You can never force a man into marriage

By valentine

From as early as five years old, I always knew I wanted to get married and by the time I was 16, I had it all planned: The dress I would wear, the colour, the number of maids and even the kind of man.

No woman can help dreaming of that special day when she will be the focus of her ball. Men don’t know this but when a girl is dating a man she is already planning her wedding day.

So when I turned 25 and there was no prospective husband material in sight, I came up with a plan that would ensure I got married by 27. The plan involved four strategies.

The first strategy (plan A) involved lowering some of my expectations of Mr Perfect. If a man got it right on at least 80 per cent on my list, I would embrace him like he was a godsend.

Shortly thereafter, I met Simon. He wasn’t the best dresser nor the most eloquent but he was handsome, kind, hardworking, funny, had a nice body and I could easily manipulate him. In my book that made him the perfect husband material. Everything was going well until I sensed reluctance to commitment from him.

This called for Plan B, which meant bullying him into moving in with me. Understanding a man’s love for sex, I denied him for almost two weeks. I even refused to take his calls making him imagine the worst. I told him that I would only forgive him if he agreed to move in with me.

The allure of more sex in the ‘come we stay’ arrangement finally won the day and Simon moved in.

Moving fast

The news of our moving in spread like a bushfire and soon my girlfriends were counting down to the wedding bells.

This was the best time for the third strategy (Plan C), which meant I had to prove that I was his dream wife. I cleaned his clothes, cooked his best meals, stood by him during hardship and always looked beautiful for him. One year later, and Simon hadn’t proposed or even mentioned marriage. I moved on to the final Plan D.

This involved an ‘accidental pregnancy’. I reasoned that no sane man would turn his back on a woman who has given birth to his child. The man even refused to meet my parents despite giving him a son.

I quickly came up with Plan E, which involved moving out with my son. I had assumed that he would miss the child if not me and rush to marry me. But weeks turned into months without anything happening on the marital front. He would drop in to see his son and then leave. Later on I heard that he had moved in with a woman who he claimed was his fiancÈe.

I learnt a very valuable lesson: You can’t force a man to marry you; he either wants to or he doesn’t.