No one is saying wait and be idle…or that you have to marry at a particular age or its all over. What’s being said is if you are going to marry, best you get it right first time. Believe me there’s nothing more horrible than being stuck in an essence sucking marriage coupled with the emotional stress of maintaining a facade of all being well.

and the “waiting for a mate” just piques me!
that implies females putting their life on hold and waiting for the magical man to show up! in this day and age? what the heck for?
come on ladies, we need to stand up to society and refused to be fed the age old crap about the need to be married by a certain age or the need to be married period! we can define and chart the course of our own lives.

i am not anti marriage, as i am newly married.

So you see, waiting for your flight to Hawaii does not mean you will sit in your chair and wait for prince charming to come and scoop you up on his provate jet.

The truth is “I can do bad on my own”. I will rather be single dealing with heartache from only my issues, than married dealing with double trouble. And when i say heartache, i am not refering to the trails of marriage, i am refering to the major issues you can encouter because you didnt wait on the Lord (abusive husband to you and your children, cheating husband,blah blah blah)

No one ever said marriage was easy, but once again, if you’re starting out on a not so level ground, by compromising yourself just to say “i’m married” or for your family to be happy, imagine just how much more difficult that marriage will be. It may or may not always be beautiful Hawaii forever, only God knows, but we have to allow ourselves the best possible beginning that we can.

Ekene, your heart is in the right place and you make some very solid and valid points. It’s just that reading this article, even before you admit to being married, one can tell that you are, and so, while you may think you can relate, the truth is that you really can’t. To be honest, I fear you may have oversimplified this very complex issue. I am not advocating that women should jump and marry the first guy that asks, but the reality is, as time wears on, it will be naive to assume that a woman for whom marriage is important can afford to simply continue to wait, possibly in perpetuity for some ideal. With the onset of age, our options and prospects for marriage as African women dwindle because of our societal values, and of course, there’s the stubborn issue of our biological clocks. Unlike men, our reproductive capabilities decline significantly with age. Unlike men, we do not have the power dynamic in our favour when it comes to initiating relationships.

When a man goes after a woman, it is because he has seen in that woman something to which he is attracted, and so from the start, a man has far better odds of getting the mate he wants because from the onset he doesnt ever have to go after someone he’s not interested in – he can almost literally choose and select as it were. A woman however doesnt always have this luxury and is usually left at the mercy of the men who happen to find her desirable, men who she may or may not feel the same way about. This happens frequently enough and a woman will at some point have to address the gulf between what she wants and what is available to her. To suggest that if we all wait long enough, what we want will eventually come to us makes for a nice fairytale but in reality is hardly ever the case. Life isn’t always fair, we don’t always get our prayers answered, things don’t always work out in the end, and not every single woman out there will marry her prince charming if she waits long enough. Most married women I know have compromised in some way or the other, and this isn’t always necessarily a bad thing.

I’m not sure that it is helpful to continue to perpetuate this idea which we as females have been raised on, of this knight in shining armour that will come to us and give us some utopian Hawaiian picture of marriage. The truth is, in life I have found that even those that thought they were marrying the man of their dreams woke up sometime into their marriage and the dream had turned into a nightmare. So if one then waits and waits and waits for this plane bound for Hawaii and the plan finally lands, purportedly headed to Hawaii but enroute, encounters some severe turbulence and has to head to Alaska? What then?

And more importantly, is there really someone who can promise another a Hawaii of marriage? Isnt every single marriage laden with the potential to be either Hawaii or Alaska, depending on what the travellers make of it?

I think the real issue we need to address is this. For too long, we women have over romanticised the institution of marriage. I am a hopeless romantic myself and I want what I want. I am starting to realise though that as with everything else in life, chasing perfection is bound to be a futile exercise, so I have to take stock and assess my options. Determine what my real needs are. What my motivation for marriage is based on. The picture perfect, the pragmatic or a combination of both? What must I absolutely have in a partner and what would be nice to have? What have I always thought I must have, which in reality I really could do without. What are my deal makers and deal breakers. Pretty much the exercise that you say your friend was engaging in. The man she was considering had by your own admission a lot of qualities she had wanted, and some too that she had hoped to do without. She needed to determine what she could and couldnt live with and off the back of that analysis chart her next step with that man, not dismiss him off hand. No woman should dive into a situation she has assessed will lead to trouble, but every woman who has been waiting I believe owes herself an honest reappraisal of her options, and her wish list. Without this, I fear we are setting ourselves up for some major disillusionment because it may well turn out that Mr Right whom we had all assumed would show up as a matter of course if we waited long enough may never turn up afterall, and we’d have waited only to never marry, or to end up marrying the Mr not so Right we had despised 10 years before…