Calling all girls!

What do men really want? How to please your man? How to look your best for your man? 5 secrets for snagging Mr Right. These are the sorts of headlines that scream at us from our so-called women's magazines on a daily,weekly and monthly basis. Its not like getting advice on how to get the best value-for-money mortgage or how to take care of your car to get the best mileage out of it. Men are not toys, pets or aliens. They are human beings, every girl has at least one in her life be it her father, brother or friend. They grew up on the same planet as us, were fed the same food as us, taught by the same teachers in school and slept on the same sorts of mattresses as we girls did. Why are the two sexes so different then and why do we need a virtual manual to ensure the best relationship with our men?

Even with all the manuals that we pore over trying to understand why men think and behave a certain way, we girls are still pushed to our wits end trying to crack the matrix which is the mind of a man.

Now here is the thing- women grow up wanting attention and affection whilst men are bred to seek reassurance and boosts to their egos. These might sound like two very similar concepts but I assure you they are different. In the case of women, we just need to feel wanted and needed just for the sake of it which is why a girl will happily keep 5 or 6 'toasters' running at the same time even though she isn't interested in any single one of them. Men on the other hand need reassurance that they are the man, that they know everything; they are pleased when we appear not to be able to change a 'simple' flat tyre or a light bulb so that their macho sides can come through to the rescue.

Where am I going with this? I, along with 49.9% of the female population on this planet, have given up trying to understand what goes on in men's heads let alone mould ourselves into what men want us to be. We have given up trying to understand why men are the way they are. The other 50.1% are still teenagers and don't really care.Why do they refuse to understand the importance of affection and attention in the life of a woman whether she be their grandmother, sister or wife?

Men are so quick to point out when a woman is nagging but what they fail to realize is that it would not be nagging if they went ahead and took directions the first time around. Okay, I will narrow down this write up to the specific context of boy-girl relations. A girl would typically call her man just because she wants to have a chat/hear his voice/vent about her day. When she finds that she's the one responsible for most of the outgoing calls between her and her man she will typically request that he try and call her regularly. Maybe, everyday. Hence, this man is forced to call her out of duty, he is merely fulfilling an obligation. Meaning he has no desire to actually speak to her everyday, he is only doing it because she asked him.Why is this always so?

Second case in point is the busy man. Statistics have claimed that women are better at multi-tasking than men. Be it the more general multi-tasking involving holding down a career, raising kids and keeping the home spotless or the more specific multi-tasking involving painting our toenails, talking on the phone and dancing to music. This is what I've read over and over again anyway. Why is it that when men get busy, you suddenly cannot find them anywhere with a torch light, they don't call their women for days on end and when you finally find their brake lights, they say 'I've been so busy, I haven't had the time to call you'. This is one excuse that I will never ever understand. How busy is busy, really?

Thirdly and finally, before this sounds like the post of a crazy blogger with relationship issues, why is it that men find it so hard to say what is on their minds? The most articulate and eloquent men suddenly go all taciturn in the middle of personal drama in their lives. They call you with a rough edge in their tone, sounding like you owe them money. When you ask what the matter is, you must have faulty psychic powers because he is fine and that edge you thought you heard in his voice is just a figment of your imagination. Weeks later when the problem has blown over, they insist that you should have been more patient and gentle in getting the problem out of them.

Sigh.....men are baffling and sometimes I really do think that they are from Mars. perhaps if we women started to act more like men then we would have peace of mind because they don't seem to have the same sorts of heartaches that we have concerning all the petty stuff. Just get busy and don't pick up your phone because it really is impossible to walk and talk at the same time isn't it. And next time something or someone really annoys us at work or at school or even in our father's houses, pick up the phone and call your man and mumble a word or two without telling him the REAL reason why we are angry.

NEVER HAD TO LOOK FOR LOVE

I have been reading a lot about girl-boy relationships lately, even written a couple of posts on the subject myself. The material on this topic will never run out and I will never get tired of reading about relationships, and issues concerning it nor writing about it. Now I don’t want to get too personal and write about my issues here but I would like to say a few things concerning a few things.

I do not think there is anything wrong with a woman going after a man. Notice I did not use the word ‘chasing’. If a man has indicated that he is not interested in you, as a grown- ass woman you swallow the rejection and move on. The way I see it, it’s like being turned down after a job interview. As a matter of fact, I intensely admire women who go after the man of their dreams- it shows great organizational skills and burning ambition to know what you want, identify it amidst a sea of prospects and pursue it. Yes, we all 'know'(read: have been told) that all men like the thrill of the chase but I don’t think any man would disqualify a woman as a potential simply because she called him first or responded to his text within 30 seconds. The key is subtlety.

