IF I NEVER MARRY.
PS: This article is quite a lengthy one. If you choose to read, you are advised to read to the end to understand with clarity from the perspective of the writer, who is a single woman at the age of 28yrs.
For once I hanged up the call with a lot of frustration and some mild anger in my voice.
The person I had just spoken to was my mom and that contributed to the complexity of what we had just addressed. It was subtly becoming a quite a constant issue in our conversations of late and I was beginning to feel pressured, mind you I wasn’t pressured by my mom but feeling pressured was what I was beginning to feel. And it was an issue of marriage from two different perspectives, her expectations and mine but thankfully none of us I believe was entirely wrong.
There are two things I believe people are afraid to openly speak about. The first one is Sex. The second one is marriage.
My parents are one of the opened minded people I know in life and for me that has shaped me and my siblings in owning this world in our own way in the pursuit of character, talents, career choices and even how we each represent our Christianity badges. Someone once told me I wasn’t a typical Christian and that I came across more as a spiritual person and I didn’t know what to take that as, a compliment or none- it really didn’t matter so much to me because I understood where the person was coming from and I owe a bit of that self discovery to my parents, especially my dad for the liberty to find God and express Him in an unconventional way ( through poetry) unlike him who is the preacher and express it in how best I know.
Sometimes it gets on my nerves, especially when my parents call every Sunday to find out if I had closed from church, a smart way of finding out if I did. And often I hadn’t. It is my father who I have explained in extent the reason why I haven’t found myself in a building – a church- and yet I will say that I have found myself getting more closer to knowing God in these past few months of not being consistent in entering a temple.
I am still looking for something which I dare not bother myself to explain because it’s something that I think myself to believe is in-depth and therefore mincing words will only cover the truth.
That was me taking a little detour from what I am inspired to share so now back to my main reasoning of writing this article.
If I never marry?
First of all, let me let you know I am a honest writer and my parents do follow me here and yes both parents are likely to read this. My parents for sometime have been asking me about my love life which I strongly believe it’s the best thing that any parent can be concerned about but when does too much asking become unbearable or fuel a little bit of irritation in your heart?
Will we say after every call or visit, or within an interval of three to four month or one to three years? It’s so hard to draw a clear cut there.
As a single woman at the age of 28 years I will say one of the reasonings I have come to gather from people’s assumptions of single people are
1. That they have high standards
2. That they keeping saying No to everyone
3. That they don’t put seriousness into that aspect of their life.
And to be frank sometimes I just get tired of listening to a lot of lectures from people trying to figure out for me what they think or perceive I am missing.
Every marriage is different and so are the things you hear from each one of them and so are the many intertwined opinions you gather in your subconscious over time.
Of course it is a great thing for your married friends or parents and even some unmarried people to remind you about that aspect of life but I think what people fail to see is that marriage or finding love has no formula just like success.
Sometimes you do all that you know how to but things delay or fail or come quickly or late or never at all and I feel that’s the part of the narration we do not expose.
To acquire a degree technically one must go to school and study hard and that is likely to be guaranteed. But can we say that about love?
Is love guaranteed fully with a person going out often, spending time with more people, putting themselves in vantage positions, making themselves available for every date?
If that guaranteed love, then certainly love and marriage wouldn’t be for introverts because they are the type of people who wouldn’t find themselves a lot of times in such situations.
Marriage isn’t like going to the groceries store and ticking the list and it is neither like saying magical words and seeing it’s manifestation in a minute.
I do not understand why it is even wrong for people to have preferences when it comes to marriage. And also again I wonder who determines what is a high standard and what is a low standard?
When my parents came to visit me some months ago, I needed help in fixing something at home for them so I called a friend to help out. The following day in the kitchen I told my mom that that friend had shown interest in me but I wasn’t convicted in my heart that that’s the person I, Jo, with everything at least I know about me and is discovering about myself and the said friend would not want to consider a possibility of journeying with in life.
For me love goes beyond mere feelings to deep reasonings like compatibility. And compatibility is not something both agree to adjust to, it isn’t something one can force.
My dad followed up a week with the same issue and I had time explaining to him my reasons for not being interested in the said friend in that particular way. There were things my father asked for,
Was he a Christian? I checked
Was he working or had something doing ? I checked and I remember telling him that I was certain besides my mother there were other women who had similar checks but He chose my mother not because of the checks but because he knew. It’s just a knowing one just knows.
I have heard it said it’s the best thing to marry a friend but truly nobody marries their enemy.
