I really loved her. We’d been friends for almost seven years. But then she got married and now almost every month she’d put me on the stand and make me feel inadequate for not finding a man yet. “Do you like anyone? Does anyone like you? I need updates! You should learn to lower your standards. But you know the problem is that men don’t like outspoken women so you have to tone it down. Yes, he is a mean drunkard but no man is perfect. I want you to be happy the way I am now.” Eventually, I stopped calling or picking up her phone calls. I started ignoring her texts. She asked me if she’d done anything wrong and I lied; I alternated between saying that I was busy and saying that my phone had issues. But really, here’s what I wanted to say to her and all the women who get married and suddenly treat their single friends with condescension. Firstly, you need to know that we love you. We want to spend time with you, host you, come and have lunch at your home. We want to be ‘aunty’ to your kids. But you alienate us in favour of fellow married women because you’ve been told that your single friends will steal your man. It’s insulting. It’s insulting because by suspecting that all your single friends want your man, you’re assuming that because they are single, they find every man desirable. So your husband couldn’t possibly be too short or too fat or too loud or too average-witted for their liking. And if you are worried that your husband might cheat on you with your own friend, isn’t that a reflection of his character; something you need to worry about? You’ve been told that your single friends will poison your marriage because they are envious when in fact some of us live for inspirational stories of true love especially in this generation where insincerity is the norm. We want you to succeed because it will give us the courage to jump in. And here’s the hard truth; just because you’re married doesn’t mean that you’re better. A common misconception is women who are ‘marriage material’ have similar ‘good’ traits. But if that were true, all my quiet, gentle, kind, submissive and enterprising beautiful friends would be married while my big-headed loud friends who are argumentative and have no training in home economics would all still be single. So don’t insinuate that your single friends have to emulate your character or behavior to find a man. You’re not better than them. You just found someone who is okay with who you are and vice versa. And remember that different people want different things. And because different people want different things, stop telling your single friends to lower their standards. So you’re happy to play obedient wife and sidekick. Good for you. But don’t force your belief on me when patriarchy makes me gag and I’d rather stay single than accept anything less than an equal partnership.
