Let’s celebrate single women’s ability to reject the toxicity of men

If anything, lockdown has shown the institution of marriage going up in flames – especially the black marriage.

Rumours abound of imminent splits and confirmed divorces among celebrity couples where infidelity played a role. We came to celebrate these unions, set them as goals, because they seemed to be breaking the moulds.

Here were young, black and gifted individuals who complimented each other and gone were the days of a woman being dependent on a man who would only be in the marriage when it suited him.

Or so we thought. We would try and sweep under the carpet the whispers of cheating husbands. And when black Twitter finds the man cheating, he retweets it and pokes fun at it.

Despite the wife and children having seen it now, who have slept many a night with pillows wet from sobbing, and heard many mornings’ silences broken by the screams of arguments about infidelity.

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I speak as a black woman, as a wife and mother. We want and deserve better. For years there has been an unwritten expectation that black women must just grin and bear it.

They must weather the storms of infidelity, see the faces of their husbands in faces of neighbourhood children, go toe-to-toe with the mistresses of their husbands and survive the abuse of the husband’s family.

Then, at the very end of it all, be celebrated as women who held their families together … Are these are the kinds of conversations that we hold in 2022 – who is “the side” and who “the main”? Two women fighting in public for the adoration of a man who plays them off against each other? I cannot fathom the mediocrity.

We teach others how to treat us.

And as we continue to shame more and more single women for the inability to secure a husband, I am more inclined to celebrate their ability to reject the calibre of men that society has been producing in high numbers. We have to be able to call a spade a spade – that men might not be marriage material.

It’s not an “us” problem, this is all you. Women cannot be expected to sacrifice themselves in exchange for a life of loneliness in marriage.