Ladies, who will settle down with this generation of men?

I was brought up in a rural settlement where we clearly could tell the different roles played by men and women.

I grew up knowing that men were the stronger species that didn’t know fear or shy away from responsibilities. I thought them to be small gods, who always stepped in to help women in tasks like lifting heavy weights, constructions, making decisions and even escorting them in the dark.

They would meet and talk about the welfare of everyone in the community. That was the men those days. To date, I have great respect for them and I still think they are the alphas of our society. I feel like every woman needs one of them in her life. I, however, have a concern.

A friend of mine recently told me she would rather remain single or become a nun before settling with one of today’s men. My attempts to explain to her how important it would be fell on deaf ears. She asked me to open my eyes and look around, see if I could tell the men from sissies. As the conversation drifted to other topics, I was stuck on the sissies point. I took her advice and looked around and as much as I hate to say it; I realized that those days’ men are gone, completely replaced by wimps who possess just half of their fathers’ guts.

I do not blame this on our men; one couldn’t possibly solve a single thing in their adulthood if they spent all their teen ages clutching their mother’s skirts.

A former colleague of mine used to bring Monday staff briefings to a state of sympathy whenever he was asked a question regarding his department. He used to be the last to answer and we would often be forced to leave him behind with the manager since he couldn’t trust himself to talk amidst us. He was well learned, with a Master’s degree from a known university but that didn’t stop him from calling our boss every time he had to make even the slightest of decisions. At first, I felt for him until I met his mother. She was a loving mom who didn’t trust her son to make decisions on what to wear; whom to hang out with or even what shoe best fitted his work place. She loved her 30-year-old son that she took her time to bring him lunch, despite the company treating us to that.

My colleague’s behaviour is an example of today’s men, who would rather sit at home and listen to their mothers tell stories of their youth than go out there and make decisions that would build a nation. A while back, we went camping with a bunch of friends. Our paid tour guide, probably seeing we had men in our company, quickly and carelessly pitched our tents and left. Long before night came, the wind blew up one of the tents and it needed reinforcements. We, being the men trustees looked up to the men in our midst, hoping they would fold their pants to knee high, remove their shirts and get to work on the tents. You should have seen the terror on their faces. They all had their mobile phones out, calling for the guide to return, threatening to report him to his bosses for wanting them to spend a night in the cold, reminding him the amount of money they had paid among other things I wouldn’t do even if I was alone in that situation.

After getting reassured the tents would be fixed, our good men sat with us and flashed out their phones to take selfies of themselves in the wild, posting them all over social media. This meant we would spend the next few hours counting who had more likes and followers on what platform. After that night, I knew too well that gone are the men who would ensure their families had a roof over their heads before sitting down to rest.

Recently, a friend of mine left a relationship she had started just a few months ago. We all felt for her and wanted to know what could have possibly happened. She wasn’t sad at all for leaving, she said. It was indeed a relief to take a break from babysitting. We thought she was reacting to the breakup like any other person, bad-mouthing the other party but she sat us down and told us her case.

Her said boyfriend had this ‘take care of me attitude’. He would wait for her to do all things for him, including shop for his clothes, launder and press them. He would expect her to look for food, cook all his meals, do his dishes and ensure he had clean bedding to retire to. All these she had to do amidst going to her work place and he hadn’t even proposed. Whenever she mentioned it to him, he would sulk and complain that he would have wanted to help but he didn’t know how to do to any of these things.

He offered to keep her company while playing his video games so she wouldn’t feel alone. He wanted her around for him to survive and would starve if she didn’t serve him, he said.

These are just examples of what today's men are and a caution to not entirely expect them to do what men of earlier days did. This kind who will rather remain in the friendzone than ask a girl out for fear of responsibility. With this kind of upbringing, with innovation to make work easier and men softer , with television bringing all these ideas about designer man bags and lip-gloss, with xxx sites to jerk off to, with social media calling for likes and followers, with all the empowerment of single parenthood, with parents too busy to have man talks with their sons and with all these videos games to escape to, we surely do not expect these men to go out there, feed their families, protect their women and certainly not be the men of the house.

At this point, I agree with my friend for calling them unreal, for refusing to get involved with their soft selves and definitely for recognising that they simply got their roles mixed up along the way. I wonder then who will end up with them? Who will overlook this new misguided lot and settle with them? Who is ready to forget what clothes real men are cut from and get married to this very educated less informed generation of men?