I stumbled on Danielle Crittenden a while back (self-styled feminist/anti-feminist, author, blogger etc). and she has written a lot on marriage, female/male relationship since modern feminism for the American environment and I decided to share this opinion of hers... The counter opinion is actually what is common in our society (feminism/not).

She believes women should marry first (early; she married at 25 and hubby 28) and have kids (and staying at home to take care of them) before talking about building a career as having a career first before family is working against the infamous 'biological clock' and there might be 'no man/responsible man when she is ready to build a family'. (my opinion is for her to do both simultaneously as a career is built over years and the beginning can be designed not to be so tasking).

She also believes starting to 'build' a career in early 30s to infinity (retirement) is better than building a career till say 35 and retire to marriage and family building.

See some excerpts below from a 1999 interview:

Women can have it all, but not all at once. Danielle advises women to lock down a partner early and have children while they are most fertile and then pursue a career later in life.

This is an idea I haven’t considered before. Danielle took some lessons from women who started families early in life and later pursued their careers and ended up having fulfilling lives and advises other women to do the same.

I like this idea, but the horse has already left the barn. Today’s men that are coming of age have already noticed that girls aren’t looking very seriously into marrying at an early age, so men have adapted and either participated in the hookup culture, went overseas to look for brides or have simply left the dating scene entirely. So locking down a man or getting him to commit early in life will be difficult unless women have a change of heart and started dating men they put in the friend zone. The economic environment also contributes to this. It is nearly impossible to raise a family without both parents working. So there’s a lot of positive feedback driving this cycle of putting off marriage forward, so I see average ages for marriage getting higher and higher, perhaps plateauing in the mid to late 30’s for both men and women. People take cues from their environment and conclude that they need a good career established before they even think about a family which will likely put them in their late 30’s if my experience has been any guide.

The idea Danielle suggests would require a radical change in values. Starting families at a young age would require being willing to live on a shoestring budget in a studio apartment while driving a Corolla and eliminating or sharply reducing conspicuous consumerism. Is the millennial generation, the most self-entitled generation in American history, willing to do this? Time will tell, but I doubt it.

16:26

Once women get their careers established and explored their sexual freedom, they seek to settle down and find that there are no men around. The sexual revolution seems to have left men behind or assumed that men would be waiting to marry them when women determined the time was right.

Danielle understands a lot of things but as much as she talks about the sexual revolution, it seems that she doesn’t understand the environment at all. The man shortage isn’t because nobody has discussed men’s roles during the feminist, sexual revolution. It’s supply and demand.

It’s a mistake to assume that the sexual revolution made sex available to everyone. The current sexual market would seem to follow the 80/20 rule- 80% of the sex is only happening between 20% of the people. This creates a lot of resentment among the bottom 80% of people who are now involuntarily celibate (aka: incel). Men will either opt out of the dating market place entirely, search for brides in foreign countries, or emulate the top 20% in some way (ie: use game), and if successful, men aren’t going to want to settle down when they can have an entire sexual buffet for them to indulge in courtesy of the sexual revolution. Meanwhile, the bottom 80% along with the top 20% of women are still pursuing careers and out performing many men in today’s society (better jobs, better pay, more degrees, etc) so when they do want to settle down, they find many men unsuitable due to the women’s hypergamous nature.

So how do we change this? It would require some incentives to bring men back into the fold. What incentives? Good question! Maybe we should ask what men want out of life and relationships and try to accommodate that, but this isn’t likely to happen any time soon. Woman dominate the discussion on gender issues in this country and they aren’t giving an inch!


Full interview here: https://lovegoneglobal./tag/danielle-crittenden/

This is another article of hers on cost of delaying marriage:
Whether we know it or not, we have a season of life when we're more apt to find a mate. Some things just won't wait.

Our grandmothers, we are told, took husbands the way we might choose our first apartment. There was a scheduled viewing, a quick turn about the interior, a glance inside the closets, a nervous intake of breath as one read the terms of the lease, and then the signing — or not. You either felt a man's charms right away or you didn't. If you didn't, you entertained a few more prospects until you found one who better suited you. If you love him, really loved him, all the better. But you also expected to make compromises. The view may not be great, but it's sunny and spacious (translation: he's not that handsome, but he's sweet-natured and will be a good provider).

Whether you accepted or rejected him, however, you didn't dawdle. My late mother-in-law, who married at 20, told me that in her college circles in the mid-1950s, a man who took a woman out for more than three dates without intending marriage was considered a cad. Today, the man who considered marriage so rashly would be thought a fool. Likewise, a woman.

