Everyone needs to shift to teaching mental health as the top priority over anything else. Without happiness within yourself, all other areas of life will not work, no matter what way you personally choose to live.
Loving yourself and being happy alone should be taught as important from a young age. Often times, society teaches from youth that the main goal in life is to get married and have children, which in my opinion is not good. Stable mental health needs to be seen and talked about as the top priority for everyone and is the key to making anything else work.
While connections, relationships, and love are major parts of life that are all definitely super important, you should learn to be happy with yourself with or without those things. The relationship you have with you should be number one.
The fact that finding love with someone else has always been more talked about than finding love within yourself is a reason why many relationships don’t work out to begin with. Placing your happiness on another person is unhealthy. One person should not be your “everything” or all your life is about, and some people think that a good relationship and partner mean those things are true.
The expectations we place on our partners or for our relationships are often what make them so difficult. You and your relationship should exist as separate entities.
These things should be taught to kids, rather than making marriage seem like the only “normal” choice for a happy ending.
Oftentimes, when people say they don’t want to get married or have kids, there are not welcoming responses. This harmful pressure to settle down is even more often directed towards women. They receive heavy questioning from family and friends beginning at a young age: “Do you have a boyfriend?” “Are you gonna have kids soon?” “Are you guys gonna get married?” etc.
Instead of these questions being normalized, we need to give young people room to explore what they want in life for themselves, without so many societal pressures. This can relate to sexuality, occupation, or just wanting to figure out who you are alone before thinking of your future with another person.
Some girls plan their wedding from a young age and know exactly how they want it to go. Others however, don’t want to get married at all or want to do it in a non-traditional way. No matter which of these you identify with, as long as you are happy with your life, it is completely okay. If you don’t even know what you want yet, that should be fine too.
That should be normal, especially considering how major these choices are.
The feeling that you need to conform to certain standards is something that often contributes to bad mental health too. The pressure to get married and have children makes many people who don’t want those things feel like they aren’t normal.
It’s not only parents teaching their children this, but something that is ingrained in society all around. A lot of issues present in society are becoming more talked about, which is great, but this is an issue that people are often blind about and really relates to many other things as well.
No matter what other areas of life you strive to succeed in, you and your mental health should be most important. Without happiness and content within yourself, every other area of life will most likely be significantly more difficult. So, I urge you to stop thinking and stop making other people feel that a long-term committed relationship is what is needed to experience true happiness. Not everyone is the same and everyone’s goals are and should be different. True happiness can only come from within.
– Abubakar Yunusa writes from Abuja.
