The ‘Leftover Women’: Life is what you live it!

AGGIE: I’M A SINGLE LADY at 42, will a man still marry me?Am I under a spell? I feel ashamed and embarrassed. I clocked 42 last July and to be candid I’m not into any serious relationship. I’m the first daughter of seven children. Just last year, our last born who works with a telecom company got married to her longtime boyfriend, leaving only me hugging ‘tubes and tyres.’ I’ve gone for prayers in several churches; they promised me that my husband would appear in no distant time.When I was in my mid 20s, I had many ‘toasters’ but they were never my dream men. I used to think my kind of guy was the tall, dark and handsome one. Preferably banker, but now they are not forthcoming. Now, I’m even ashamed of living in the same house with my parents at my age.Please what can I do to help myself at 42?The Dark NightYou can climb all the hills in this land but you might still not have answered Aggie well enough. In China, they are called ‘Leftover Women.’ The Chinese Ministry of Education coined the phrase in 2007 to define the “modern urban women most of whom have high education, high income, and high IQ. They are nice-looking, but they are relatively demanding in choosing spouses so that they haven’t found ideal partners for marriage.”By 25, most women are expected to have completed education and started a family, even if they are into the dot.com corporate world. But author Joy Chen, in her book, Do not Marry Before age 30, seeks to allay most fears women have, from the scientific ones such as reduced ability to give birth down to the looming fear that no man would want to approach a woman at 35-plus.What a woman like Aggie is bound to face in African setting is social scorn, never mind that a 21st Century woman lives her life the way it comes. They are the independent women, when they choose to make a baby, the father of the child will never be known. She will want to raise her child singly.But there are times that you need to marry when you are way past 35. Family and societal pressure becomes too much to hold. Aggie describes it all above. So, what do you do?It’s important to assess yourself. If you all your affairs are relationshits instead, then you need to look into your character. Chances are that you have raised the bar too high for many a prospective suitor, who end up swallowing a lump while failing to tell you how they feel. Drop the IQ desire. This thing of saying you know about Alabama, Buckingham Palace, Che Guevera and you can discuss the role Rosa Parks played in the Black Movement in America will send the lot of us who can only talk about Alpha, Mswati III and Mwai Kibaki for other options, including at KBC. If you lower the bar to Taxi Motors and street vendors, you are going to find a mate sooner than a Ugandan can take to learn corruption.How many more friends can you make in your life and how open are you? You need to be honest with those around you. Don’t hide your feeling, just like you should never be desperate. They say desperation gives courage to the cowards. It will only help you faster into what Chen calls insidious relationship, where there is no love in the family. This means extramarital affairs. Lots of it. And when the children come, they see no love bonding in mom and dad and grow up to know no meaning of love.Aggie, at 42, you don’t need to look for love. Sometimes, we fall in love by default. Love is built, it can be a process. That’s why people date. So when a man comes along and he has some worthy qualities, give him a try. Then let that touch of love grow from within.

Lifestyle

The ‘Leftover Women’: Life is what you live it!