Instead, like lords or sailors of yore, a young woman is encouraged to embark upon the world, seek her fortune and sow her oats, and only much later — closer to 30 than 20 — consider the possibility of settling down. Even religious conservatives, who disapprove of sex outside of marriage, accept the now-common wisdom that it is better to put off marriage than do it too early. The popular radio host, Laura Schlessinger, traditional in so many of her views, constantly tells her listeners not to consider going to the altar much before 30. In 1965, nearly 90 percent of women aged 25 to 29 were married; by 1996, only 56 percent of women in this age group were. Indeed, the more educated and ambitious a woman is the more likely she is to delay marriage and children, the Census Bureau reports. And if she doesn't — if such a young woman decides to get married, say, before she is 25 — she risks being regarded by her friends as a tragic figure, spoken of the way wartime generations once mourned the young man killed in battle: "How unfortunate, with all that promise, to be cut down so early in life!"

I remember congratulating a young woman upon her recent marriage to a friend of mine and commenting perfunctorily that both of them must be very happy. She was 24 at the time. She grabbed my hand, held it, and said with emotion, "Thank you!" As it turned out, I'd been the only woman to offer her congratulations without immediately expressing worry that she'd done the wrong thing. Her single female friends had greeted her wedding announcement as a kind of betrayal. A few had managed to stammer some grudging best wishes. Her best friend nearly refused to be a bridesmaid. They simply couldn't fathom why she'd tossed away her freedom when she was barely out of college. And she, in turn, couldn't convince them that she really had met the man she wanted to marry, that she didn't want to keep going out to bars in the evenings and clubs on the weekends, postponing her marriage for half a decade until she reached an age that her friends would consider more suitable.

In this sense, we lead lives that are exactly the inverse of our grandmothers'. If previous generations of women were raised to believe that they could only realize themselves within the roles of wife and mother, now the opposite is thought true: It's only outside these roles that we are able to realize our full potential and worth as human beings. A 20-year-old bride is considered as pitiable as a 30-year-old spinster used to be. Once a husband and children were thought to be essential to a woman's identity, the source of purpose in her life; today, they are seen as peripherals, accessories that we attach only after our full identities are up and running.

And how are we supposed to create these identities? They are to be forged by ourselves, through experience and work and "trial" relationships. The more experience we have, the more we accomplish independently, the stronger we expect our character to grow. Not until we've reached full maturity — toward the close of our third decade of life — is it considered safe for a woman to take on the added responsibilities of marriage and family without having to pay the price her grandmother did for domestic security, by surrendering her dreams to soap powders, screaming infants, and frying pans. But here is a price to be paid for postponing commitment, too. It is a price that is rarely stated honestly, not the least because the women who are paying it don't realize how onerous it will be until it's too late.

I remember having, in my early 20s, long and passionate conversations with my female friends about our need to be strong, to stand alone, to retain our independence and never compromise our souls by succumbing to domesticity. And yet at the same time, we constantly felt the need to shore each other up. We'd come across passages in books — paeans to the autonomy of the individual, replete with metaphors of lighthouses, mountains, the sea, etc. — copy them out carefully (in purple ink, on arty cards), and mail them to each other. It was as if despite our passion for independence, despite our confidence in ourselves as independent women, we somehow feared that even a gentle gust of wind blowing from the opposite direction would send us spiraling back into the 1950s, a decade none of us had experienced first-hand but one that could induce shudders all the same.

Our skittishness was all the more surprising given that most of my friends' mothers, as well as my own, worked at interesting jobs and had absorbed as deeply as we had the cultural messages of the time. When I look back upon it, I think our youthful yearning to fall in love must have been enormously strong and at war with our equally fierce determination to stay free. We were fighting as much a battle against ourselves as against the snares of domesticity. And if one of us were to give way, the rest would feel weakened in our own inner struggles, betrayed by our friend's abandonment of the supposedly happy, autonomous life. For the truth is, once you have ceased being single, you suddenly discover that all that energy you spent propelling yourself toward an independent existence was only going to be useful if you were planning to spend the rest of your life as a nun or a philosopher on a mountaintop or maybe a Hollywood-style adventuress who winds up staring into her empty bourbon glass four years later wondering if it was all d--- worth it. In preparation for a life spent with someone else, it wasn't going to be helpful.

