Futura Bold

Futura book sans-serif

Futura demi sans-serif

Futura extra-bold sans-serif

Futura heavy sans-serif

Futura light sans-serif

Futura medium sans-serif

Gaya

I was fifteen years old, sitting with my older cousin Chibundu, when he told me I needed to tone down my ambitions because men do not like women who are too ambitious.

Was it the first time I had heard it? No. Mama had been saying versions of it for years, slipping it into conversations so much that it always came up in every random gist. Still, something about hearing it from Chibundu, a boy only four years older than me who had done nothing particularly impressive with his own life at that point, made it land differently. He said it with such authority. Such certainty. Like he was doing me a favour by warning me before I made myself too much for a man to handle.

I was fifteen. I had done nothing wrong. I had made the mistake of talking about what I wanted to do with my life. I remember going quiet because something in me registered that this was important information, the kind you file away and refer back to later. The world, apparently, had rules about what a woman was allowed to want, and I had just been briefed on one of them.

By the time Chibundu said it, Mama had already been teaching this lesson for years. She just never called it that. It came wrapped in other things; concern, love, practicality, the specific wisdom of a woman who had watched other women make themselves difficult to love and paid attention to what happened next.

It sounded like: "Ada, you don't need to be the one talking the most in every room."

It sounded like: "A man wants to feel needed. If you are doing everything yourself, what does he have to offer you?"

It sounded like: "Your aunty Ngozi had a good job, good money, everything. You know she is still single? Men were intimidated."

Aunty Ngozi was the cautionary tale of my entire childhood. She appeared at every family gathering, well-dressed, well-spoken, clearly doing well for herself, and yet somehow her existence was presented to me as a warning. This is what happens, the air around her seemed to say, when a woman forgets to leave room for a man. I looked at Aunty Ngozi and saw someone who seemed perfectly fine to me. My mother looked at Aunty Ngozi and saw a lesson.

I absorbed without examination, and it became part of my operating system before I was old enough to audit it.

When a lesson that comes in small, consistent doses: you don't notice yourself changing. There is no single moment you can point to and say, that is the day I started shrinking. It happens gradually, the way a plant grows toward light, except in this case you were growing away from yourself.

I started editing my answers when people asked what I wanted to be. The full version was too much, I could feel it being too much even as I said it, so I learned to offer the smaller version first. The one that didn't make people uncomfortable. The one that left room for a husband somewhere in the middle of it.

I stopped talking about my plans in mixed company. With my girlfriends I could say everything. With men I learned to ask questions instead. Men like being asked questions. They like explaining things. I was good at this. I was, in fact, very good at making myself smaller in rooms with men and I did not realise for years that this was something I had been trained to do rather than something I had chosen.

I told myself it was strategic. I told myself I was just being smart about how I presented myself. I had several reasonable-sounding explanations for why I consistently showed less of myself than actually existed, and I cycled through them depending on who was asking.

The truth, which I am still in the process of being honest about, is that I was afraid. Not of men specifically. Of being too much. Of wanting things so loudly that I scared away the love I had been taught I was supposed to want most.

You already know about the<a href="https://aura.ng/life-and-love/unlearning-everything-my-mother-taught-me-about-being-a-good-woman-episode-1-if-you-don-t-sweep-every-morning-no-man-will-marry-you-"> man from Enugu</a>. The one I cooked for. The one I travelled to his mother's house for every month, the one whose cheating I interpreted as a personal failure of my domestic performance rather than a failure of his character. What I didn't tell you in <a href="https://aura.ng/life-and-love/unlearning-everything-my-mother-taught-me-about-being-a-good-woman-episode-1-if-you-don-t-sweep-every-morning-no-man-will-marry-you-">Episode 1</a> is what I put on hold during those three years.

There was a programme. A competitive fellowship for young professionals, the kind that opens doors and builds things and puts you in rooms you would otherwise spend years trying to get into. I found out about it in my second year with him. The deadline was the same weekend we had planned a trip together, a trip he had been looking forward to, a trip I knew he would be disappointed about if I cancelled. I did not apply.

I told myself it was bad timing. I told myself there would be another opportunity. What I did not tell myself, because I was not ready to say it out loud, even internally, was that I had already made a calculation: that being the kind of girlfriend who cancels a trip to apply for a fellowship was the kind of girlfriend who was too much. Too driven. Too focused on herself. The kind of girlfriend who, my mother's voice helpfully reminded me, makes a man feel unnecessary.

