I'll Die An Old Spinster, Thank You

I've been having an ongoing discussion with a good friend of mine about what exactly might be wrong with us in the couples department. We're both in relationships (of sorts), and it took a great amount of effort, perseverance and patience on the part of our men to even get us to the point where we could agree to call the liaison a relationship. Now that we're there, the struggle for power is everything. Actually, it's not so much power as self-assertion, and it's constantly making an appearance in our daily lives. It's even present in our imaginary lives. I'll explain.

We were talking about a young African woman who recently married the love of her life. Before their wedding, her man would cook for her, clean the house, wash dishes...atypical courtship behavior for an African man, but perhaps we could call it typical for this age of enlightenment we live in. After the wedding, of course, he remembered that he was African and all the good behavior he used to snare her in his trap ceased abruptly. It got to the extent that she traveled to Africa for a six-week internship at a refugee camp and came back to see that he had not done anything while she was gone. Hadn't washed a dish, hadn't washed a shirt--his shirts--hadn't vacuumed a room. He was waiting for her. I can understand her washing the dishes and cleaning up the house, cuz she has to share that space as well, and if she's anything like me, the dirt just won't fly. What tripped me out was that she actually washed his damn shirts. This is where my--and my friend's--imaginations came into play.

Now, we had the same reaction to the fact that she actually performed what some would call her "wifely duty". I just call it gracious, because I imagined that my next move would have been to say, "Ah ah, darling, haven’t you grown tired of looking at your dirty clothes just piled on the floor like that over the past six weeks?" Then I would have stepped over his clothes, washed mine, folded them neatly and put them away. It's not so much that I don't believe in doing my man's laundry; anyone who knows me knows that I enjoy cleaning up anything dirty. But I don't do lazy people's work, and that was just a gross display of sloth as far as I'm concerned. In marriage, one has to pick one's battles; this wouldn't have been a fight, not on my part. But I'll be damned if anybody expects me to turn myself into a maid/mumu simply because I was convinced (deceived?) to be handcuffed to you for all eternity. The man has would have to have balls of steel, and even then, he'd have to make sure I don't have a blowtorch within reach to melt those suckers.

My friend laughed when I expressed my sentiments on the issue to her, and said she felt the same way. Then she asked me a question that I had to pause and think about. She said: "Why aren’t we submissive? What's wrong with us?" My answer at the time was that I guess we are just un-marry-able, and if we remain focused on marrying your average African man, I suppose we are. In a world market where young bachelors are already trying to exert themselves over single girls in a bid to find the obedient wife, my opinions and behaviors are certainly not amongst the most desirable. Un-marry-able? Hell, I’m un-date-able! It’s not that I mind being told what to do, but there is a time and place for everything and the respectability of the approach is paramount. My fellow Nigerian males are forever trying to control the way I speak, the way I choose to do--or not do-- my hair, even the pictures that I post on MSN Messenger. I once put up a big hand giving someone the finger, just for kicks, and two of them said they weren't going to talk to me anymore until I took it down because it was "un-ladylike", to which I responded: refer to my picture for further comment. When I took the picture down a week later, they had the audacity to express satisfaction at the "fact" that I saw fit to listen to their advice. Advice or orders?? If I were five years younger, I'd have put the picture back up and told them to sit on it and spin. But I digress. The point is: why do I, and so many other young women I know, remain so averse to being submissive to our significant others?

There is definitely a control element to this issue, but at the crux is the more important matter of respect and equality. Young African women are finally starting to see and understand their worth in the world as human beings and individuals, not as commodities to be sold and distributed by the male figures in their families into meaningless, soul-stripping marriages. We are intelligent (oftimes more intelligent than our partners--let's be real), we make more money, we are self-sufficient--and the Japanese are making sure that we become more self-sufficient every day with the creation of new and innovative "toys", if you catch my drift. We like having men around, sometimes, but we are realizing more and more that we don't really NEED them, per se. And the men, instead of understanding that what needs to happen now is for them to heed this Bible that they like to misquote when it suits them and treat us like the partners that we were created to be, choose instead to behave like giant children and throw tantrums in all colors and sizes. They want us to stop demanding exclusivity in our relationships. They want us to have as many children as they want, never mind our feelings on the issue. They want us to kneel before them in front of their friends and family and feed them cake, because surely that means that we believe they are our gods, or at the very least our masters. And I look at these men, thinking to myself, "I'm smarter than you, you loser!" and choose to walk away rather than parade myself as a spectacle, a spectacle with nothing to gain from false displays of humility.

And suddenly it makes so much more sense why no one is getting married young like they used to: the men are waiting for us (women) to reach our "desperate age". For some, it's 29; for others, 33. Either way, they're waiting for us to be so desperate for a partner that we'll put up with just about anything to get that ring. I may not even be 24 yet, but I say ha! to that, and know that I will still be saying ha! if and when I’m 34 and single; I will not mortgage my happiness and freedom for a piece of jewelry. My people need to re-educate themselves on what marriage really means. After all, what's the use of the title without the substance to back it up? African men still see marriage as a forum for them to display their "manliness”: wives should be docile and obedient birthing machines, unquestioning and non-provocative, and ready to satisfy their husbands' lust whenever the mistress(es) are unavailable. He brings home the bacon, she cooks it and feeds him the lion's share. And even if she's bringing home a leg of ham versus his strip of bacon, she better recognize that it doesn't mean anything but that she better kneel when she's serving him his pork, so further show that she doesn't consider herself better than him for making more money.

That's what I have to look forward to? I mean, I'm sorry, but if I must choose between that and a life without a partner, I choose my independence. At the very least, I know what it takes to make myself happy and I will do it without complaint. My former pastor tried to convince me that everyone had to get married; it was God’s wish for all of us. I don’t know about all that. I think God would prefer my happiness above all else, and I might just be happier as a single, independent woman. And, ultimately, I'd rather just get a dog.