And this is the revelation that greets the woman who has made almost a religion out of her personal autonomy. She finds out, on the cusp of 30, that independence is not all it's cracked up to be. "Seen from the outside, my life is the model of modern female independence," wrote Katie Roiphe in a 1997 article for Esquire entitled "The Independent Woman (and Other Lies)." "I live alone, pay my own bills, and fix my stereo when it breaks down. But it sometimes seems like my independence is in part an elaborately constructed façade that hides a more traditional feminine desire to be protected and provided for: I admitted this once to my mother, an ardent 70s feminist ... and she was shocked .... I rushed to reassure her that I wouldn't dream of giving up my career, and it's true that I wouldn't."

Roiphe then goes on to puzzle over how a modern woman like herself could wish for a man upon whom she could depend. "It may be one of the bad jokes that history occasionally plays on us," she concluded, "that the independence my mother's generation wanted so much for their daughters was something we could not entirely appreciate or want."

Unfortunately, this is a bit of wisdom that almost always arrives too late. The drawbacks of the independent life, which dawned upon Roiphe in her late 20s, are not so readily apparent to a woman in her early 20s. And how can they be? When a woman is young and reasonably attractive, men will pass through her life with the regularity of subway trains; even when the platform is empty, she'll expect another to be coming along soon. No woman in her right mind would want to commit herself to marriage so early. Time stretches luxuriously out before her. Her body is still silent on the question of children. She'll be aware, too, of the risk of divorce today, and may tell herself how important it is to be exposed to a wide variety of men before deciding upon just one. When dating a man, she'll be constantly alert to the possibilities of others. Even if she falls in love with someone, she may ultimately put him off because she feels just "too young" for anything "serious." Mentally, she has postponed all these critical questions to some arbitrary, older age.

But if a woman remains single until her age creeps up past 30, she may find herself tapping at her watch and staring down the now mysteriously empty tunnel, wondering if there hasn't been a derailment or accident somewhere along the line. When a train does finally pull in, it is filled with misfits and crazy men — like a New York City subway car after hours; immature, elusive Peter Pans who won't commit themselves to a second cup of coffee, let along a second date; neurotic bachelors with strange habits; sexual predators who hit on every woman they meet; newly divorced men taking pleasure wherever they can; embittered, scorned men who still feel vengeful toward their last girlfriend; men who are too preoccupied with their careers to think about anyone else from one week to the next; men who are simply too weak, or odd, to have attracted any other woman's interest. The sensible, decent, not-bad-looking men a woman rejected at 24 because she wasn't ready to settle down all seem to have gotten off at other stations.

Cont'd

Or, as it may be, a woman might find herself caught in a relationship that doesn't seem to be going anywhere or living with a man she doesn't want to marry. Whatever her circumstances, the single woman will suddenly feel trapped — trapped by her own past words and actions — at the same moment other desires begin to thrust themselves upon her.

So much has been written about a woman's "biological clock" that it has become a joke of television sitcoms: career women who, without warning, wake up one morning after 30 with alarm bells ringing in their wombs. Actually, the urge for children and everything that goes with them — not just a husband, but also a home and family life — often comes on so gradually that it's at first easily brushed away. What a woman is aware of, at around the age of 26 or 27, is a growing, inchoate dissatisfaction, a yearning for more, even if her life is already quite full. Her apartment feels too quiet, her work, no matter how exciting or interesting, is less absorbing, and her spare time, unless packed with frenetic activities, almost echoes with loneliness: Think of an endless wintry Sunday afternoon unbroken by the sound of another voice.

She starts noticing the mothers all around her — especially young, attractive mothers — pushing strollers down the street, cooing at their babies in supermarkets, and loading up their shopping carts with enormous quantities of meat, vegetables, cans, jars, boxes of detergent, and packages of diapers, as she purchases a few meager items for her own dinner. All the horrors she once connected with babies — their noise and messiness, their garish plastic toys, their constant crying and demands that wear down and dull even the most strong-minded of women — are eclipsed by their previously underestimated virtues; their cuteness, their tiny shoes and mittens, their love and wonder, and, perhaps most enviable of all, the change of life they cause, pulling a woman out of herself and distracting her from her own familiar problems.

Alas, it's usually at precisely this moment — when a single woman looks up from her work and realizes she's ready to take on family life — that men make themselves most absent. This is when the cruelty of her singleness really sets in, when she becomes aware of the fine print in the unwritten bargain she has cut with the opposite sex. Men will outlast her. Men, particularly successful men, will be attractive and virile into their 50s. They can start families whenever they feel like it. So long as a woman was willing to play a man's game at dating — playing the field, holding men to no expectations of permanent commitment — men would be around, they would even live with her! But the moment she began exuding that desire for something more permanent, they'd vanish. I suspect that few things are more off-putting to a man eating dinner than to notice that the woman across the table is looking at him more hungrily than at the food on her plate — and she is not hungry for his body but for his whole life.

