January is over and we are almost close to Valentine’s Day. Already, gift companies and curators are advertising hampers and skitmakers are making the same old jokes about hiding your face if you are single.
Valentine’s Day is also a day where people celebrate love; women in particular celebrate what their partners got for them and post it online.
Now, I love love and I strongly disagree with women suffering in the name of “ride or die”. That said, recently, I have also come to associate the performative nature of announcing what a partner did for you as a woman with the pressure felt by some women to prove a man is spending on them.
Of course, it is not the fault of the woman who is showing what her partner got for her. It however calls for deep introspection that some women buy themselves packages and then lie that it was a man who got it for them. Why do some women lie and how potent is being seen as a “pampered” woman to the outer world? Is there some social currency and power involved in the world knowing that you can “relax” and be “taken care of?”.
These questions have been on my mind as Valentine’s Day draws near. However, these questions of desirability do not only exist during Valentine’s. While that day sees a grand amplification, outside of it, a lot of women in day to day life lie about men getting them things in order to appear “soft and feminine”.
In reading the novel Everything Good Will Come by Sefi Atta, we see through the character of Mother of Prisons, why some women who are breadwinners lie to everyone with eyes that their husbands are the ones providing. The character implied that she did that to protect his ego. Outside of the novel, in Nigeria, it is not uncommon for women to buy cars and then lie that it was their husbands who got it for them.
In smaller scale situations, it is not uncommon for younger women to buy themselves gifts on random occasions and then post that an imaginary sponsor bought it for them.
And why is that? Why is it that we have created a world where women fear that being actively about their money would make men not spend on them? Does it not call for questioning that a woman once confessed to feeling afraid that her job in STEM makes her masculine and not desirable to her boyfriend?
Why is it that a woman who works hard and is intentional about making money is told not to hustle like a man and just “relax” or is even told she “hustles like a man” as a compliment? What or whose system is empowered when women see the money they make as survival funds until a rich man arrives?
For Enifome, a baker and food enthusiast, she narrates that this attitude is often born out of a desire for women to “get the envy/admiration of other women and to signal to other men that they are loved and desired.”
“When I was younger, I had a lot of female friends who if we were in an [all girls and no males friendship] group, all of us wanted to show that we were desirable. Everybody wanted to outdo the other person by stating what their boyfriends did and bought for them. If you were the person whose boyfriend or lover wasn’t buying them anything, you sort of felt like he did not love you enough.”
She went on to say that even when nothing was being bought for you, one had the internal pressure amongst friends to state that things were being bought for you. “It was proof that you were an ‘it girl’, she says.
No woman should ever feel the need to lie about gifts gotten from men in order to prove her overall human worth.
Our worth comes from the fact that we are inviolably human and not if a man finds us worthy of being catered to.
Angel Nduka-Nwosu is a writer, journalist and editor. She moonlights occasionally as a podcaster on As Angel Was Sayin’. Catch her on all socials @asangelwassayin.