Since I was very young, I remember playing with sand with my fellow little friends and discussing what our future would be like. Of all those conversations, one thing that stuck with me that I used to mention frequently was how I wasn’t going to get married.
At that time, there was no woke mentality, it was just a reflection of the society I grew up in. it was a place where women were made to do the lots of dirty jobs including cleaning up after the men and his family, but the men would often just go out in the morning and return at night. Even though I knew it was because of the family, I wished that the only things the women were doing was just for the husbands, but it included his family members.
For every time a woman voiced her opinion about how she was been treated, she would be told to pray about it or be patient because she was a woman, and her husband’s family’s rights were far above hers, so I made up my mind to never get married, because I wouldn’t sign up for such a life.
Growing up and exposed now, I realized that it wasn’t just in my community, however, there are other marriages that are so blissful, I just wasn’t opportune to grow up in a community where the happily married ones dominated. So, when I realized there are happy homes, I said, “okay, if the world is gravitating towards seeing women beyond mere objects, then I would want to get married”.
However, no one prepared me for the pressure that comes with growing into a marriageable age. The expectations are so high from family and friends that you would think that you are in some kind of trouble just because you chose to wait for a man that tick the boxes you are not willing to compromise on while also building a life for yourself.
It could be easy for others to grow up, go to school, and just get married straight outta school, but for some of us, beyond wanting to get married, we want to go into the marriage not as bitter souls who would frustrate the efforts of the beautiful man we want to spend the rest of our lives with, so we choose the path of first, seeking therapy to overcome the traumatic experiences we’ve had growing up before trying to be committed to any marriage.
But I think the community doesn’t care about what you want from life, rather, they have a slated timeline for women, the biological clock they say, and because of this pressure, a lot of people have fallen deep into a kind of marriage they resent and have become what they tried to avoid.
See, one thing I know though is that “the community will be fine. The friends and family will be fine, all of them”. Just do you. Go into marriage when you are ready to, and this is even beyond marriage, do what you want to do for yourselves, not because others want you to. The fulfilment that comes with being there for you, standing strong for you, and choosing you first is so beautiful that the excitement of that directly affects your relationship with people, and everyone around you.
If you choose to do it because of the pressure, you most likely will get frustrated and eventually bow out due to the mental stress of trying to cope with what you weren’t prepared going into.
Images are from MetaAI.