So the single woman is reduced to performing the romantic equivalent of a dance over hot coals. She must pretend that she is totally unaware of the burning rocks beneath her feet and behave in a way that will convince a man that the one thing she really wants is the furthest thing from her mind. She might feign indifference to his phone calls and insist she's busy when she's not. When visiting friends who have small children, she might smile at them or politely bat them away or ask questions about them as if they're a species of plant and she's not someone particularly interested in botany. Whatever she does, though, she cannot be blamed for believing, at this point in her life, that it is men who have benefited most from women's determination to remain independent. I often think that moderately attractive bachelors in their 30s now possess the sexual power that once belonged only to models and millionaires. They have their pick of companions, and may callously disregard the increasingly desperate 30-ish single women around them, or move on when their current love becomes to cloying. As for the single woman over 30, she may be in every other aspect of her life a paragon of female achievement; but in her romantic life, she must force herself to be as eager to please and accommodate male desire as any 1920s cotillion debutante.

A woman's decision to delay marriage and children has other consequences-less obvious than the biological ones and therefore harder to foresee. It is not simply the pressure of wanting a baby that turns those confident 25-year-old single career women you see striding through busy intersections at lunch hour, wearing sleek suits and carrying take-out salads to eat at their desks, into the morose, white-wine-drinking 35-year-old executives huddled around restaurant tables, frantically analyzing every quality about themselves that might be contributing to their stubbornly unsuccessful romantic lives.

By spending years and years living entirely for yourself, thinking only about yourself, and having responsibility to no one but yourself, you end up inadvertently extending the introverted existence of a teenager deep into middle age. The woman who avoids permanent commitment because she fears it will stunt her development as an individual may be surprised to realize in her 30s that having essentially the same life as she did at 18 — the same dating problems, the same solitary habits, the same anxieties about her future, and the same sense that her life has not yet fully begun — is stunting too.

For when a woman postpones marriage and motherhood, she does not end up thinking about love less as she gets older but more and more, sometimes to the point of obsession. Why am I still alone? she wonders. Why can't I find someone? What is wrong with me? Her friends who have married are getting on with their lives — they are putting down payments on cars and homes; babies are arriving. She may not like some of their marriages — she may think her best friend's husband is a bit of a jerk or that another one of her friends has changed for the worse since her marriage — but nonetheless, she will think that at least their lives are going forward while her gearshift remains stuck in neutral. The more time that passes, the more the gearshift rattles, the more preoccupied the woman becomes with herself and all her possible shortcomings in the eyes of men until she can think about little else.

This may be the joke that history has actually played upon us — and a nasty one it is. The disparity in sexual staying power is something feminists rather recklessly overlooked when they urged women to abandon marriage and domesticity in favor of autonomy and self-fulfillment outside the home. The generation of women that embraced the feminist idealization of independence may have caused havoc by walking away from their marriages and families, but they could do so having established in their own minds that these were not the lives they wanted to lead: Those women at least had marriages and families from which to walk away. The 33-year-old single woman who decides she wants more from life than her career cannot so readily walk into marriage and children; by postponing them, all she has done is to push them ahead to a point in her life when she has less sexual power to attain them.

Instead, she must confront the sad possibility that she might never have what was the birthright of every previous generation of women: children, a family life and a husband who — however dull or oppressive he might have appeared to feminist eyes — at least was there. As this older single woman's life stretches out before her, she'll wonder if she'll ever meet someone she could plausibly love and who will love her in return or whether she's condemned to making the rest of her journey on the train alone. She might have to forgo her hope of youthful marriage and the pleasure of starting out fresh in life with a husband at the same stage of the journey as herself. She may have to consider looking at men who are much older than she is, men on their second and third marriages who arrive with an assortment of heavy baggage and former traveling companions. These men may already have children and be uninterested in having more, or she'll have to patch together a new family out of broken ones. Or, as time passes and still no one comes along, this woman might join the other older single women in the waiting rooms of fertility clinics, the ones who hope science will provide them with the babies that the pursuit of independence did not.

All these aint applicable in Nigeria! Thank you



Nobody should quote me.

Conted.

From a feminist view, it would be nice, I suppose — or at the very least handy — if we were able to derive total satisfaction from our solitude, to be entirely self-contained organisms, like earthworms or amoebas, having relations with the opposite sex whenever we felt a need for it but otherwise being entirely contented with our own company. Every woman's apartment could be her Walden Pond. She'd be free of the romantic fuss and interaction that has defined, and given meaning to, human existence since its creation. She could spend her evenings happily ensconced with a book or a rented video, not having to deal with some bozo's desire to watch football or play mindless video games. How children would fit into this vision of autonomy, I'm not sure, but surely they would infringe upon it; perhaps she could simply farm them out.