So I didn't apply. We went on the trip. The relationship ended anyway, eighteen months later, in that kitchen in Enugu with a pot of ofe onugbu on the cooker and a truth I could no longer pretend I didn't know.

I think about that fellowship sometimes. Not with drama. Just with the specific, quiet grief of a door you closed yourself.

About a year after the relationship ended, I met someone. I will call him Emeka, because there are too many Emekas in my life for this to be confusing and also because the name suits him. Emeka was pleasant. Emeka was attractive. Emeka was the kind of man who made a good first impression and a reasonable second one and by the third time we met, something was clearly building between us.

We were having dinner, the fourth time we saw each other, and I was talking about work. I was telling him about a project I was leading, what it involved, where I wanted it to go, what I was building toward. Normal conversation. The kind I have with my colleagues every day without incident.

He smiled in the middle of it. Not a warm smile. A slightly amused one, the kind that sits just slightly wrong on a person's face when they are finding something charming in a way that is not entirely a compliment.

"Thank you," I said, because I am.

He leaned forward slightly, like what he was about to say required a small adjustment of posture.

"Can I ask you something? If we were to build something serious together, would you be willing to submit your ambitions?"

"Submit them how?" I asked. Genuinely because I wanted to make sure I was understanding correctly before I responded to what I thought I was hearing.

He nodded, satisfied that I had asked rather than reacted, like the question itself was a test I was passing.

"It's not a bad thing," he said. "Ambition in a woman is great. I actually love that about you. But it needs to know its place in a relationship. I'm not saying don't have goals. I'm saying your goals should not be bigger than mine. That's just how it works when a man is the head."

He looked back at me, completely sincere, completely unbothered, waiting for me to agree with something he had clearly said to women before and received reasonable responses from.

I thought about fifteen-year-old Ada sitting with Chibundu, going quiet, filing the information away. I thought about the fellowship I didn't apply for. I thought about three years of making myself smaller and calling it love, of cooking ofe onugbu in someone else's mother's kitchen for a man who was cheating on me, of turning down opportunities and adjusting my answers and editing the full version of myself before anyone even asked me to.

"So what you're saying," I said pleasantly, "is that your comfort with my ambition is conditional on it being smaller than yours."

"No, I want to make sure I understand you correctly, Emeka. You are telling me, on our fourth dinner, that my goals are fine as long as they don't exceed yours. Not because of any practical reason. Just because you are the man and I am the woman and that is how it works."

He shifted slightly. "I'm just being honest about what I need."

"I appreciate that," I said. And I meant it, genuinely, because honesty on a fourth dinner saves everybody a significant amount of time.

We finished the meal. Pleasantly, actually. He was not a bad person. He was just a person who had been told, the same way I had been told at fifteen, that this was simply how things work, and unlike me, he had never had a kitchen in Enugu force him to examine it.

He did not call after that, and I did not spend a single evening wondering what I should have said differently.

Chibundu, for what it's worth, is not particularly successful. I checked. He is fine, living a regular life, which is completely valid, but he is not someone whose warning about female ambition I should have filed away and referred to for twenty years. He was a nineteen-year-old boy repeating something the world had told him, the way I was a fifteen-year-old girl receiving it, and neither of us had any idea what we were doing.

Mama meant well. She always means well. She was giving me tools she believed I needed for the world she understood, and in some rooms, those tools have served me, but a tool built to keep you safe in one environment can become the thing that keeps you stuck in another.

What I am unlearning is the reflex. The editing. The pre-emptive smallness. The habit of reading a room before I decide how much of my actual self to bring into it.

A man who finds my ambition intimidating is a man who was always going to find something about me too much. And too much for him is not the same as too much. It never was.

I just spent twenty years believing it was because a nineteen-year-old boy said so and my mother nodded. The ceiling was never mine. I just kept ducking under it out of habit. I'm done ducking.

The fellowship I didn't apply for ran for two more years after that trip. I found out recently they are accepting applications again.

This is a series about the instructions African women were handed before they were old enough to question them, and what it actually costs to follow them. Episode 1 was about the broom. This one is about the ceiling.

read more