At 41, Sarah had become a community project.

Her mother was praying.

Her aunties were investigating.

Her married friends had begun forwarding photographs of perfectly innocent men with captions like:

“What about this one?”

Even the woman who did her hair had joined the national search.

One Saturday, an aunt finally asked her the question everybody had been circling.

“Sarah, aren’t you lonely?”

Sarah thought about it.

“No.”

The aunt looked disappointed.

“But you live alone.”

“Yes.”

“You eat alone.”

“Sometimes.”

“You travel alone.”

“Sometimes.”

“And you are telling me you are not lonely?”

Sarah smiled.

“Auntie, I have also been lonely in a relationship.”

Silence.

Uncle Rwamiti, who had been concentrating very seriously on a samosa, looked up.

That was the sentence.

Because we have confused two completely different things.

Being single is a relationship status. Loneliness is an emotional experience.

You can have a wedding ring and be desperately lonely.

You can sleep beside somebody every night and feel unseen.

And you can return to an empty house, make yourself tea, put on your favourite music and experience something society rarely teaches us to recognise:

peace.

This does not make marriage unnecessary.

It makes desperation unnecessary.

Sarah eventually did something her aunties found even more alarming.

She bought herself a ring.

Not because she had given up on love.

Not because she had declared war on men.

And certainly not because she intended to marry herself and spend the honeymoon arguing over who would pay the hotel bill.

😂

She called it a promise.

To stop treating herself as a waiting room.

To build friendships.

To travel.

To create meaningful work.

To take care of her body.

To enjoy her own company.

And if love eventually knocked on her door, wonderful.

But love would meet somebody who was already living.

Perhaps that is the useful idea hidden inside what some people call sologamy.

Forget the ceremony for a moment.

Forget the dress, ring and strange headlines about people “marrying themselves.”

The deeper proposition is much quieter:

I refuse to postpone my relationship with myself until somebody else chooses me.

Marriage can be beautiful.

Partnership can be beautiful.

So can a life that isn’t organised around waiting for either.

Uncle Rwamiti returned to his samosa.

“Sarah,” he said, “just one warning.”

“What?”

“If you marry yourself and later want a divorce, please don’t ask me to testify against you.”

😂😂😂

Uncle Rwamiti
Making sense of change through ethical storytelling.