If this seems a rather chilling outcome to the quest for independence, well, it is. If no man is an island, then no woman can be, either. And it's why most human beings fall in love, and continue to take on all the commitments and responsibilities of family life. We want the noise and embrace of family around us; we want, at the end of our lives, to look back and see that what we have done amounts to more than a pile of pay stubs, that we have loved and been loved, and brought into this world life that will outlast us.

We strengthen a muscle by using it, and that is true of the heart and mind, too. By waiting and waiting and waiting to commit to someone, our capacity for love shrinks and withers. This doesn't mean that women or men should marry the first reasonable person to come along, or someone with whom they are not in love. But we should, at a much earlier age than we do now, take a serious attitude toward dating and begin preparing ourselves to settle down. For it's in the act of taking up the roles we've been taught to avoid or postpone — wife, husband, mother, father — that we build our identities, expand our lives, and achieve the fullness of character we desire.

Still, critics may argue that the old way was no better; that the risk of loss women assume by delaying marriage and motherhood overbalances the certain loss we'd suffer by marrying to early. The habit of viewing marriage as a raw deal for women is now so entrenched, even among women who don't call themselves feminists, that I've seen brides who otherwise appear completely happy apologize to their wedding guests for their surrender to convention, as if a part of them still feels there is something embarrassing and weak about an intelligent and ambitious woman consenting to marry. But is this true? Or is it just an alibi we've been handed by the previous generation of women in order to justify the sad, lonely outcomes of so many lives?

What we rarely hear — or perhaps are too fearful to admit — is how liberating marriage can actually be. As nerve-wracking as making the decision can be, it is also an enormous relief once it is made. The moment we say, "I do," we have answered one of the great crucial questions of our lives: We now know with whom we'll be spending the rest of our years, who will be the father of our children, who will be our family. That our marriages may not work, that we will have to accommodate ourselves to the habits and personality of someone else — these are, and always have been, the risks of commitment, of love itself.

What is important is that our lives have been thrust forward. The negative — that we are no longer able to live entirely for ourselves — is also the positive: We no longer have to live entirely for ourselves! We may go on to do any number of interesting things, but we are free of the growing wonder of with whom we will do them. We have ceased to look down the tunnel, waiting for a train.

The pull between the desire to love and be loved and the desire to be free is an old, fierce one. If the error our grandmothers made was to have surrendered too much of themselves for others, this was perhaps better than not being prepared to surrender anything at all. The fear of losing oneself can, in the end, simply become an excuse for not giving any of oneself away. Generations of women may have had no choice but to commit themselves to marriage early and then to feel imprisoned by their lifelong domesticity. So many of our generation have decided to put it off until it is too late, not foreseeing that lifelong independence can be its own kind of prison, too.

http://www.boundless.org/relationships/2005/the-cost-of-delaying-marriage

teasel:

I bet you didn't read the op.
Typical dumbass Nigerian male.

Abeg no bashing.

Tried breaking it down for easier read....

But it is still damn long

So my opinions on this subject matter:

1. I believe in young love/ dating as few people as possible/ chastity before marriage,

2. I have never seen marriage as a hindrance to career/ chopping life (well, I don't see clubbing/drinking/partying/casual sex/ flirting/friendzoning guys etc. as chopping life so..)

3. I believe with an understanding spouse, you can achieve whatever you will
..
4. I believe you cannot have it all at same time; there is season for everything Ecc. 3:1

So let's go.

I am sure this thread will be very interesting

Cutehector:
All these aint applicable in Nigeria! Thank you



Nobody should quote me.

this boy again

bomboy!

cc:

byvan03
Cococandy
Mmotimo
mindfulness
Shayebaby
EfemenaXY
Tearoses
blank
Onegai
Ewuro4
Edwife
Kimoni
Greatgod01
Taryour
Chillisauce
Ujoan
Damiso
Naijababe

WORD bukatyne
SYNONYM long post.

lilmax:
WORD bukatyne

SYNONYM long post.

Na you sabi...*rolls eyes*

What's your take on the OP?

I believe in juggling all the balls that count, I don't know about one waiting for the other. Bukatyne actually we can have it all, once your head is in it, you can if the opportunities present itself. I won't give up one for the other, doing all at once is not new if you have got the physical and mental stamina to. Always better to settle when the odds are still high, not when a man will need a pastor to confirm you as a wife material before he marries you .

