Memo No. 155 From The National Welfare Desk of Men
WHY THE 30s ARE MESSY FOR MEN AND WHAT THEY CAN DO ABOUT IT
The average divorce age in Kenya used to be around 46. From around 2017, it started going down, and by the time men were being dropped like dead weight out of a sinking ship during Covid-19, it had sunk to 35.
Recently, my uncle sat me as a matter of urgency to talk to me about the consequences of being a free and unattached bachelorhood. We got to a point where we talked about the options of women a man in his late 30s has. Starting from 18-22, we agreed that would be too young. 22-27, a bit risky, and many mem may never catch up with their growing demands as a man gets older. Then we got to 28-32. My uncle made a casual statement, but what I think is the most consequential statement of the year.
“28-year-olds women are now divorced. Out of their first their marriage or a complicated baby-mama/daddy drama, that is really complicated…”
It slapped me really hard. That increasingly men are being divorced by 35 and a good number of women are divorced by 30, and the journey to serial monogamy has begun on earnest.
Not too long ago, I met a man in his early 40s, thrice divorced and now on his fourth marriage. Men need that kind of reckless optimism.
The 30s have become very shaky lately. Men in their 30s, especially, 35+ inherited the residual good days of Kibakonomics. And probably married on their first job, only for Uhuronomics to grind the economy to a halt. I am talking about businessmen, bankers, journalists, lecturers, and every other industry that was affected under Jubilee.
So we have a generation that started with so much optimism, the first generation that transitioned to middle-class after college, the first generation where men wanted to undo the sins of their fathers. And then Jubilee and Covid happened.
Three things affected millennial men, born from 1983 onwards.
One. At the top, the income disparities between men and women had been amended and any man who married his college mate married an equal. On the surface, this was a good thing. Except that most men shouldered their father’s financial responsibilities on a completely different environment. The cost of living had more than tripled. For most men, the hope of a two-income household created an interesting paradox. Unlike in the West, where income equality often translates to equitable sharing of bills, most millennial women embraced the best side of modernity but still retained anything about traditional African societies that served their agency. Hence, the much talked about financial abuse of Millennial men leading to the undocumented Covid-19 divorces.
Secondly, our generation was the first to experience social media and the freedom to work and travel while married, on a large scale. Social media affected both genders. Your wife couldn’t mute the validation from the lust of men in her inbox, reminding her how cute she looks after every photoshoot she uploads. And for most men, they could not help notice that nyash of 20-something so much in heavy supply in Facebook and WhatsApp status, never minding the power of Instagram.
This has created a generation of couples who are dissatisfied with each other.
Add to this, office affairs. Your 32 year-old with her perky boobs, painfully taut ass is the crush of some 41-year-old boss in her office. The boss is tired of his wife and wants some piece of noncommittal action. Hypergamy bows to capital. Your wife sees you as lazy and unambitious, and she believes that the boss will marry her or if she gets him a child as he promised her, he will take care of the kid. Wimen sometimes can be recklessly optimistic when listening to promises of a naked man.
And now, you as a man, starved off attention and sex at home by the wife, you will turn to some 20-something who could use some pocket change for her varying needs in exchange for comfort and your sob stories. Thus, once a promising marriage dies because men and women now have unfettered access to alternative sexual partners and there is no one to blame.
Thirdly and more importantly, as men, we lost our frame. We lost our frame, not entirely on our fault, though we are to blame, but due to so many factors: absence of father and father figures, blue-pill conditioning, and we were genuinely adjusting to a generation of women that expected us to be the best version of our fathers when we could not ask them to be at the very least be the most average version of our mothers. The difference between a mother born in the mid-1960s and her daughter born in the early 1990s is so vast that it is not even a generation apart. It is like ten generations apart. Some women have told me that their mothers were never satisfied with their station in life (married and domesticated), and they hoped their daughters would be the exact opposite. And that is how some women have turned out to be: the opposite of everything their mothers were. But somehow, they wanted men to be on their best behaviour.
In the end, nearly half of married millennial men, educated, living in cities, working in corporate world are now divorced or will be divorced before 40. Some actually have never married, just a string of baby mamas and many are not even responsible for their progeny.
Many still have aspirations to be attached. Some still want to start over again with the same mindset that got them into problems in the first place.
Once after the men have tripped, what can they do to get it right the next time?
The first time a man trips is the first time he meets himself. Whether it is losing his job, or the mandatory snooping on his wife’s phone where he finds wifey sending nudes to some sleazy bastard, or losing a parent or a lover, once in your 30s, life comes at you harder. Life will throw the same things to men, but they will handle it differently. Some men will lose a job today and will be excelling in business the following day. Some men will be divorced today, and in two years’ time, they will be running a new family, while some are licking their wounds.
So, if in your 30s and life has already happened, how do you navigate? And if you still have your shit together, your job is still intact, your wife still submits, and your business is doing well, how do you maintain that or mitigate any disaster that may blindside you.
