By Nyainda Manaseh
There’s no logical reason behind being married at the age of 25. Not even 28, or 31. You can be married at any age you want, as long as you are above the legal age of consent and you can comfortably provide for your family.
In the same breath, it is okay not to have graduated at the age of 22. Or even 27 years. No one knows the struggles that may have erected hurdles in your life or the sacrifices that you have had to make in order for your loved ones to get through.
It is not a must to own a car by a certain age. You can buy one in your 20s or even 40s. It is still okay. It is only you will feel the heat when you cannot afford to fuel it and it degenerates into a jalopy in your parking lot. The standards that you were trying to keep up with will not be anywhere to fuel it on your behalf.
Do you have any aspirations for a certain highly placed job? No one should tell you that you must achieve it by the age of 22, 28 or even 35. You can get hold of that position at your own pace, whether in your 40s or even 20s.
If you still do not own a home at 40s, it is okay too. And you do not have to explain to anyone why you do not have one. Perhaps you still have daunting responsibilities of taking care of your siblings, paying their school fees, and even their rents.
These are reasons that your contemporaries will conveniently forego in piling pressure on you to build yourself a home. And probably, you have just been from building your parents a home with the little you have been saving and it’s only you who knows the depth of your pockets.
Certainly, there’s no such prestige as knowing your parents have a descent roof over their head after a protracted struggle to mold you into you are. Even if you are still entangled in a bedsitter or a one bedroom house in the down town estates of Kayole or Dandora, it’s only you who should steer your life.
When you plunge into a dungeon of mortgage loans, which you knew in the first instance it would take a toll on you while paying, it is the same folks whose pressure you succumbed into to look like them that will be the first to sneer, and talk in hush tones behind your back when the auctioneers will come knocking.
There is no specific formula to life. Neither do we have specified rules to it. This is not a competition. You can choose marathon and the other one will go the sprint route. But at the end of it all, happiness is what will suffice.
It is however important to dream, to have a vision and to work towards achieving them by a certain age you have set for yourself after an assessment of your life. We really need to get rid of this idea that there is expectation to do things by a certain age set by the society.