Now I’m no relationship expert, neither do I have any qualifications in psychology or what not, but I am a woman and you don’t get to my age without learning a thing or two about boys, girls and chemistry. As far as I am concerned, we usually know within 5 minutes of close contact with another person whether they are someone who we can ever see ourselves being with or admit to being in a relationship with. Yes, just five minutes. For some people it’s the voice- a person’s voice speaks volumes about them. Some people claim that a deep, booming voice in a man indicates that he’s a natural leader and able to influence people and wield a position of authority. Hence any squeaky-voiced contenders may as well fall back.

I was reading a recent post by my good friend at http://thirdworldprofashional.blogspot.com, which sort of inspired my current post. She was talking about men who string you along but do not want to marry you; I had so much to comment on that I decided to simply consolidate all my comments here because a lot of it is not directly related.
A friend of mine was telling me about this amazing man who she ‘dated’ for 7 months but never introduced to any one as her boyfriend. The reason being that he did not embody those values which she believed her significant other should possess as standard. This had nothing to do with religion, ethnicity, looks or even financial standing. It had a lot to do with the fact that, she came from a family of strong, commanding men and this guy, ‘M’ was the complete opposite of these things. He was a bit too sensitive, obedient and forthcoming. A little bit too adoring, reverential and had a bit too much time for her. She was used to the man wearing the trousers in the relationship and the woman having to seek the man’s face and beg for his time. It wasn’t that M did not have a job, quite the contrary he was a manager in his workplace and oversaw 12 staff- why did he have to time to spend 4 hours of his working day speaking to her on the telephone?

Another friend of mine told me how she met this gorgeous tottie at a house party and decided that he was exactly her type. He had the rugged good looks, the quirky individual style that involved the wearing of a lot of peg-leg trousers and bowler hats as well as being a music producer of techno and electro in his spare time. Let no one ever call him the typical Nigerian boy. She set about trying to present herself in the most girl friend-ly way possible- no foul language in his presence, cooking 5-course meals, confiding her deepest darkest secrets to make him do the same. This guy being the non-typical Nigerian boy, told her straight up that he had decided within 5 minutes of meeting her that she was not girlfriend material. Ouch, some of you may say, but this isn’t the most tragic thing on earth. It just confirms my theory that if a guy wants to ’wife’ you or ‘girlfriend’ you, even an infinite number of burnt meals prepared for him, him being 22 years old and unemployed or how many small, petite and light skinned girls he’s dated in the past even though you are a tall Amazon goddess with hips to rival Oprah Winfrey will not change his mind( and vice versa).I do not know the rhyme or reason for this.

Seeing is believing they say and I had to move back to Nigeria for two and a half years to confirm for myself the heights which to which some women will go in order to secure a band around their finger. This particular point is inspired by a post on a blog I just recently started following- http://www.miafarradaily.blogspot.com/- where the author was ranting about thirsty women and market spoilers, laugh out loud funny but it did get me thinking. Thinking about women who simply do not want to be alone, the thought of singledom is as severe as a sentence of life imprisonment with hard labour. Now I am not here to preach all that nonsense about being secure in your own company and enjoying being single as I believe everybody has their own threshold for loneliness . Some people rely on affection and attention and would simply expire if they didn’t have a steady stream of pingers on their case( where did I read that men don’t bother to actually call women nowadays except you’re their girlfriend) whilst others are happy to chat with men one at a time until they make that connection. I won’t tell you which category I fall into!

The first category of women are those that always have a pot boiling on the back burner so they never run out of samples to pick from if push comes to shove. The second category of women are more laid back leaving everything to fate knowing that the more you look the less you see and sometimes you cannot really engineer these things. I do know one thing for sure and it is that our resumes cannot be carbon copies of each other’s. Different men are attracted to different things and it is not necessarily the fact that you don’t wear short and tight dresses and have never stepped into a nightclub in your life nor that you are an almost-Michelin-starred chef and can whip up a three course meal with a blindfold on and one hand in your pocket that will make a man take you seriously. Sometimes these things are just your luck(destiny/fate/God's will/karma- delete according to your faith).
PS: I’m no saint but I’ve never had to look for love.

