Sex Talk: What are you passing down?

A young woman in her early 30s is struggling to find a husband, because “I want someone who will love me the way my father loves my mum”.

She is worried she has set her bar too high, but I told her I see no harm in refusing to settle for less.

I asked her how her dad loves her mum, and she said: “From when we were kids, we knew our parents as being openly affectionate to each other, even in our presence. I only got to know that was not the case in every home as I grew up and started hanging around my friends’ parents.”

She said, her father is also fiercely protective of his family, spoils their mum, and provides without question.

“As for me, all I am kissing are frogs. Men who are threatened by my financial success, and others who date me only because of it,” she said.

She is at that point in life where she is ready to settle down and start a family, but her father has set the bar too high.

“Do you think there is another man like my dad out there?”

Well, God made your dad, didn’t He? I asked her. But I was also quick to add that she could be studying the wrong parent; clearly, her mother is also doing something right that has activated the kind of husband she has had for close to forty years!

Iron sharpens iron, after all… She agreed, her mother is also no ordinary woman.

“She does things that my corporate self cannot imagine doing for a man in this day and era, but if that is what attracts a good man, I will start being intentional, because I know everything. I have grown up in that home.”

I asked what her mother does that perplexed her over the years, and she said, “Many small, small things that I didn’t think even mattered in the big picture. Like, we never enter their bedroom uninvited.

She personally cooks his meals – at the very least, the sauce – for all the years I have seen them, and prepares a fruit snack for him in the mornings. She handles all his laundry, although we now got them a washing machine, and they have sweet names for each other and are really playful…like, you can find him oiling her hair, things like that.”

She said it used to “low-key annoy me how we could agree on something and then she just changes her mind at the last minute if dad is not on board”. Call it veto power.

Now in her search for that ‘perfect’ man, she is willing to explore some of these things that she initially thought were archaic and ‘uncorporatey’; “You do have a point when you say my dad’s greatness could have been unlocked by the right wife. So, I’ll rebrand.”

Okay; now on to you. What example are you giving your children? Because, I also know another – a man and an only son, at that – who has vowed never to marry or have children, due to the volatile and toxic marriage he was raised in.

“Don’t feel guilty if you feel that you need a little time away from your kids. It’s important to spend time with them, but it’s also important that children see their parents in love and connected. The modeling that is provided for children is essential in the creation of their own healthy relationships,” Suzie Heumann and Dr Susan Campbell write in their The Everything Great Sex Book.

caronakazibwe@gmail.com

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