by Demola Rewaju

If only men had more rules than clues, we would know that money is just a part of what it takes to keep a woman – a lesson we learn when she starts cheating with the gateman or when she complains that you don’t know how to satisfy her in bed (and there we were thinking we were totally rocking her world).

This post from last week found its way to YNaija’s website and the reaction was massive – I’m starting to suspect that my blog is being read by angels or demons who don’t comment after reading. From the comments on YNaija, one lady wondered why the pressure is often on women to do this or that in order to make a relationship work and I know it is true. In fairness, I’d planned to write a separate piece to brothers in the Oh Brother section of my blog talking about how men can avoid a woman like Ese Walter, a piece that would help men to steer clear of women that can destroy the golden marriage they have but somehow, that article never materialised. I had however written about the subject in this other article some months back.

[READ: Demola Rewaju: Your man and the Ese Walter of life]

But let’s examine that stereotype: is there more pressure on women than men to make relationship work? Truthfully, yes is the answer. From kindergarten boy/girl stories to teenage affairs and adult relationships, the impression created is that the woman has more at stake than the man and should therefore put in more effort. It is a pressure that women have allowed themselves to be burdened with for a very long time. Consider the pressure of getting married: I have an elder brother who is closer to forty than thirty and is in no apparent hurry to bring a wife home. I have a younger sister who is closer to thirty than forty and she is married with an over one year old kid. We live in a society that tells us something is wrong with an unmarried woman past a certain age. I really don’t like it, it’s just how it is. I secretly root for single and successful mothers like Funmi Iyanda and another dear female friend of mine who has three kids but is living her life for herself.

These women are quite few though. Only very few women can absorb the negative pressure of society which is usually channeled onto her through her mother. It is not a coincidence that both Funmi Iyanda and the dear friend I know have lost their biological mothers a while ago (Funmi lost hers at a very young age). Some women have freed themselves from the pressures of society but others can’t imagine going through life as a liberated lady without obeying the rules that women have to live by.

Go to any singles’ meeting and consider the ratio of girls to guys – it’s usually something like a dozen ladies to one man: women accept this pressure. I’ve seen women hold back on living their lives simply because they do not yet have a man – these women refuse to buy houses or any kind of visible property that may scare a man away. Someone needs to tell them that a man who is intimidated by the stuff you have isn’t worthy of having you.

Women want to be proactive, they want to do something other than sitting pretty waiting for the right man to come along, they want to attract him and somehow exert control over him and that’s how they created the rules that now put them under pressure. The dynamics of this pressure started with the desire of woman to exert more influence and control on man since the beginning of time – When it comes to the male approach to romance, our brains are wired from the age of 25 (or 21 these days) that the best way to woo a woman is with cash – a very straightforward solution. Remember the joke about a guy who hits the gym early one morning and asks the trainer which of the workout machines would help him get a date with the prettiest girl on campus within one week. Trainer takes one look at him and directs him to use the machine outside: an ATM machine.

If only men had more rules than clues, we would know that money is just a part of what it takes to keep a woman – a lesson we learn when she starts cheating with the gateman or when she complains that you don’t know how to satisfy her in bed (and there we were thinking we were totally rocking her world).

For a woman, there is almost a lifelong training session since she was a girl: you have to know how to cook, you have to know how to clean yourself up, you have to study your man like an opponent, know his weaknesses and play around them. You’ve got to be sexy but not slutty, you’ve got to be smart but not too intelligent, you’ve got to be humble but project confidence and many other antithetical maxims.

If we go by the religious beginnings, we find Eve feeding Adam an apple and from then on changing the dynamics of power to show that women influence men. From the scientific perspective of evolution, the ancient men held so much power over women that all you had to do was knock a woman out with a club and drag her into your cave for a session of selfish sex. Women had to do something more to keep the man coming back and perhaps show him that there is a vast difference between sex with a ‘dead’ (frigid) woman and a steamy session with a participating woman. Woman then went beyond that to show man that her favours are more than sexual – some proved themselves in warfare, others in statecraft and showed the world that women indeed run it. This article I posted a while ago explores the subject in greater detail.

So, yes, I agree that there is a lot of pressure on women to be a certain way in order to catch and retain a man but much of that pressure is invited by the woman and much of it has favoured women by giving them rules on how to deal with men and men are left with only clues on how to deal with women. Why does anyone think some guys resort to raping women or visiting brothels?(not that there is an excuse or that I agree with either). Why do some men find it easier to flirt from one lady to the other depending on which is willing to accommodate him? The truth is that most men don’t have the faintest clue to that age old question: what do women want. Some of us have spent a lifetime trying to find the answer and would give everything but our penises to find the answer. A wiser question would rather be: what does my woman want?

————————–

Read this article on Demola Rewaju’s blog

Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.