Too long.

I'd be more inclined to read this if it were written from the Nigerian perspective.

Sorry.

byvan03:
I believe in juggling all the balls that count, I don't know about one waiting for the other. Bukatyne actually we can have it all, once your head is in it, you can if the opportunities present itself. I won't give up one for the other, doing all at once is not new if you have got the physical and mental stamina to. Always better to settle when the odds are still high, not when a man will need a pastor to confirm you as a wife material before he marries you .

Seriously?

In this day and age?

EfemenaXY:


Seriously?

In this day and age?

Actually it's prevalent in this day and age. The pastor ish seems to be part of the end time situation.

EfemenaXY:
Too long.

I'd be more inclined to read this if it were written from the Nigerian perspective.

Sorry.

The non-Nigerian perspective makes it interesting.

EfemenaXY:
Too long.

I'd be more inclined to read this if it were written from the Nigerian perspective.

Sorry.

The non-Nigerian perspective makes it worthy reading and interestingly captures a part of the Nigerian 'situation'

An single woman at 30 is 'martially condemned'

bukatyne:


The non-Nigerian perspective makes it worthy reading and interestingly captures a part of the Nigerian 'situation'

An single woman at 30 is 'martially condemned'

By whom & how?

bukatyne:

2. I have never seen marriage as a hindrance to career/ chopping life (well, I see clubbing/drinking/partying/casual sex/ flirting/friendzoning guys etc. as chopping life so..)

What's bad in friend-zoning guys?!
A Lady can't date all guys she meets, you know?!, and that doesn't mean she shouldn't maintain casual relationship with sensible ones without being tagged a friend-zone....

This is interesting. Will return to comment better.

She believes women should marry first (early; she married at 25 and hubby 28) and have kids (and staying at home to take care of them) before talking about building a career as having a career first before family is working against the infamous 'biological clock'.

I think theoretically her suggestion makes sense. But practically it's not always achievable. How many people have control over when they get married? Especially for women whom our society consider it a taboo for them to go chasing after men yet somehow are condemned if they don't marry early. I don't even know how that makes sense but....topic for another day.
So while she's still single, is she supposed to fold her arms and wait for marriage before starting a career? What if that never happens?

The most practical thing is to build your career and work your family in when it does come to pass. You can have both.

For those who got married early, yea it wouldn't hurt to get the babies out of the way to avoid plenty distractions during the pursuit of success. I'm not gonna do that though. Working on both at the same time.

Key is to marry someone who's willing to step up and do what you can't so you won't be overwhelmed.

In the West, there are institutionalized policies to protect women in and outside marriage, in and outside their careers. Feminists have done the ground work to enable women be spoilt for choices. Moreover this sounds like White women experiences not the black woman experience in the West which is often different. Not only that by 23, these women are done with school.

I really can't say the same for Nigerian women or men born in the 80's or 90's. Our parents enjoyed such privileges though before Nigeria went to the dust. I didn't have such luxury. Before the advent of private universities, you almost don't get a mere bearing of your life until you are racing for your 30's because of university strikes and economic hardship. The economy most of the time will determine whether you marry early or not and the Nigerian man a woman marries is a strong factor if that career will even take off after marriage. Most people who take off school or career path find it hard to go back could be for personal reasons or financial reasons. It is good for the husband to be well to do before going on this path. Not only well to do but is a champion of your dreams. Before entering this marriage, I take God beg you, sign an agreement with witnesses.

This marriage before/after career decision is often shaped by your upbringing. In my home, it wasn't spoken in lay terms, but we the children all knew we had to finish school, have a career before marriage. When I got done with my masters, my parents congratulated me and said 'after this I hope you'll go for a PhD' lmao.

byvan03:
I believe in juggling all the balls that count, I don't know about one waiting for the other. Bukatyne actually we can have it all, once your head is in it, you can if the opportunities present itself. I won't give up one for the other, doing all at once is not new if you have got the physical and mental stamina to. Always better to settle when the odds are still high, not when a man will need a pastor to confirm you as a wife material before he marries you .

True we can do it all but not at the same tempo.

@Marrying early: True and I know this has always been your gospel

Lol @ pastor confirming.... it happens at all age ranges.

bukatyne:
Tried breaking it down for easier read....

But it is still damn long

So my opinions on this subject matter:

1. I believe in young love/ dating as few people as possible/ chastity before marriage,

2. I have never seen marriage as a hindrance to career/ chopping life (well, I see clubbing/drinking/partying/casual sex/ flirting/friendzoning guys etc. as chopping life so..)

