By Brenda Kageni
Last week I received an email from one of my readers called Onyango, who sought to correct my wrong assumptions and attitudes about men, love and marriage. He said it was the reason I, and many young professional women in Kenya are unmarried.
The email was filled with untruths and myths about relationships. For example, what is this thing about there being too few men and those keen on a serious relationship being even fewer? That a potential man comes your way and you are above 18 and completed college, you think twice before you turn him down. I do not doubt statistics but I wish he had taken time to factor in that just because a man was interested in a relationship did not give him leeway to a woman’s heart. Then there is this argument that marriage is an obligation. Onyango thinks that every woman needs a man as much as every man needs a woman and that in order to be respected among contemporaries and fulfil social and natural obligation, a man should marry and a woman, get married.
A lot of hog wash, I say. We know once we become of marriageable age, our mothers, grandmothers and aunties are forever prodding us on when we will be bringing the man home, but ‘obligation’ would be the wrong word to use. You do not owe it to the universe to get married. It just means you will have to forsake creating things that traditionally were restricted to marriage.
And with the advance of science and technology, I am not sure what else remains a preserve for marriage —sperm donors, artificial sperm, vibrators and same sex relationships, is what I am talking about.
Single and contented
And you need to do a minor survey to discover that many female icons in Kenya today are single — please do not ask me to try and explain that.
Being single and unattached, and with no intention of doing so, is not the worst thing that can happen to a man or woman. It is possible to live a complete and fulfilling life without a spouse.
I take to mind Onyango’s argument that women who drag their feet once God brings along the right man might remain single throughout their life; that all unmarried women in their late 20s, 30s and 40s, at one time turned down a potential husband.
But I disagree that a woman who turns down a serious and reasonable man doesn’t get a second chance. Beautiful and gifted women in particular usually play hard to get hence pushing away potential suitors. They are also likely to get sidelined because some men think they are too beautiful to make a good wife and are better off remaining in the trophy category. But such women also get hit on more than other women and kissing all the frogs in the hope of finding the prince is lame; so is hooking up with the wrong man because we are afraid he’s the last man to come calling.
Another lie is that good men are few and already taken. So you have to put up with a crappy relationship because you look at the odds and wonder how likely you are to come across another hunky, HIV negative, well to do, loving young man whose only fault is that he cheats on you and beats you silly when he crawls home drunk at 3am.
Finally, to Mr Onyango, what is wrong with a woman wanting nothing but the best for herself? It is not "…demanding too much from nature to get good education, celebrated jobs and still want an angel of a man." If by any chance they exist, yeah, why not?
