A letter to a single lady

I had the rare privilege some time ago to have this conversation with a young unmarried lady, and I thought I may share this with everyone out there. So please help me draw the attention of every single person you know to this piece. This may be useful to them, but even if it’s not new knowledge, at least it will help reinforce the old understanding that they have had before now.

So this lady was asking me how I met my wife.  She said, “Did you pray for your wife to be a particular type of person, or to meet her in a particular way?”

 I replied “With the benefit of hindsight, I got the type of wife that I wanted. I wasn’t looking for her when I met her. I was looking for me. I was looking to getting to a better version of me, to make more of me with what was already put in me. In the process of me doing that, she showed up. In her, I met my partner and together we built a better me.

Now this is the story of my own life, I was not the perfect man, neither was I the perfect husband. Even now, I am still being formed, and my wife is playing an important role in helping God to form me.

Then she asked me, “how I can be like that to whoever I will marry?”

That was when I really started to talk to her. And this same thing I now repeat to all the ladies who are not yet married who may read this,

The first thing a yet to be married lady should do is to keep working on getting to be who God wants her to be! “Work on yourself first! God has made you someone else’s helpmeet, but it is important that by the time you meet the person, you are ready to hit the ground running. Adam saw Eve and it was clear to him that Eve was the flesh of his flesh and the bone of his bones. So until you meet the man, you must continue to build yourself up, to improve yourself, to be ready as a wife in waiting. The Calabar maidens used to go a fattening room to get prepared to marry their husbands. At the time they go in, for sure, they had not yet met the man, but they had started preparing for the man. You don’t start when you have met him… it is almost late then. You start before you meet him. So build yourself first. Ask me, what do I build? I don’t know, but you will know when you start building yourself up, and not just waiting for a man, or any man to come and validate you. You will know when you discover that you are not waiting for a man to come and take care of you. You need to be able to take care of yourself. You need to be able to stay happy with yourself, to love yourself, to emancipate yourself. When you love yourself and the “you” that God is making, it will be easy for a man to come and love you, and if a loser comes along who can’t love you, you will know, and you can kick him out of your life early enough.

Second, look out for a man who is not yet a finished product himself and who does not see himself as made. “A finished product does not need any help”. It is done, finished, completed! It is just waiting to be unveiled. If you marry a finished product, you will just be a ‘hangers on’; no role for you to play in his life; he is made, he doesn’t need you.

Next, you will need to be useful to the union. You may not have money or have a job, worst cases, when you are married, you can save from the money he gives if you are not able to earn yours at that moment, and with what you save, you show him what you can do.

If you are working or doing business or have money of your own, you must try to be someone who is independently dependent on her husband. The bible talks about the virtuous woman in Proverbs 31. You need to be that virtuous woman. You need to make your husband proud, happy, and secure in the knowledge that his woman is industrious. You must pull your weight in the home, even if your husband does not need your money. More of this in subsequent blogs by the way.

A bit more about being independently dependant on your man. A man needs to feel that he is needed in your life. This is the mistake that most financially self-sufficient women make. They think, “Well I make money too, and I should have a say”. Yes, by all means you should, but the way you do it is what will make a difference.

In any case, you must realise that men are created to be nurturers, providers, and protectors to their wives and family, thus if a man does not feel as if he is meeting any or all of these needs in your life, his ego is damaged. This happens to most men, but sadly, as we know, only a few men are happy that the women can provide.

 So if the man does not feel that you need him in your life beyond being the handy man in the house and being the baby producer, then he is most likely going to find another woman who will let him carry out these roles. I am not making excuses for the men out there who are playing, I am just saying to the woman, your man must see himself as a nurturer, provider and protector in your life however you want to do it.

Part of the lessons of the fattening room is that the woman must make his man know that she is truly the weaker sex. Weaker not only in physical strength, but in all open aspects of marriage. Now, striking this balance will be hard, but it is possible if you trust your marriage into God’s hands.

Next, in looking for a man and working out the best of union, you must also remember this key truth. The man you are going to marry is not your dad, so what your mum tells you about your dad will not be true about your own man and her advice will not often work wholesale in your marriage. 

Similarly, your friends’ husbands and your sisters’ husbands have different makeups from your own man, so the way they will live and relate with their own will not be same as the way you have to live with yours. Even your pastor’s wife is different from you, and her husband is different from yours, so the way both of them live will not be exactly the same as the way you and your man will live.

Good advice is good but you must not apply it wholesale. It needs to be customised. So don’t build your notion of marriage on the experiences of other people, and don’t expect from your man what you see in other men. He is different from the other men. You are different from the other women. Even the chemistry between you and him will be different if it is another man you are dating, and also for him, if he was dating another woman. Enough said, the summary on this one is that every relationship is different and all the personalities in the relationship are different, so don’t be fooled and misled.

A lot ladies build romantic notions of marriages from romance novels, from own wishes, and sometimes from other people’s lives. It is good to think positively of what you want your marriage to be like or what you would like your man to be like. However, let me say this for those who have put their faith in God. Don’t just put your faith in Him, put your whole life in him. Acts 17:28, says, “In him we live, In him we breath, in Him we have our being…”

Let your desire completely be for God. The bible teaches us not to work things out for our lives with our own hands and trusting our own efforts. Ladies pray all of the time for the best man that will be what they have in their dreams as husband, but how do you know which man is the best for you. If our lives and existence are in God’s hands, and He has said to seek him first His kingdom and He will add all other things, then we must know that this includes the best man for us, the bone of our bones, and the flesh of our flesh. I think if we are His will and we pray for His will to come to pass in our lives, we will find that getting the right man will not be question, it will be getting the wisdom of God to make a good man the right man.

I suppose this has been a long letter and perhaps different people may be at different places in their lives right now, nonetheless I believe that these same principles hold true no matter what, and I hope that you would find some wisdom in what you have read. If you did, please drop a comment publicly or directly to me at Folarin.Banigbe@gmail.com

God bless you!