When There Are Six Women Chasing One Man
Read the following extract from a recent report from the U.S.
Real life is more complicated, of course, but this simple model illustrates an important truth. In the marriage market, numbers matter. And among African-Americans, the disparity is much worse than in Mr. Harford’s imaginary example. Between the ages of 20 and 29, one black man in nine is behind bars. For black women of the same age, the figure is about one in 150. For obvious reasons, convicts are excluded from the dating pool. And many women also steer clear of ex-cons, which makes a big difference when one young black man in three can expect to be locked up at some point.
Removing so many men from the marriage market has profound consequences. As incarceration rates exploded between 1970 and 2007, the proportion of US-born black women aged 30-44 who were married plunged from 62% to 33%. Why this happened is complex and furiously debated. The era of mass imprisonment began as traditional mores were already crumbling, following the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the invention of the contraceptive pill. It also coincided with greater opportunities for women in the workplace. These factors must surely have had something to do with the decline of marriage.
But jail is a big part of the problem; argue Kerwin Kofi Charles, now at the University of Chicago, and Ming Ching Luoh of National Taiwan University. They divided America up into geographical and racial “marriage markets”, to take account of the fact that most people marry someone of the same race who lives relatively close to them. Then, after crunching the census numbers, they found that a one percentage point increase in the male incarceration rate was associated with a 2.4-point reduction in the proportion of women who ever marry. Could it be, however, that mass incarceration is a symptom of increasing social dysfunction, and that it was this social dysfunction that caused marriage to wither? Probably not. For similar crimes, America imposes much harsher penalties than other rich countries. Mr. Charles and Mr. Luoh controlled for crime rates, as a proxy for social dysfunction, and found that it made no difference to their results. They concluded that “higher male imprisonment has lowered the likelihood that women marry…and caused a shift in the gains from marriage away from women and towards men.”
http://www.economist.com/world/united-states/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15867956
In Nigeria, there over 50,000 men in prison and these men left behind girlfriends and wives who are now desperately seeking companionship from other men. So they join the pool of hundreds of thousands of other single women who are searching for men to date and marry.
Let us add the girlfriends and widows of the thousands of Nigerian Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) soldiers killed during the civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Then include the thousands languishing in hellish police cells all over Nigeria. All these unfortunate victims of foreseen and unforeseen circumstances had sweethearts who must continue with their lives.
Then finally, how can millions of jobless single women date and marry millions of equally jobless single men in Nigeria?
Therefore, the millions of jobless single women are desperately chasing the gainfully employed single or married men to make ends meet.
So a gainfully employed single man is now facing 6 to 10 single women who have no other man available to date or marry.
There is scarcity of eligible bachelors and the cause has nothing to do with the SPIRIT OF LATE MARRIAGE or whatever many opportunistic pastors have been using to lure desperate single women to their churches and milk them dry of their hard earned money in the guise of sowing for the miracle of getting married.
Tell the pastors to go and set the bond men in jail free and then give jobs to the millions of jobless single men first and stop preaching lies to single women in Nigeria.
For every single woman who gets married, there is another woman with a broken heart caused by the same man you are calling husband.
There are more single women than single men in these interesting times of economic, social and political vicissitudes.
We cannot escape from the present realities in Nigeria and the U.S.
We do not have enough eligible single men for our single women.
Six single women may have to share one man or languish in loneliness.
SHARING IS CARING.
~ By Ekeneyerengozi Michael Chima
