A young, stunning Ugandan woman posted on TikTok recently, the type of men she will never be caught dating or in courtship with, and her standards were quite high.
She does not want men who are not perfect gentlemen – they had better open doors and pull out chairs for her. She does not want a man who talks dirty to her during a dating/courtship.
She does not want questions about her income. He had better be generous, he had better be rich… and on and on. She made it clear, she is not poor and will not be asking a man for money, but he had better know how to give her some of his money too.
The comment section ‘ate her alive’, but I understood her perfectly. In fact, she ended the post by saying, she is very much aware she is likely to end up all alone, and that is okay by her; she is not willing to compromise on what she wants.
Well, gone are the days when marriage was a woman’s single, biggest achievement in life – to the point that some women I know swore by the mantra, ‘a toxic marriage is better than no marriage at all’.
These days, due to trends from the West filtering in through social media, exposure through travel and film, the Gen Zs and Millennials seem to have a totally different take on love, life and sex.
No amount of slut-shaming seems to dissuade them from a rapidly catching-on phase, where they find their sex on the go, are very much into sex toys, are freely talking about practices such as ‘freezing their eggs’, and do not care much about commitment anymore.
Our ancestors must be doing backflips in their graves! Just like men, young women are now chasing and securing the bag, and it is difficult for the other gender to comprehend that a man can come to a woman dangling the marriage carrot, and she does not bite, unless it has additional frills tied to it.
“My daughter brought her fiancé home for introduction (okugamba obugyenyi), and we discussed the bigger ceremony of kuhingira and an eventual wedding,” a friend recently shared.
“After a few months, she came to me complaining that her fiancé was pestering her to move in with him, but she was not interested. Not even in the kuhingira, or church wedding.”
On pressing her further for why she had hosted a kugamba obugyenyi when she had no intentions of following through with the marriage, she said she just wanted a taste of the function’s glamour, and to be the centre of attention.
Imagine that! But I did not find it surprising. Many young women even go all the way with the wedding, when they have zero intentions of celebrating any anniversary with their newlywed husbands.
The moment their plane hits the first air pockets, they are out of there. I don’t know what things will be like by the time the Gen Alphas are entering the marriage mart. Strange sex and marriage trends that we thought were limited to Europe and countries such as Japan, may soon be with us.
Already, our fertility rates are not what they used to be in the 1990s and early noughties; expect them to keep falling, considering that even in far-flung villages of Busoga and beyond, young women are abandoning marriages and homes to go secure the bag in the Arab world.
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