The marriage question: When a woman asks

My friend was with her ex for 11 years. It would sit perfectly into one of those occasionally told stories, which in turn trended, on Twitter. As the story goes, she met this guy at 17 and after a year of wooing, she fell for love and they sailed and soared for another 10 years and then one day, it all ended.

A male friend told me about his last relationship shortly after graduating from the university. They had both served in the NYSC programme and the love flame between them couldn’t have been warmer. Well that flame quenched when, shortly after service, she popped the question.

No she didn’t propose; that’s for the men as tradition holds. The women ask the marriage question. It comes in variants such as, ‘ When are you getting married?’ or ‘When are we getting married?’ or what not. Followed by a story about her being next in line to get married in her family and how she has younger ones to carter to and what not.

For him, it was the former and the moment he told his honest answer, which was that he wasn’t ready to get married, she left.

He may think she probably left for a prospective suitor who could grant her wishes faster than he probably could (and as she may have told him), but for her it was a simple case of, she wasn’t the one he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. And no matter the amount of time she may have waited to ask the question, it would probably still be the same answer he would give. So why not find out sooner?

That is mostly the mentality of women who end a relationship based on the response to the marriage question. Because for a woman, it isn’t about how long she has to wait for him until he’s ready. It is about if it is worth waiting for; if he would want to spend the rest of his life with her. For her to have asked, it meant that she was willing to spend the rest of hers with him too. Not necessarily that she was ready to walk down the aisle. Heck half the time, the women themselves aren’t ready, they just need that assurance it would eventually happen.

This doesn’t mean that if she leaves, she didn’t love him enough. If she left, it is because she found out he didn’t love her that much enough to want to be happily ever after with her.

Truth is, it is a skill that most don’t value or even have. Because if most girls saw the bright side of this, there would be lesser stories of guys dating a lady for six years only to find the right partner in another woman barely a month after ending the relationship and thereby leaving with curses as gift after.

It could have saved my friend from getting dumped when she almost hit the big three-o, should she have read signs into him not giving her straight answers when she asked at certain ages, while the years passed by.

It is a kind of a defense mechanism. Abetting the unseen. It helps reach reality faster instead of later when ‘the market value may have dropped a notch’.

Ending up two to three years later still unmarried isn’t a punishment for taking a hike. It simply puts the woman back into the market for a more worthy suitor, and even though the new relationship with him would either last longer or shorter, she is certain it is to infinity.

In a way, it does both parties a favor. He doesn’t get to trend on social media for keeping his woman captive for years and eventually not wifeying her and she gets to take another chance at love and nailing it possibly.

So if a woman you’re dating, at a certain point, asks you the marriage question, that’s a woman who knows what she want and isn’t afraid to reach for it. And you would do her and yourself good to answer her honestly and not chastise or hate her for spoiling what she foresaw not to work out. She chose her own bravery.

A man may argue that she may be wrong and indeed he was considering the prospects of wifeying her but he just needed a little more time to be sure. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that; it just depends on how you respond to the marriage question. Choose your words carefully as anything you say then, holds ground. It is only from your response that she would be able to tell how you feel about it.

Women can tell if it is never going to happen or if there are prospects [even if you don’t use ‘we’ in most sentences]. Most women know the truth but ignore with the hope that the eventuality will turn around at the bend.