₦airaland Forum

Mindfulness:
I don't want to be a bully so I won't post IT.

crackhaus:
What I find more interesting is how you quickly saved it.

Mindfulness:
He has been posting pictures of himself and his family for two or three days. He was attaching them to his signature so that nobody can download them. I was thinking that it was quite stewpid because anyone can take a picture with their phone or make a screenshot but I didn't care about these pics.


BUT THIS ONE, I HAD TO HAVE.

crackhaus:
The USAF hasn't even learned how to conduct aerial tactical manoeuvres better than you do here.

crackhaus:
Because deep down you're very naughty and very much find that sort of thing stimulating, no?

Mindfulness:
If you had seen the pic, you would not have used the word 'stimulate'.

crackhaus:
Or a combination of both, don't you think?


Come on, you couldn't possibly deny how the advent of feminism and gender-equality has something to do with the whole career/marriage debate...even in Nigeria.

What is a self-styled feminist?
You mean she's not a real feminist?

byvan03:
I realised it isn't about the books , hardly you see a young lady that's really that into her books these days. It's more of the rock your youth mentally that is actually delaying most. A 26years old lady still feels like a child these days.

crackhaus:
Thanks for the links, much appreciated.

Now will you conduct your own research to compare with what those writers came up with?
I distinctly remember you telling me not to believe everything I read on the internet.


Meanwhile, let me help you begin:
Shaybebaby, do you have any regrets being a mother?

bukatyne:
@Women feeling sex.y past 30..

I think women are more in-tuned with their sexuality as they grow older.

Bolade005:
Hanhan Bukatayne, do you honestly believe what you wrote there is the truth?

Maybe Feminism is not completely responsible but Ma'am, it is partly responsible and you know this for a fact.

Mindfulness:
Confirmed.

bukatyne:
.

A 26yr old is still young though ripe for marriage.

I think the problem is what people term 'chopping life'.

bukatyne:
@Women having mates past 30...

From my little observation, getting a man to marry is not the issue as much as indecisiveness and deciding to hold on to several 'unpotential' men due to reasons best known to them.

I marvel when a lady tells me she is 'single and searching' yet has several male 'friends' she keeps around her

How would the potential husband be able to decipher she is still available?

I again marvel when some give very funny characteristics such as he must have so in his account; must look like this etc. Etc.

I know someone who when in her late 40s got a divorcee to marry her and she wanted a big white wedding in addition to the heavy traditional wedding. The man obviously didn't want a big white but was willing to have vestry wedding. Years later, she got a widower to marry her and she said she couldn't deal with step kids. Several examples abound.

Some might say what about men but a older man who is not so rich will rush to his village to marry Nkechi or Titi; he wouldn't waste time courting/trying to court Tiwa Savage who he can't attain and Behind his Nkechi to Tiwa.

I told someone I married my boyfriend from university and she said I must be boring... Well, I agree.

I have seen older women marry but they all decided at that point they needed a break and wanted to get married and positioned themselves for marriage.

@Women feeling sex.y past 30..

I think women are more in-tuned with their sexuality as they grow older. I see women in their mid/late 30s in my office and I say have managed to look very good despite their kids and have the money, time and knowledge to look fresh than ladies in their 20s.

@ Marriage being the ultimate...
It is just a means to an end. It is important to have someone who is compelled to have your back, put you first and create mini yous with while you launch out into the world. The mini yous replace you when you exit.

I don't understand it as the hands wriggling institution where everything stands still or end the day you say 'I do'

It is even important to have your own pursuits and friends to enjoy your marriage. No man/woman can give you everything and there are some voids only God/vocation can feel.

It is also expected that people have their eyes open when entering so they don't jump out and they have spouses also committed to making/sustaining their happiness.

Cc:

Byvan, Mindfulness, crackhaus, HannefahRN.
[size=2pt]
Lilmax is becoming a prophet o![/size]

HaneefahRN:
I agree with this. Marriage guarantees nothing. Lots of people are living miserable lives being married, but do not want to get out cos of what the Society would say, and fears of unknown. Being married doesn't mean being happy, nor save from loneliness. If a person makes a wrong choice of spouse, it's like hell on Earth.

bukatyne:
@Women having mates past 30...

From my little observation, getting a man to marry is not the issue as much as indecisiveness and deciding to hold on to several 'unpotential' men due to reasons best known to them.

I marvel when a lady tells me she is 'single and searching' yet has several male 'friends' she keeps around her

How would the potential husband be able to decipher she is still available?

I again marvel when some give very funny characteristics such as he must have so in his account; must look like this etc. Etc.

I know someone who when in her late 40s got a divorcee to marry her and she wanted a big white wedding in addition to the heavy traditional wedding. The man obviously didn't want a big white but was willing to have vestry wedding. Years later, she got a widower to marry her and she said she couldn't deal with step kids. Several examples abound.

Some might say what about men but a older man who is not so rich will rush to his village to marry Nkechi or Titi; he wouldn't waste time courting/trying to court Tiwa Savage who he can't attain and Behind his Nkechi to Tiwa.

