Losing your worth trying to impress a man

Relationships today have become tedious affairs that require those involved to always be a step ahead in knowing how to please one another. For women, efforts to please men and hence become more desirable are often times taken to the extremes.

Today, people are easily connected and share social issues easily through social media platforms. Facebook and Whatsapp groups have become common arenas where people, majorly women, freely talk about different matters – mostly men. Most Facebook groups have more than 6,000 members, and a Whatsapp group can average about 100 members.

Issues such as how to impress a man, how to make a man fall in love with a woman, how to deal with a man who has extra marital affairs or a cheating boyfriend and the likes are usually at the top of the list of discussed topics.

A simple survey by Woman reveals that, majority of women lose their dignity and are used and abused in the process of trying to impress a man. They also forget in a relationship, it’s the happiness of both partners that matters, and not one’s ability to please the other, it’s a reciprocal affair.

The survey further revealed that, most women think that happiness has to be derived from either the husband or boyfriend. They forget that the decision to be happy is a gradual process that grows with the relationship.

Amina Salehe, 35, a primary teacher grew up seeing her mother trying so hard to make sure her father and the entire family are happy. The father would get special treatment compared to other members of the family. However her father offered no such special treatment towards her mother.

Amina’s mother worked as a nurse. With a nursing job, she would sometimes go for night shifts. Each day this occurred, she would go above and beyond to make sure that her husband got a special meal she prepared the afternoon before the shift, while the rest of the family would eat food prepared by the house help.

“I could sense a bit of bitterness from my mother. She regularly complained of being exhausted and hardly had any time for herself,” speaks Amina, adding “even so, she still continued doing things for my father that he could manage to do on his own.”

Sharing challenges

Mariam Juma, 42, is a Facebook group administrator, handling a group of more than 6,000 members. She is a banker and a mother of three children. The idea to start a Facebook group came after realising a lot of women silently suffer in their marriages and relationships and have no one to share their bad experiences with. Such experiences can range from physical to verbal abuse in confines of their homes. Such women decide to stay silent because they want to please their men.

As a way of sharing such experiences, Mariam decided to talk to her four friends and agreed to set up a group that is used as a forum for ladies to talk about their life and challenges.

“It has never been easy to deal with women who are broken and frustrated. There are many women out there who want to please their men above anything else but are just lost and don’t know what to do. To make it more comfortable for women to open up about their relationships, we decided to allow them to come with their concerns right in the inbox and we hide their identity,” says Mariam.

A woman being submissive and willing to do anything in a bid to please her man stems right from childhood. According to Mariam, during the three years that the group has been active she has realised that parents can play a vital role in changing the mind set of women who are so keen on pleasing their husbands. “Parents are failing their daughters when it comes to how a woman should live with her husband,” she speaks.

Most of the questions aired in the group are from women who are in relationships that are characterised with abuse and other forms of mistreatment, but can’t seem to get out of such relationships because they love their husbands and are willing to withstand the ordeal.

“I just think parents should go the extra mile to educate a girl child from an early stage on how valuable they are. They should also teach the girls not to put anyone before them. They should teach them that being happy is a decision that can be made by a woman without depending on a man to make her happy,” Mariam speaks.

Joyce Joram, 30, also a member of the group which Mariam administrates agrees that parents have a lot to do for the girl child to break that mentality of being submissive to men.

“Most posts I go through are from ladies who are being beaten, cheated on, pushed out of their marital houses, their money being used without their consent and still stay in the same marriage,” says Joyce. Women go through all this trouble because they are afraid that their man will decide to leave them if they voice any objection.

Joyce further says that some ladies who share the same man meet in these groups and instead of finding a solution to their predicament these women decide to fight each other for a chance to continue being with the man. It is baffling how a woman can still desire to live with a man whom she has ascertained is involved in extra-marital affairs.

Instead of depriving themselves of a chance to experience true love, it is expected of such women to sit down and amicably look for a solution to the problem. Pleasing a man is good, but a line needs to be drawn to determine a point of limitation.

Changing your looks

There are women who change the way they look simply because they want to look more desirable to their men. They buy slimming pills, change their complexion, all because their man wants them to look a certain way.

Chris Mauki, a counsellor and motivational speaker who mostly speaks on behalf of voiceless women, says that, poverty has a lot to do with this tendency of women losing themselves in the process of trying to impress a man.

In the past, a woman used to be perceived as a weaker sex, and as a result she was unjustly treated. She was deprived of important things such as education, right to own property and so forth. Today, the fact that a woman continues to please a man unabated and in the process deprives herself of freedom and a right to enjoy life, she is subconsciously subjecting herself to an inferior status.

“What is happening today sets women back and makes them lose confidence in believing that they are enough. They are not meant to make men happy. Their lives matter, and they don’t only belong in the kitchen,” says Mauki.

Growing by that trend, some tribes even went as far as considering a girl child to only be meant for marriage, taking care of the family, and pleasing her husband.

Mauki further says that, with a very poor level of thinking, people fail to understand that all the activities being done by a woman at home such as taking care of the family, are more significant in comparison to a man who goes to work and then straight to the bar with friends after work before returning back home. “To break the glass ceiling among women themselves, a very serious talk at a family level needs to be done. And whoever preaches about being tolerant in marriage and relationships needs to differentiate between tolerance and endurance,” Mauki states.

Women should also stand their ground and say no to men who take them for granted. They should be the managers of their own life and shouldn’t be afraid to fight for their happiness.

Reports from various websites suggest that if you want to be happier begin by being good to yourself. Being good to yourself will always bring back the ability to do the things you have always wanted to do but not able.

It says that happiest people go out of their way to treat themselves right and they do something nice for themselves each day. They set appropriate boundaries and take care of themselves by saying no to things when they need to.

When you love yourself, you understand that saying no to something you don’t want to do is an act of kindness, and you don’t walk around with negative feelings toward the person who asked you to do something you didn’t want to do, reads part of the online article.

Things that will keep you be happy are to listen to yourself, listen to how you talk to yourself, and the internal tone of voice you use. If you criticise yourself you are ruining the chances of self confidence.

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