Maternity before marriage: Type of men who look for women with ability to bear children

In an ideal situation, a man meets a woman, they start dating, their families meet, they get engaged and walk down the aisle to become one.

Then the children start coming- that is how normal marriage life usually begins. However it seems there is a trend gaining ground where a man introduces a fiancée to his parents only when the lady is carrying his child or has already delivered one.

Duncan, a junior manager at a city supermarket says that he has seen a number of his buddies who took out huge loans to pay dowry and finance a flashy wedding only for their marriages to come a cropper and therefore feels that having a child- or one on the way- is some sort of assurance.

“If she is willing to keep and raise my child, it means she is ready to settle down and therefore I should do the honourable thing and marry her,” he states.

He is currently living with his girlfriend of 4 years but is in no hurry to walk down the aisle.

“I am not taking her to meet my parents till she develops morning sickness and becomes irritable,” Duncan confides.

For the longest time it was the women who were accused of ‘trapping’ men by getting pregnant but it seems the shoe is on the other foot. These men will convince their girlfriends to stop using protection and wait for that all-important signal so that they can commit for life, effectively putting the cart before the horse.

Samson, a city freelance IT expert, says he is yet to marry and when time come he will take home a woman who has carried his baby to term. He is of the view that with the moral decadence in society, soon it will be hard to find women who can enrich the marriage with children.

“Without a doubt I will marry a girl who is educated, most likely a university graduate. A visit to the next VCT centre will reveal our HIV status. I will easily find out whether in her mannerisms she measures up to be wife material. Finding out if she can bear me children is quite a challenging task on the other hand,” he says and attributes the state of affairs to the worrying rate of back street abortions which later comes to haunt the woman when she wants to get children.

According to him, the astonishing figures that are found in various health reports are actually conservative and the problem is much bigger, meaning that many women lose their ability to have children as a result.

While not many are as wary of getting women capable of child-bearing, most men, who in most instances have already settled with their partners, feel that having a child is the surest sign that time has come to marry.

“I have many friends who have been married a few weeks to their due date. All of a sudden, a man who seemed not in a hurry summons his family and tells them that he wants to marry, visits to both sets of family are made and before the child comes, the two are formally joined in matrimony and he has put his house in order,” says Carol, a high school teacher at a city school.

The need to have child born in a lawful union, a proper family that is recognised, drives these men at break-neck speed to say “I do”.

“As much as I can see what informs such thinking, I think it is really sad. Basically, the man is telling you that he is marrying you because of your womb- not your personality, brains or that he wants to spend the rest of his life with you. That is really sad,” she says when asked what he thinks of such marriages.

Martha is one woman who learned about this kind of man the hard way. After dating her ex-boyfriend for close to six years, she kept on asking him why he never even wanted to meet her parents or introduce her to his.

“He always gave excuses and at some point I started feeling that I was wasting my time because our relationship was headed nowhere. We had many fights over this and our relationship slowly deteriorated,” she recalls.

wasting time

All along the ex-boyfriend had been trying to convince her to stop using contraceptives.

“When we started out, we were using condoms but with time he stopped and always had the excuse for “forgetting” to carry one. Either that or he would “realise” that his supply had run out,” she recalls.

As a result, they started having unprotected sex, which always forced Martha to take morning-after pills. The incidences of “forgetfulness” became too many that she decided to be the one carrying the condoms.

“Then he started saying that the experience was not as good as the other time we ned used protection, meaning that I ended up- again- using morning-after pills,” she says.

When this also happened one too many times and aware of the health risks this frequent use posed, she decided to start taking the oral contraceptive pill. Even that did not go down well with him. She kept wondering why a man who did not even know her parents wanted to get her in the family way. She did not have to wait for long to know.

“A few months after we broke up I was told by one of our friends that he was getting married. That took me by surprise. How could a man I had known for years without any sign of commitment decide to settle down in a matter of months?” she recalls.

She later learned that the woman her ex-boyfriend met just after their break-up had gotten pregnant weeks into their courtship and had been introduced to his parents as the future wife. By the time she came to learn of it, the wedding was just a matter of weeks away.

“I wish he had told me what he really wanted from the beginning so that we do not waste each other’s time. Obviously we had different values because I cannot knowingly have a child with someone before he puts a ring on it, let alone just meeting parents,” Martha says.

According to her, that kind of thinking is just selfish because women are more than “mere child-factories” and their usefulness should not be pegged on whether they can have children. In fact, she contends that science has shown that most instances where a couple cannot have children, the problem is usually with the man.

“Since men cannot get pregnant, are we supposed to walk out of marriage when one discovers it is the man’s fault? Or should we get another man to do the job, seeing as so much value is being put on having a child?” she fumes and notes that it is really unfair that when women get pregnant they are accused of ‘trapping’ men yet when the man gets her pregnant so that he can marry her, it is ‘strategy’.

Benson on the other hand sees nothing wrong with doing a ‘test-drive’ of family life before marrying because it brings out the true colours of your partner and if one feels the woman will be a good wife and mother, getting her pregnant is the beginning of the journey.

“Our grandparents used to do things differently because there was no such thing as dating. You just identified a girl you wanted to marry and married her, then went the family way. Most people already live with their partners and get intimate regularly, why not have children to stamp assurance onto the union? With children in the picture, you have to provide a safe nest and formalising your union is the first step” he theorises.