided advice? Of course they like and crave the same things we married women crave, to wit; companionship, security and the joy of children. If they did not, they would not be seeking life partners in the first place. Now to assume that they have given up and started to live a single life in blissful indifference to any of the above yearnings is fallacious thinking at best and at worst a delusional denial of where they are getting a little so’mthin so’mthin from. I think we will be kidding ourselves if we believe that single ladies who desire companionship are not getting any.
All that will simply happen is that they move into other people’s territory, having decided from what they are being told that they cannot get married or are not cut out for marriage. Yet I know that this advice is not entirely right because in the past three years, I have five friends in their mid and late thirties who have found men to get married to and these were men without any baggage, no ex-wives and no kids outside their marriage. These men too were looking for women of a certain cadre and some were so career focused for a long time to the exclusion of finding a relationship. Yet single ladies are told many times that marriage was not by force and to be content with their lives. All I can say is thank goodness they ignored this advice and kept their male hunting strategies alive. Many friends of mine in Lagos and Abuja now have to contend with their husband’s baby(ies) mama drama. Some of their husband’s baby mama’s were actually their own friends at one point or the other.
Okay back to the issue at hand. There are number of advice I give persons who are still searching and I will proceed to outline them here one after the other.
The Fallacy of One Sided Analytical Methods
One good example that comes to mind are the many situations where friends of mine meet a guy and proceed to analyze him with all his faults and his drawbacks and explain why he is not quite a fit” (like we women are wont to do), I always help their analyses by assessing their options with the guy in question whether negatively or positively. After analyzing the guy and his faults, then I make it compulsory that we analyze my own friends and their own faults as well to see whether there might be a fit. Trust me, as their friend I put all their own faults and bad behavior on the table and it is usually a very annoying exercise for them. The truth is that sooner than later into their part of the analyses, they realize that they are themselves as imperfect as the one they seek to analyze. Like the saying goes, let he who is without sin throw the first stone. The key, I tell them is to determine what their tolerance level is, and we determine this using a check list of what works for them and what doesn’t work, to determine compatibility factors between them and the prospective guy to be. This tends to work out for many of them who simply decide whether or not to take the plunge, believe me when I say many of them usually do take the plunge.
Fallacy of Similarities in What Men Want
It’s time we sisters begin to tell each other the truth. The idea that men are all thesame is at best a fallacious and logically flawed reasoning that makes it difficult for our fellow women to find their one true partner. Men are not thesame in anyway and by that token, men do not look out for thesame things in their women. Similarly women are not thesame and in that regard, should not be seeking thesame thing in men. There are men who want home makers, there are others who desire a diva, and others want an empty headed trophy wife, while others seek career driven women. My husband for instance has a disdain for women he considers divalicious, however my younger brother will not follow any woman that does not wear Jimmy Choo shoes or carry LV bags (whether real or fake). In thesame vein my older brother desires a stay at home wife, someone who will raise his kids while he goes out to bring the bread, and as warped as this sounds, he has found just that woman in his current fiancée and at least the rest of the family has an idea of the type of wives we expect in the family.
Fallacy Three: The give up searching syndrome:
I don’t subscribe to asking anyone to give up the idea of finding their own life partner; rather I encourage them to maybe look in a different place, or in a different way. While I agree with Soul Sista and Anike that it’s unhealthy to let the search of a man consume you to the detriment of everything else around you, yet it depends on how much ending up with a husband matters to you.
Yet again using another family member as an example; my sister who is a Tyra Bank protégée found a man who would let her keep her full time modeling career within the marriage in Nigeria. It took her time to find him, and yes she got all sorts of advice, such as “please change careers”, “be more homely”, “go and get a master’s degree”, “get a proper job”, “marriage is not for everyone”, “don’t kill yourself oh because you want to marry”. Yet in all this torrent of wise counsel, my only recommendation to her was not to give up if she really wanted to find a life partner. In the end, it all boiled down to strategy for her because at first she was looking at the wrong sort of men and in the wrong sort of crowd. The people who were seeking my sister’s hand in marriage were not her usual big boy type friends and she could not at first imagine being with someone who has never been mentioned and would not desire being on the front page of city people with her.