10 years older

I remember when my mum was 45 and I said to her 'mum wow you look so good even though you're almost 50', meaning this as a compliment.She turned to me with a look of steel and said 'even 49 is very far from 50'.And today,12 years later I myself have come to realise that this is the gospel. Last September I returned to the UK to start my masters programme in International law. For some reason, I imagined that I was going to have an identical experience to my crazy 3 years as an undergraduate in London.Nothing could be further from the truth!
Back in those days, I was known as a party-rider, and this was before the expression was patented by 9ce in his song. I was partying 2 weeks before my exams,the night before a 9am shift at work. My middle initial was S for spontaneous. I had no idea what the notion of planning entailed.Schedules were a foreign word, I never experienced tiredness and if anyone's swagger needed to be gingered, I was the go-to person. The library was a social spot for us in our first and second years, in fact it was so bad that my friend Adanna used to wear a disguise in the library just so I could not find her and come and distract her.
Fast forward to 3 years after my graduation from university, and 18 months after I wrote my last examination at the Nigerian law school.I am a post graduate student and even 24 year olds are positively new borns as far as I'm concerned.I'm consumed with a burning ambition like I have never had in my life. I curse my laid back attitude whilst I was at uni and I really wish I'd done better in my 1st and 2nd years.
If only I could get into a time machine, I would go back to my summers of lounging at home, channel surfing and party hopping and do an internship. I would have devoted more time to developing my writing, penning that novel that I've dreamt about authoring since I was 10 years old.I would have sought out and read all the literary classics from Jane Eyre to Things Fall Apart to Wuthering Heights.I would have done more travelling and explored this big wide world around me which I only started doing in 2007.I'm proud to say I now have 7 countries under my belt!
My little cousin who's 17, started university in Ghana last September and the last time I went out clubbing with my flatmate in Nottingham, I was easily 8 years older than everybody on the dance floor. I could not get myself to move my body, it was a parody. Whenever someone calls me to go out, I look first at my warm bed and then at my delicious half-read novel and I answer negative. I have outgrown those days of grooving left right and centre. I am a job-seeker,I am one-half of an adult relationship, I am an invitee to the 10 year reunion at my High school and I am currently receiving queries from my grandparents about whether they will be alive when I walk down the aisle.
I think it's important to recognize that life comes in stages though. I enjoyed my youth, I tried everything at least once, I discovered myself, I changed my ideology oh at least 5 times, I made some friends, fought some and lost some. I lived on my own, then moved in with my parents. I lived abroad then lived in Nigeria, made my own money and then taxed my parents. I met the wrong boy and then met the right man.Life is a metamorphosis, we just have to embrace the next stage.

Love is all around us...or not?

Nobody has ever successfully defined love to the satisfaction and agreement of the world at large. Someone once said it is a feeling that you feel that you've never felt before. That could be any number of other emotions though...even hate.

People 'fall out of' love too. This, I've never particularly understood. If love is the emotion felt by a mother towards her child then love is unconditional and pure, right? There isn't any one thing the child does to earn the love. A child can earn his mother's trust or respect by conducting himself in a certain way but apparently you do not get to experience what a mother's love feels like until you become a mother yourself.I guess this automatically expels all the men in the world from experiencing this particular brand of love. And all the women who never have children.

The other kind of love that I am aware of is between a man and a woman. The one between Leonardo Di Caprio and Kate Winslet in Titanic that made him risk his life in the face of certain death by drowning to go and rescue her from her flooded cabin. Or was it the other way around? This kind of love is fierce( I've been told), it literally burns a hole through your soul and has a lot to do with the physical too. How then can we tell the difference between love and lust? Is lust a certain kind of love?

Then there's this other theory about 'love grows'. Back in the days, our grandparents and some people's parents said to them, there was nothing like dating or getting to know someone. It was really about finding a suitable man or woman and getting married. The love was sure to follow if the woman cooked the food in the right way and gave him kids of the right sex. Conversely if the man had a sustainable source of income and paid the brideprice upfront (no credit), all the boxes were ticked.The rationale behind this was that you do not stay with a person for 10, 20 years and not find something to love about them. We modern people today call this convenience. The last resort for the people who get to a certain age and think: 'that's it, the search is over'. See 'tick tock , now is the time' post.

Is love an emotional or a physical feeling? We're all familiar with pain but that too, it seems, is psychological. If you stick a pair of scissors into the leg of a paralysed person 5 times they do not feel it. Is there still pain but they don't feel it? Or is there actually no pain at all? I wonder if love is a bit like that, you close your eyes, put up a wall, disqualify the person but it's still there...only that you can't feel it.