People do not marry their friends in the name of friendship but they see in their friends something they want to get bonded with in life and that’s the story I strongly believe must be put out there.
There are certain things people can endure in friendship because there is mild degree of commitment but are there people willing to do that when they are bonded by a sacred covenant called marriage?
Again, the zenith of a woman’s success I strongly agree should not be marriage. This saying often feel nonsense to some people.lol
Unlike the Apostle Paul , I strongly desire to marry some day but I am training my mind to know that that aspect of my life wouldn’t come to complete me. After marriage it’s a phase called motherhood which may come or may not and still chasing my own dreams and building myself up to reach my maximum potential in life. The sum of who I become after I exit this world is the crown of my whole being and not just a single phase of my life, not my career accomplishments alone, not the success I will make as a writer someday alone, not the kids I will raise and certainly not when I finally marry.
In the purpse of life, marriage isn’t the ultimate, marriage is part of the regulars stops we make commitment to. Like education , like career, like
passion. This is not to compare the significance of marriage to all these but truthfully all these are milestones in the picture of one’s life. If it wasn’t so, some people wouldn’t move on to have series of marriages after series of failures
and education will have a limit.
If society understands that marriage has no certain timelines and that people inwardly desire to marry it is only then that they can come to terms with that reasoning, and instead of putting pressure they would rather make it more easier for people in that single phase of life to adjust and happily hope for a different phase that is if they desire.
I live in a two bedroom apartment surrounded by a variety of indoor plants like my snake plant, money plant, monstera, cactus plant with a touch of aromatherapy I get from my desert mist diffuser ( check on that diffuser it’s amazing)
Is that a lot for a single woman? The answer is obviously a No for me.
Am I missing something here? Of cause no! As a matter of fact the only thing missing is the rib of that man who is yet to be my husband someday.lol
The things I choose to accomplish now as a single woman before I marry doesn’t make me less serious. It’s called choices and preferences and I keep saying people do not want the same things in life.
We all don’t want the same character in men, same vision in women, the same jokes, the same stature, skin color, job opportunities, locations, desires and passions and that IS OKAY.
For sometime I use to lie when people ask me about my marital status to avoid the long aftermath lecture when I tell them I am single.
To avoid that I could just say I am engaged and of cause this is to say that people can be engaged for how ever long they want before settling into marriage.
But I do not anymore and neither do I engage more in the long lectures as if it sealed that all single women and men are totally ignorant to what Is it that they want in life regarding the concept of Marraige.
In between singleness and marriage is a whole big world on its own. It is an unspoken world for different people, an unspoken situationships, unspoken phases of ups and down, finding self and identity, deciding career pathways, having financial freedom and then of cause finding the true spark of love.
Which a lot of people exclude from their stories.
They tell you everything but leave that one thing out, the spark, the certainty, the peace, the decision, call it whatever you want but that knowing that that person you are marrying is the one you are certain even with fear as the one you want to journey your whole life with.
Some marry early for good reasons, some also for bad reasons. Some marry late for good reasons, some also for bad reasons. Early marriages last in the same way early marriages end. Late marriages last the same way late marriages end.
There are billions of people on this planet with different situations and what makes us think we have figured out all there is to know about marriage in all these billion stories?
My mom married my dad at the age of twenty six. Their live story was one beautiful story. They were good friends and dated for close to seven years before they marry.
Am I obligated to follow same trend? No. Certainly my parents chose that path because there was something they each saw worth waiting for in each other and that’s the reason they got married and not because they were friends.
Like I said nobody marries their enemy.
And it is very crucial for people to understand that there are many ways a person can feel pressured especially in our 21st century when it comes to marriage. Forget even about the constant notifications you get from your friends on their beautiful wedding invitations, the new trend of gowns, kente, tuxedo and oh the now tending name mash ups, the #kidvet 2020, #Sunbeat2020, the honey moon locations, see we are already pressured by what we see, I didn’t say what you go looking for because these things come to you. In the most sane moments of your single life. Ha!
So maybe instead of asking questions like what are you waiting for, we can replace that with what are the things you expect in the person you hope to meet one day.
Instead of saying you are growing, why don’t we say how best can you achieve some personal goals why you are hoping to marry someday, and maybe instead of saying
When are you going to marry we should first consider asking, DO YOU DESIRE TO MARRY SOMEDAY?
Because everyone has a choice, even in how they want to direct the boat of their love lives.
Devotedly,
Jo nketiah