It took me time to make her understand that she must divorce the publicity and life style that is required in her chosen profession from the privacy of her relationship. Even though she needed much convincing, three years later into her marriage, she is still modeling, trying to set up her own agency and even planning for their first baby. Oh! lest I forget to add, she married a black Nigerian Igbo man, who is a Banker for that matter and who at the time of their marriage was hardly exposed to any western culture as we know it, having never left the shores of our great country prior to their wedding. He was not the usual type of guy she would date, but today she is having the best of both worlds. Many of her former advisers who had asked her to change career to find a husband have also taken to putting down her situation to just her luck. I believe she just started doing the right thing, at the right time and the man simply gravitated towards her.
The fallacy of “when It Will Happen When It Will Happen”
The long and short of this portion is that marriages don’t just happen, meeting the right person also depends on prayer + expectation +opportunity + strategy. However note that there is no one single formula to finding a husband, it depends on how you plan it. Is it not funny that we plan everything else in our lives except how to meet and catch that one partner we want? We plan what courses we want to read in the university, what profession we want to take, where we want to live, where we would like to work. In short almost every other thing in our life is planned expect how to meet our dream men. Yet we expect him to walk into our lives and just find us waiting in the wings to be plucked. I would suggest that we women employ a similar strategy that people often employ in reinventing themselves in their workplace environment and adapt it to finding husbands. Find out what the type of man you desire really wants and find out places that they go to or even look at the men around you, at work, in your social network and see if there are any others you feel might be even remotely close to considering a life partner. The sad part of this assignment as Mutti noted is that for some inexplicable reason, most men will never come out and say categorically what they seek in their women. Therefore the onus is on the woman to engage in a discovery process that will ferret out those tidbits of information that will aid her in getting her the man she wants to marry. I have some simple methods that I employed in my own case in getting the man I wanted to marry to marry me.
When you meet a guy for the very first time, don’t act coy or shy, except if you are coy and shy. My male friends say they hate that and it is simply because men have yet to figure out how to differentiate between being shy and being snooty, or being coy and being snobbish. Furthermore, they are also scared away from women who frown a lot. You don’t have to smile too much, but at least learn to relax your facial muscles
Find out those closest to him, be it his best buddy, or his best sibling, in short the closest person to him is key to getting this man. When you’ve found out who this special person is, then you can become their buddies as well. In my case it was my poor sister in-law who became my best friend as soon as I knew I wanted to marry her brother. That was my strategy and well the rest is history.
Find out what makes him tick and what ticks him off. In other words gauge his temperament, his mood and what his triggers are. This is helpful in understanding the personality of the person he is and whether you have the capacity to reach him.
Share your self with him bit by bit; by sharing your good news and your bad news with him and letting him share his with you… small by small he will begin to tell you everything in his life and please make sure you learn to listen to him closely because it is at this unconscious moments they reveal more about themselves and tell you the truth about what their innermost thoughts are. File all these information away in your memory for future use. They will come in handy sooner than you expect.
In the same way women like to be appreciated, so do men, if you see that he loves going to certain games, plan ahead get tickets and ask him if he would like to go see the game. If you share a passion in music, help him find that one rare CD player he has been trying to find for a long time. Just little things that count. I’ll leave the cooking controversy out of this. To each his own
A number of men these days like women who are aware of their environment and know a bit of current affairs. Many of my male friends tell me they enjoy women who can stimulate them through a good conversation. Not arguments oh! But rather serious and interesting chitchat and conversation. You don’t have to be experts in any topic just have a general awareness of what the current states of events in your neck of the woods are.
Yet in all that you do, never make it too obvious that you are looking at him as marriage material or he will begin to see you as desperate. Give him some space after all you yourself will need some space too. Don’t let him feel pressure.
However if after three years of dating and he is over 30yrs and he is still foot dragging, or is yet to say anything about marriage, please move on.
Finally get your girlfriends to hook you up male friends and colleagues that they know, and even their brothers and cousins. I find it a bit perturbing that we women tend to protect our brothers and cousins from our girl friends. And sometimes even when they are attracted to each other, we try to stop it. If your girlfriend is not good enough for your brother, I wonder how she can be a good enough friend for you.