3. I believe with an understanding spouse, you can achieve whatever you will
..
4. I believe you cannot have it all at same time; there is season for everything Ecc. 3:1

So let's go.

I am sure this thread will be very interesting

I don't even believe in dating different people because 'I'm young and wanna have fun in my teens or 20s.' It is a WASTE of my time. I didn't do it. I just caught one guy in my early 20s and kept him on lock down ever since. Lmao.

You don't even need all those clubbing nonsense or having guy friends to enjoy life fully. I consider them unnecessary baggage. Men friends bore the heck out of me. I dunno how women do it.

FrancisTony:

What's bad in friend-zoning guys?!
A Lady can't date all guys she meets, you know?!, and that doesn't mean she shouldn't maintain casual relationship with sensible ones without being tagged a friend-zone....

Friend-zoning occurs when you intentionally and subtly take advantage of a love interest without having an desire to date the person.

I know I will not date B yet I send him errands or request for favors because I know he will do it.

It's wrong to me. I see no need to keep a guy who indicated interest in me as a friend. It is either I want to do or I don't

blank:
This is interesting. Will return to comment better.

Madam blank, I am waiting o!

bukatyne:


True we can do it all but not at the same tempo.

@Marrying early: True and I know this has always been your gospel

Lol @ pastor confirming.... it happens at all age ranges.

Not really my gospel, I only answer when asked and I really don't care what age people get married . It's exactly at any tempo you wish to maintain , I see no differences . Just more work and that's it . You really think that a young woman will stand and wait for your pastor 's approval? Me go leave you dey go my way.

I guess it's your gospel too because I don't see you telling ladies to build skyscrapers first before getting married.

cococandy:
I think theoretically her suggestion makes sense. But practically it's not always achievable. How many people have control over when they get married? Especially for women whom our society consider it a taboo for them to go chasing after men yet somehow are condemned if they don't marry early. I don't even know how that makes sense but....topic for another day.
So while she's still single, is she supposed to fold her arms and wait for marriage before starting a career? What if that never happens?

The most practical thing is to build your career and work your family in when it does come to pass. You can have both.

For those who got married early, yea it wouldn't hurt to get the babies out of the way to avoid plenty distractions during the pursuit of success. I'm not gonna do that though. Working on both at the same time.

Key is to marry someone who's willing to step up and do what you can't so you won't be overwhelmed.

I agree that the advice sounds very good in theory though not always practicable as life sometimes throw a curve; some people use husbands do boyfriend etc.

She was apparently referring to ladies who say they want to build a career before thinking of marriage. Career here meaning a steady place before deciding to get married. E.g. I want to be at the managerial level before I think of marriage. She advised ladies to marry immediately after university/ shortly after, build a family while working part-time or no time then take a plunge into the workforce if she's interested later.

I very much agree with your key though... the partner is key

Stillfire:
In the West, there are institutionalized policies to protect women in and outside marriage, in and outside their careers. Feminists have done the ground work to enable women be spoilt for choices. Moreover this sounds like White women experiences not the black woman experience in the West which is often different. Not only that by 23, these women are done with school.

I really can't say the same for Nigerian women or men born in the 80's or 90's. Our parents enjoyed such privileges though before Nigeria went to the dust. I didn't have such luxury. Before the advent of private universities, you almost don't get a mere bearing of your life until you are racing for your 30's because of university strikes and economic hardship. The economy most of the time will determine whether you marry early or not and the Nigerian man a woman marries is a strong factor if that career will even take off after marriage. Most people who take off school or career path find it hard to go back could be for personal reasons or financial reasons. It is good for the husband to be well to do before going on this path. Not only well to do but is a champion of your dreams. Before entering this marriage, I take God beg you, sign an agreement with witnesses.

This marriage before/after career decision is often shaped by your upbringing. In my home, it wasn't spoken in lay terms, but we the children all knew we had to finish school, have a career before marriage. When I got done with my masters, my parents congratulated me and said 'after this I hope you'll go for a PhD' lmao.

First, welcome back from your hiatus

The author is a upper mid-class white woman

I agree the economy and educational system doesn't favor marrying 'early' as advocated by the author and the husband extremely matters in this parts.

@ Topic: I am a staunch supporter of marriage before career... Career in this context is working to become a top shot in her industry. I don't see it happening over a long period of time to hold down marriage for.

