Who is Selling Singleness?
Me too, I want to know
The other day, an online acquaintance put up a tweet that caused a fair amount of furore.
In it, she claims that society (who?) has conspired to sell women an idea of success idealised by a career at the expense of relationships with men and family life.
It attracted a huge amount of criticism and in my opinion, well deserved eye-rolling, because to be honest, this kind of social commentary has always baffled me.
As far as I have observed in my thirty something years of life on multiple continents, people who say this about women’s choices and the social influences and incentives affecting them, are describing their imagination.
The society they are describing does not exist.
Everywhere in the world, the dominant message, especially to women, is that the height of success is to be married with children.
Women who are not married or don’t have children, despite having careers are treated like failures or lacking something.
Those who loudly lament from this perspective, largely cook up an imaginary world in their mind, in which society is dominated by career over family as ideal, then go about claiming this is what we have been sold.
Who is selling singleness?
Nobody sold that and nobody is selling that.
Especially not to us as Nigerian women.
We come from a country where majority of women are already married, and the average woman has five children.
And more importantly, it’s so dishonest to pretend that beyond constantly being pressured to attach ourselves to men in order to be viewed as fulfilled human beings, women are actively punished and dehumanised in a million little ways by so many people in society, for not being chosen by men, despite quite often, very much wanting to be.
I personally, for as long as I can remember, have noticed, that of the torrential antagonism and interpersonal abuse I have been subjected to, both offline and online, most of it has revolved around devaluing my worth as a person because I wasn’t chosen to be some man’s girlfriend or wife, or because I had been rejected by whatever men had been in my life, or speculation that I would never be wanted or chosen by men for love, relationships, and marriage because of some irredeemable quality about me, and how that clearly marked me as worthless or even subhuman, or at least, surely less of a woman, and unworthy of dignity or respect.
For anyone, the effect of this kind of casual cruelty in so much of life, would be to make one desperate to be married, or at least in a relationship, even if only as a means to gain status and a modicum of respectability and the social protection from ridicule it affords.
I’m not immune to this psychological and emotional manipulation, so I’ve also had my moments of feeling intimidated by it, and questioned my worth as a human being and a woman, but at least, I can see it for what it is.
Though in its own way, being able to see the ugly machinations behind what we accept as socially normal is a curse.
I think women who suddenly start espousing these ideas are experiencing anxiety about getting married or having children, which is normal.
But it’s dishonest to falsely claim as prevailing a narrative that is in fact, a minority view everywhere in the world, in order to justify your own anxiety over your personal choices.
The most dominant reality in society is that women’s lives are made hell for not having a relationship with a man, and women are devalued for being single and childless.
Married women especially those who are mothers, are elevated and respected by society more than other women.
You can process how you feel about your 🫵🏾 own life and your 🫵🏾 own desires as a woman for marriage and a family, without seeding falsehoods into the already toxic pool of shared social consciousness.
As a woman, we all have a duty to protect and safeguard ourselves as a group, but many women unfortunately seem to want to outsource this task to men, believing they are special, and that some fake traditional role playing of “The man is the provider and the protector” will save them from being treated by men the way billions of women before them have been.
History teaches us, that the women for whom the man they shared their lives with failed or refused to provide and protect them, are too numerous to count.
I wish there was more of a sense of conscience and duty, to realise, that ideas are not neutral, and some narratives harm women more than others, especially when they’re not true.
Money and careers, and the financial security they bring, are the safety net that women didn’t always have, and they’re not mutually exclusive with marriage.
Nobody ever questions men’s ability or commitment to relationships and marriage because they have work and careers, which bring them wealth and stability.
Questioning it in women, is attempting to attack women’s ability to safeguard ourselves in a world that chewed up our foremothers and spat them out to die of broken hearts in poverty and ridicule.
And as a Nigerian woman, when the women of our country have always worked, have always provided, have always made and kept their own money, always run their own businesses, always maintained their financial independence from men, until these practices were upended and demonised by male supremacist powers of Islam and Christianity, is a further degree of dereliction of duty to your female sex.
There is no age in which women have ever been able to guarantee the relationships they had, but at least in this age, if the relationship falls apart, we won’t lose everything like too many of our female ancestors did.
Why is that such a bad thing?