The Fallacy of being yourself and the Right man will come to you
Many of us will acknowledge that there are various parts that make up person and his/her personality. After-all that’s why we can each be women, mothers, wives, lovers, comforters, nurse, and even cooks and house helps, and Yes! bosses too!! You just need to dig deep into yourself to discover the part that is needed or most suitable in your current role as a man seeker and flow with it. Using a workplace example, I have gone from being a lawyer, to a consultant, and now to a project developer. As the need arose, I had to reinvent myself to suit the occasion and to match the opportunity that was emerging in my work place. I always had to read the work place environment to determine what part of “me” needed to be projected forward in order to get noticed. If I had not brought out my various personalities to show my different capabilities, many of these opportunities that abound and runneth over would continually pass me over.
Lastly, I must say that this is not about play acting or pretending to be what you are not. It is like being in school, and at each stage of the education you learn something new, acquire new skills and use them when the need arises. It is necessary to always take stock of your self and reinvent yourself if the old self is not working. In re-assessing and re-inventing yourself, you end up knowing what works for you and your man and what does not. The truth is that no one really remains thesame after marriage; but truth be told no one really remains thesame after any major life experience or life changes. Certainly with age, many changes are bound to occur as well, both in your personality and your inner soul and spirit. It is about growing up, and realizing who you really and what is important, and what is not, and shifting and reassessing yourself and your goals as time goes on. Nine years into it and three kids later, I continue to learn new things everyday about myself, about the man I married and about our own marriage as well.
Even after the marriage, there is still a lot of work to be done. Trying to catch the man is like taking SAT, then catching him and marrying him is like GRE, GMAT and LSAT but the one after marriage that comes with till death do us part, na im hard pass. It like registering, studying and taking Nigerian Bar Exam, New York Bar, California Bar, Medical Board Exam, Pharmacy Board Exam, ICAN, ACA, ICSAN, CIArb… all at once. Many things are going on in that marriage, and the lessons and exams are continuous processes: If you pass one, you go unto the next stage oh, and if you fail, you retake it, but the exams last a life time. Believe me some of the learning can be tough, but hey! please get tougher, other people’s bad experience should not be a determinant to how your own case will work out. We are each the architects of our own lives.
Conclusion
While it is true that there are no guarantees that even after a woman gets married, that she will be happy and content in the marriage, or that the marriage will work, it is equally important to note that the entire notion of marriage is not a one shot thing. It is a learning process that requires you to grow while in it. Yeah you probably heard this one before, but I’ll say it again, marriage is a life time commitment and like planning any major life decisions, those seeking to get married have to employ strategies to ensure that they get what they want. My husband and I realize that we have the rest of our lives to keep discovering the good, the bad and the better of our marriage. The only resolve we have is to keep working on it and never giving up on each other.
It is true that marriage might not be for everyone, after all there are many who do not want to marry at all. However, I think for those who desire to be married someday, it is a good thing to find methods that will put you into the marriage window of opportunity. In thesame way, please read the environment around you, and find out what the men you crave desire and try and re-invent yourself in that light. Let the diva part of you come out if it will get the type of man you want. Let the home maker in you come out if it will help you find a man you can call your own. Let the naughty part of you tantalize him if it will bring him running back for more. I will never ask sisters who want to get married to give up looking because like Tatafo says it is a lonely life out there. Even with all the wahala that comes with marriage, I enjoy the cuddle and comfort I get in my marriage, I enjoy the sex, and I enjoy the fact that I have someone I care very deeply about to share my thoughts, my dreams and my life with and I wish all my sisters who desire same much luck in their search.
Post Script.
This article is specifically directed to sisters who are single and searching, or who having sought for a life partner in the past and are discouraged from looking anymore. I must also add here that I am in no way suggesting that single mobile sisters who have no desire to be shackled with any man are not deficient in any way. Those who choose of their own accord to remain single or who are least interested in marriage have my greatest respects. However it will be good to hear the opinion of such single happy sister on this thread as well, on the issues raised in Mutti’s thread and in this article.
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