It is not necessarily an upbringing thing. My mom esp. wanted me to work longer before marriage; I wondered why the wait

It seems more western women are starting to see feminism for the farce that it truly is.
My naija sisters, oya time don come for una to do follow-follow again oo.. learn one or two things from this long and interesting piece and see why we have always called you all out on your bullshiit.

Here goes:

1.

Our skittishness was all the more surprising given that most of my friends' mothers, as well as my own, worked at interesting jobs and had absorbed as deeply as we had the cultural messages of the time. When I look back upon it, I think our youthful yearning to fall in love must have been enormously strong and at war with our equally fierce determination to stay free. [size=18pt]We were fighting as much a battle against ourselves as against the snares of domesticity.[/size] And if one of us were to give way, the rest would feel weakened in our own inner struggles, betrayed by our friend's abandonment of the supposedly happy, autonomous life. For the truth is, once you have ceased being single, you suddenly discover that all that energy you spent propelling yourself toward an independent existence was only going to be useful if you were planning to spend the rest of your life as a nun or a philosopher on a mountaintop or maybe a Hollywood-style adventuress who winds up staring into her empty bourbon glass four years later wondering if it was all d--- worth it. In preparation for a life spent with someone else, it wasn't going to be helpful.

They called us male chauvinists for telling them this - how dare we say every woman must have a man in her life to be truly complete?


2.

And this is the revelation that greets the woman who has made almost a religion out of her personal autonomy. She finds out, on the cusp of 30, that independence is not all it's cracked up to be. "Seen from the outside, my life is the model of modern female independence," wrote Katie Roiphe in a 1997 article for Esquire entitled "The Independent Woman (and Other Lies)." "I live alone, pay my own bills, and fix my stereo when it breaks down. But it sometimes seems like my independence is in part an elaborately constructed façade that hides a more traditional feminine desire to be protected and provided for.

We've been telling them, but they call us misogynists.


3.

But if a woman remains single until her age creeps up past 30, she may find herself tapping at her watch and staring down the now mysteriously empty tunnel, wondering if there hasn't been a derailment or accident somewhere along the line. When a train does finally pull in, it is filled with misfits and crazy men — like a New York City subway car after hours; immature, elusive Peter Pans who won't commit themselves to a second cup of coffee, let along a second date; neurotic bachelors with strange habits; sexual predators who hit on every woman they meet; newly divorced men taking pleasure wherever they can; embittered, scorned men who still feel vengeful toward their last girlfriend; men who are too preoccupied with their careers to think about anyone else from one week to the next; men who are simply too weak, or odd, to have attracted any other woman's interest. The sensible, decent, not-bad-looking men a woman rejected at 24 because she wasn't ready to settle down all seem to have gotten off at other stations.

Say what?
You mean a woman wrote all this?

She's definitively sexist.


4.

Alas, it's usually at precisely this moment — when a single woman looks up from her work and realizes she's ready to take on family life — that men make themselves most absent. [b]This is when the cruelty of her singleness really sets in, when she becomes aware of the fine print in the unwritten bargain she has cut with the opposite sex. Men will outlast her. Men, particularly successful men, will be attractive and virile into their 50s. They can start families whenever they feel like it.

5.

This may be the joke that history has actually played upon us — and a nasty one it is. The disparity in sexual staying power is something feminists rather recklessly overlooked when they urged women to abandon marriage and domesticity in favor of autonomy and self-fulfillment outside the home. The generation of women that embraced the feminist idealization of independence may have caused havoc by walking away from their marriages and families, but they could do so having established in their own minds that these were not the lives they wanted to lead: Those women at least had marriages and families from which to walk away. [size=15pt]The 33-year-old single woman who decides she wants more from life than her career cannot so readily walk into marriage and children; by postponing them, all she has done is to push them ahead to a point in her life when she has less sexual power to attain them.[/size]

They say we have no respect for women when we tell them this.

Interesting...


6.

As this older single woman's life stretches out before her, she'll wonder if she'll ever meet someone she could plausibly love and who will love her in return or whether she's condemned to making the rest of her journey on the train alone. She might have to forgo her hope of youthful marriage and the pleasure of starting out fresh in life with a husband at the same stage of the journey as herself. She may have to consider looking at men who are much older than she is, men on their second and third marriages who arrive with an assortment of heavy baggage and former traveling companions. These men may already have children and be uninterested in having more, or she'll have to patch together a new family out of broken ones. Or, as time passes and still no one comes along, this woman might join the other older single women in the waiting rooms of fertility clinics, the ones who hope science will provide them with the babies that the pursuit of independence did not.

I'm finding it hard to believe a woman wrote and admitted to all this.

Is she a woman-hater or some'n?