I told someone I married my boyfriend from university and she said I must be boring... Well, I agree.

I have seen older women marry but they all decided at that point they needed a break and wanted to get married and positioned themselves for marriage.

@Women feeling sex.y past 30..

I think women are more in-tuned with their sexuality as they grow older. I see women in their mid/late 30s in my office and I say have managed to look very good despite their kids and have the money, time and knowledge to look fresh than ladies in their 20s.

@ Marriage being the ultimate...
It is just a means to an end. It is important to have someone who is compelled to have your back, put you first and create mini yous with while you launch out into the world. The mini yous replace you when you exit.

I don't understand it as the hands wriggling institution where everything stands still or end the day you say 'I do'

It is even important to have your own pursuits and friends to enjoy your marriage. No man/woman can give you everything and there are some voids only God/vocation can feel.

It is also expected that people have their eyes open when entering so they don't jump out and they have spouses also committed to making/sustaining their happiness.

Cc:

Byvan, Mindfulness, crackhaus, HannefahRN.
[size=2pt]
Lilmax is becoming a prophet o![/size]

byvan03:
U



I totally agree, older women get married but there is a difference between marrying the man you want and the man that is available at the time. I know a lady about to get married, she is over 50 but the quality of the man is troubling from all ramifications . If she was younger, no family member will accept that man but now they just want her to get the hell away from house. The bad news is that the man is even stalling the whole progress, while she waits hopefully.


I totally agree with the rest of the post.

byvan03:
If people come to terms with this fact and realise that you don't have to stick out any bullshi*t, life will be easier for everyone. I have realised that there really is no correlation between age of marriage and quality of marriage too. Same challenges a young bride faced is what an older bride will face. I have no problem with someone that chose not to marry at all but for those that want, it's better to choose when you still have a larger pool to pick from. That way you settle for the desirable and not the available.

bukatyne:
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.

HaneefahRN:
Was she married then trying to re-marry? Besides I don't understand why a 50years old would be leaving with a relative. You made it seem like she is kinda dependent and probably has parents trying to push her to get married. I don't know they also count marriage so much to the extent of going for any man available.

Women get married after failed marriages though, although some would rather not probably cos of their children, my grandma married twice, lost her first husband early and re-married but she couldn't cope with the 2nd's behaviour and decided to train her children herself. He is back now though.
I know a woman who lost her husband couple of years back and is now married to her childhood sweetheart who had also coincidentally lost his wife, their kids are grown ups.

I think women after losing a husband probably through divorce or death tend not to care so much for marriage especially when they are in middle age with children. It is men that quickly seek marriage or another form of relationship soon after and not even all men.

Timbuktou:
What a misogynistic thread. Nairaland has gone to the dogs. *spits*. Even you, Crackhaus. You haven't changed one bit.
It's time for you to grow up.

The OP and comments in this thread threaten to usher us back to medieval days when women's ultimate aspiration was to hope to be owned by some man somewhere. Tufiakwa!!!

In this information age? With all the technological advancment, particularly in the field of spèrm donating, egg-freezing and botox injectioning and vaginoplastying? The misogyny is thick in this one. First-wave feminists would be turning in their lesbianic graves this very moment. And what blasphemy. The movement is under attack. Apostacy and mutiny everywhere.

Mindfulness:
Confirmed.

bukatyne:
Feminism has nothing to do with a typical Nigerian lady putting her career first or delaying marriage.

Fear of dream killer husbands, wanting to flex, parents' advice, lack of suitable spouse etc. are reasons.

She is a feminist suited to her own taste. She is considered anti-feminist to some esp. 'modern' feminists.

Real/pseudo feminism is more of your forte.

carmag:
it didn't occur to you your readers might skip this epistles

crackhaus:
Right...what were you going to say before?

The writer seems to me like 'a reformed' feminist, she has seen the light.

shaybebaby:
I dey come, out for dinner. No black and white answer.

crackhaus:


Who growing up epp?
Forever young and balling...

bukatyne:
The truth.

'Reformed' feminist? not pseudo/real/fake feminist?

I don't think she saw any light; this is who she was and grew more at it. She married @ 25 and hubby @ 28.

It is hard to understand people's beliefs if we are always ready to look for loopholes.

She is a feminist suited to her own taste. She is considered anti-feminist to some esp. 'modern' feminists.

crackhaus:
This is how you described the writer.

Since you say she's a feminist suited to her own taste, it follows that she was a feminist because the entire article could not possibly be written by a hard-core feminist (it goes against everything that feminism preaches).
Thus since she's a feminist, she most definitely is now reformed as seen in the article.

Pseudo-feminists are women who adopt feminist ideologies without a thorough understanding of its history, relevance, and core principles - This group litter this forum.

bukatyne:
That's how others in her circle and the writer describes herself. Not all feminists are 'hardcore'/ 'modern'/ 'extreme'

Well you have to understand what someone stands for before classifying them into a group. The 'core principles' of feminism is same.