Now women shun marriage

Philomena, a student of management in her mid-twenties at the School of Finance and Banking in Gikondo seems to have it all. She is on the way to sewing up a good education, has a decent family background and rates pretty high than most of her friends in the looks department. The only surprising fact about her future ambitions is not in the plush job she hopes to rope into her life early or the blue Audi she hopes to drive sooner than later, the proper middle-class apartment she intends to own. “I only need a handsome man to help me have a child.” Philomena is among many a woman who is unlikely to choose the marriage and commitment road, despite the huge social-cultural negative tag that comes with it today and who express a growing resentment for man’s supposed natural right to philandering. “I just do not need that drama in And it has nothing to do with the shortage of eligible men available on the bachelors’ list. “I have come to learn that beauty is not the easiest way to keep a man in the bag and for me that is a tough new reality that I have now come to accept.” Like Philomena, Cadette, a 29 year old administrator in a government parastatal, just cannot come to terms with the assumption that all the good men are already taken. “The good men seem not in a hurry to settle down while the rest are busy pursuing you from their safe little nasty cocoon of marriage to someone else, ready to make self-indulgent ego trips to you, the other woman, you, the accessory to his side life.” So if a woman has got the looks, the brains, a proper kinky side and well, willingness to dive into the bottomless pit of love and commitment, what else would a man want? “A tremendous amount of young men’s reluctance to commit has to do with living together,” says David Popenoe, the project’s co-director of the Rutgers’ National Marriage Project. “Guys can postpone marriage indefinitely, with all the benefits of having a quasi-wife.” A situation of where confident and focused women are ready to get hitched so that they can get that stage out of their life and focus on important things can only find laid back men who are worried about choosing a wrong mate and do not mind waiting longer for marriage with the benefit of lack of a biological clock to worry about, develops. As a result, young women seem increasingly discouraged about finding a lifetime mate, says University of Chicago sociologist Linda Waite. And there is a creeping reluctance on their part to marry, she says. “One of the things women have done is invest more in their own careers. They have put off forming close relationships and getting married.” Like Philemona and Cadette, many women have clearly decided to separate their own life from that of the person they intend to marry or rather the man they will never marry and instead settle down to finding a decent way of feeding their maternal instinct with their ‘own’ child. So, is this a worrying sign for single, undecided men who just can not help but keep putting off their marriage? When single women talk about marriage, they usually speak of the positives: Love, commitment, security, a steady life partner, and a stable family environment. When researchers asked men why they stayed single, six of the top reasons were perceived negatives. Men fear the economic effects of divorce, Popenoe says. “They are in that stage of life where they are building their income, their economic independence. The worst thing would be if they were to lose it all.” Mugisha, an IT specialist, also believes that women are beginning to get one up on them. “They have seen as cheating on them with impunity and the heart breaking has molded a new kind of young women who just want to enjoy their life.” He continues. “They date men but they do not get emotional about it because they know where it will end and that means when a man is tired of playing and wants to settle with one of his women, she can make it very difficult.” However Atlanta psychiatrist Frank Pittman, author of Grow Up!, thinks that single men are loosing out on a whole lot of things. “Married men are healthier than single men, wealthier, they live longer and happier lives, they have more sex,” “They have somebody who knows them, and tolerates them anyway.” Ends