Women's Day: Handling 40-year-olds

By Hilary Bainemisha 
hbainemigisha@newvision.co.ug

Only one day separates us from International Women’s Day of March 8. Incidentally, the day was declared by the Russian revolutionary and founder of the world’s first socialist state, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin, to honour the role of women in the revolution. 

But, as usually happens with good ideas, the world took it on and later agreed to synchronise their Women Day to March 8 because it was already popular in the majority of communist countries. 

Today, several Women’s Days later, and so many themes, therefore, the world has not only changed but also transformed. 

It is no longer viewing women as producers of sex, children and comfort and will not frown if a woman commands at war, grows beards, eats government money or marries several men. 

Women have indeed come a long way. I am awaiting Christianity to amend the constitution and add a fourth deity, God the Mother, to complete the conquest of male dominance. 

Men haven’t taken this revolution hands down, although it is now obvious that women gains are irreversible. When I give talks on love, the common challenge is that we, counsellors, should turn our guns onto men. 

Men, they say, are finding it difficult to handle empowered women and, yet, experts are focusing on simpler issues like the opposition to Valentines. 

They wish our toughness on the opposition was as vigilant as when dealing with corruption, which is worse and more devastating to society.

Men, here I come 

Today, men should gather for this important alert. I will start with the older generation which is about to retire, facing an impending loss of influence and, generally, having passed their peak time in life. 

These men have a lot of problems, among which are their wives, who are in their 40s. This year, about 1,005,962 women will turn 40 or be within 40 – 44 years of age.

And if this includes your wife, you better pay attention (not in cash). If you are someone’s wife, and this is you, I need you here too. We need to talk. 

My counselling experience has revealed that around the time a woman becomes 40, there are lots of things that shake her from her comfort zone to a more demanding stature, to the chagrin of marriage and husbandhood. 

I hurried back to tell you so that we bring our heads together in order to do any of these three things: Either to save the institution of marriage or help husbands adjust or agree to roll down the drain together.

The dynamite of 40

The stroke of 40 years of age finds a calm wife of extraordinary traits and blows her humility into tiny pieces. Forty actually looks a humble number and tempts you not to pay attention to it. When we are not looking, it disorganises women in invisible processes of fear of old age, means self-evaluation and self-inflicted panic. 

Most of them begin to look around and compare their achievements with peers, their own previous expectations and in the context of time running out. 

As a result, they stop behaving like a normal wife of a Ugandan man. And you know what happens when you do this. 

You tend to realise that wherever you are, you haven’t achieved your worth, peers are way above you and that the time to do something about it is NOW! 

Such a frustrating discovery is usually accompanied by a defence mechanism known as scapegoating, and the blame game pointer lands on the husband. 

Wives convince themselves that it is because of their husband and his family leadership that they are not ministers, cannot have their holidays in Europe, cannot afford a brand new car or be the ‘celebs’ they always see in social media! 

Hilary Bainemisha 

Their perception of lack of happiness brings Mr Husband into the picture and this convinces them that they would have achieved more and further had they been alone and free. 

Marriage then becomes an encumbrance, whose previous promise of safety and d security still remains elusive.

Other factors 

At 40, women are usually more empowered and have more money and exposure than before. Their outlook to life is no longer naïve, culturally restraining and husband-based. 

If their husbands have passed their prime years of usefulness, temptation arises to place them in the folder marked ‘Useless and Inconvenient’. And most succumb to that temptation. 

Unfortunately, world statistics show that over 84% women after 40s have considered divorce as more appealing than working harder on their marriages. 

The things they used to have in common with their husband have paled out, lost their utility or paid no dividends because of other focusses in their lives. 

Their sex life and intimacy may be down due to a number of factors; age, hormones, opportunity cost and drifting apart being some of them. And when they compare with friends, the grass seems greener yonder. 

They forget the acclaimed conspiracy of married people to present their marriages as superholes. 

They compare the rosy pictures presented by the marriages around to their own miserable and unfulfilled relationships. They start acting like unsolicited advocates of the single life, where there is no compulsion to compromise with another adult, carry an emotional load and fear of the unknown. 

The children they would have stayed for are grown and out of home and this makes them feel like they are trading their authenticity in exchange for hot air. 

The sex puzzle

Women in 40s have long stopped attaching that novel sacredness to their private parts. They now have no qualms deploying them because husbands have also become rare visitors. 

Life has taught them how stupid men can make a difference in their lives just by getting a visa to their privates. On a wrong note, transactional sex stops looking as evil as the books say. 

After all, they have earned nothing by ringing a barbed wire around them while their colleagues who placed them on the shelves are driving good cars they did not buy and living in wonderful houses they did not build! 

Even for dating, sex is no longer a function of purely love and romance if the dots to functional usefulness are not lined. 

The system is now aligned to stuff that doesn’t waste time in semantics and would need the why to be answered.