Is it OK to shun marriage for love of my business?

I am running a successful business in Nairobi’s Industrial Area with a turnover of Sh100 million per year. While I am blessed with one child, whom I got in my teens, my parents have been putting pressure on me to get married though I don’t see it as a necessity. 

At 40 now, I think I have crossed the getting-married age and I should just mind my business and my teenage son. While I appreciate that soon my son will be out of my house, I want to convince my parents that I can be single and happy—and that I am married to my business without hurting them.

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Your question is like a breath of fresh air. You are one of the people who seem happy and content with your destiny despite being there because of fate.

My advice to you is to get on with your life, ignore your parents and all those who think they know you better and enjoy the future you have designed for yourself.

Enjoy your job, your son and your future.

That said however, the Bible tells us to love and honour our parents so that we can have a happy future full of blessings.

So, much as I suggest you follow your heart and its desires, this does not mean that you can treat them with disrespect. It simply means that if they love you enough and if they respect you as a daughter they have brought up well, they will eventually accept that the 21st century woman can chart out her life and be happy.

However, your parents might be right. You should plan to meet a nice young man, fall in love, get married and live happily ever after.

That is a dream and prayer they share with many parents. The reality on the ground, however, is that for many young men and women, marriage is indeed a bed of roses, beautiful on the outside but full of thorns on the inside.

In the USA, for example, the median length of marriage is 11 years. Another interesting fact is that half of all marriages in the USA end up in divorces.

Another fact that may be relevant to your case is that loss of virginity before the age of 18 may predict a poor outcome for a marriage.
Many other factors perhaps unknown to your parents, predict greater likelihood of the breakdown of marriage.

These include your race, importance of religion to the couple, history of rape, as well as the timing of the birth of the first child. There are many other factors that could cause you and your potential husband more pain than gain.

You sound like an interesting young woman who started to have fun and adventure at an early age.

You tell us that you had your child as a teenager and this did not seem to stop from running a business that returns over Sh100 million a year. You haven’t told us what business you are doing or what you did after you got your child. But for this discussion, let’s assume that after the baby, you went to university, did a degree in agriculture and are now in the business of exporting value added agricultural products.

For you to be successful in this business, you would have had to be very hard working, waking up early, going home late, and in possession of good people skills not only to sell your produce but also to hire and retain good staff. Now for a story.

A few years ago, we saw a girl exactly like you. She was in hospital fully burnt out because she had done “the right thing” which was to get married to the son of a rich coffee farmer. He had been brought up on a large farm and his father a politician, had spoilt all his sons silly, by giving them all that they needed and more.

Education in the UK, living in London flats and driving big expensive cars upon arrival.

Her husband and his brothers did not see the need to work because their father had done that for them.

Life for the young man was full of fun; parties and holidays were the order of the day. He was confident, lazy and full of himself.

She had met him at a cocktail party hosted by her bank. She was invited because she was a good customer who serviced her loans, he was invited because his father had huge deposits in the bank.

A year into the marriage, she moved out with her three-month old baby, clear in her mind that the spoilt brat she had married under pressure from society and was just a ‘child’ under the care of his mother and would never be a husband to a hard working confident woman like herself. She moved on and now lives happily with her son.

Does this mean that there are no good young men for you to marry? Does it mean that marriage is a bad thing that should be avoided? This is not my point at all. There are millions of happily married and successful women all over the world.

The difference between you and them, is that they got married when they were ready, to men they choose themselves.