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From time immemorial, women have been conditioned to dull their intelligence so as to demonstrate that they are wife material. This conditioning weighs on women physically and mentally, because the ticket to being chosen in this society is to perform helplessness and act without the full force of your own mind. This is not love.
It is an indictment of men’s insecurity, their inability to match an intelligent woman, and so they build a cage around her instead, the way you would cage an exotic bird not to celebrate her but purely to control her. Ask yourself this: if a man can only feel like a man beside a woman who is pretending to be less, what exactly is he bringing to the relationship?
This socialisation has resulted in smart heterosexual women facing an impossible dilemma: either date men who are intellectually their equal, which grows increasingly difficult to find, or remain single rather than dim their intelligence to prove their worth as wife material. Most women are choosing to remain single because men have refused to evolve. They still want the Stone Age patriarchal benefits, submission, servitude, and silence, while simultaneously expecting women to contribute equally financially, without reciprocating in domestic labour, caregiving, or emotional work. They want a modern woman’s income and a colonial woman’s obedience, and they see no contradiction in that demand.
This conditioning does not begin in adulthood. From childhood, women are taught to dim their light to become marriageable. The instructions are explicit and relentless. You hear it in statements like “Is this how you will get a husband?” in the warning that no man wants another man, meaning that intelligence and assertiveness are male traits a woman must shed, and in the declaration that no man wants a woman who knows too much.
Female academics are relegated to the background and told that too much knowledge drives men away, while men are actively encouraged to climb the highest peaks of education without once being warned that their brilliance might make them unlovable. There is a saying so deeply embedded in Nigerian culture that most people repeat it without flinching: for a marriage to succeed, someone must be a fool, and everyone in the room knows who that person is. Who decided that the price of a woman’s love must always be paid in pieces of herself?
The women who go against the grain and refuse to shrink are punished socially and used as scapegoats to keep other women in line. They are shamed and excluded from intimacy and companionship. The dating pool, already saturated with patriarchal and misogynistic men who want a woman they can mould like clay, offers them little.
Their own families ostracise them as too picky, too arrogant, too difficult to keep a man. Their worth is centred entirely around their ability to retain a man rather than their contribution to the progress of humanity, as though the full measure of a woman’s life is whether a man decided to stay. When a society punishes a woman for being brilliant and rewards her for being compliant, what exactly is that society trying to protect, and from whom?
A person who needs another person to dull their own intelligence to feel better about themselves is not demonstrating strength. They are demonstrating insecurity and an inferiority complex so profound it cannot survive contact with a woman’s full mind. Attempting to tear your partner down, to make her small and compliant so you can feel like a man, is one of the most inhumane things one human being can do to another. The foundation of any relationship worth having is not control, not performance, not the managed smallness of one partner for the comfort of the other. It is empathy, critical thinking, genuine connection, and communication. Men must reckon honestly with their insecurity around intelligent women, and they must do that work themselves, not on the backs of women they are busy trying to diminish.
To every woman who has pretended not to know things, laughed less loudly, hidden her achievements, and made herself smaller to keep a man comfortable, that was never love, and he was never worthy of you. And to the society that taught her to do it, that framed her intelligence as a threat and her ambition as arrogance, the reckoning is coming. Women are refusing the cage. They are staying single before they stay small. And that is not a crisis. That is the most radical act of self-preservation this generation has seen.
