This is a message I received recently from Ms E:
“…Nana…I have a problem and i really need your help. I have been going out with my boyfriend for the past three years and we haven’t had “penetrative” sex all this while. Before we started this relationship i told him that i was a virgin but the truth is that three years before i met him i had sex with another boy and just last year i had another with a different boy. He still thinks am a virgin and he keeps worrying me that he wants to do it. I also want him to have me but i am scared he will leave when he …

I was having dinner with a good friend a few hours ago, and she asked me if I could give her some tips for online dating. Well, well, well,  I definitely can. About four years ago I thought it would be a good idea to write a book called ‘How to Meet Mr Right on the Internet’, which of course called for lots of research. I remember there was one week when I went on a date every single day. Most dates were just ‘alright’. I usually met men in my local area (I lived in London at the time), had a coffee, pleasant conversation and afterwards went on my merry way home. You very …

I want a guy who won’t lie to me, who will always tell me the truth no matter what, a honest guy, look me in the eyes and tell me what others can’t? Huh?????
I had so many thoughts running through my head as Michelle went on and on. Yea right, Honest indeed! We claim to want honest men but how much honesty can we really handle? Last time a guy told me I needed to shed some weight, I automatically said no to his proposal. (Now really I can’t stop laughing because I knew it was true but just didn’t want him to tell me).How many women would want her man to tell her how …

You know what sex hair is don’t you? It’s simply the style of your hair after amazing sex. For Caucasian women, sex hair is usually tussled and frames their faces messily, but oddly ‘sexily’. Since Black women’s hair is a lot more versatile, our hair has a larger spectrum ranging from dred locs gone awry, to fuzzy cornrows, to a carefully arranged weave. Since I have been natural for the last 3 years, my sex hair manifests itself as a 7” sloped flat-on-one-side afro.
My husband has informed me that this look is not cute at all. I of course translated this to mean it was not ‘sexy’. Which it in truth, isn’t.
I immediately set about …

On a day with not much work to do in the office, a colleague narrates an argument she had with her husband and somewhere along the line he quoted Ephesians 5, Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything……..
Emmmm I thought verse 25 also had something about men loving their wives. Why do men always leave out that part? It’s amazing how the least religious of men can quote this …

The happy singleton, now that almost sounds like any oxymoron doesn’t it? A few days ago I was listening to one of Ghana’s most popular commercial stations, and heard an advert which more or less said, “This film is the story of 6 successful career women who have everything they could wish for except a relationship”. Arghhh! I am sick and tired of all these films that present single women as unhappy because they are not in relationships. The story line for these films and TV series has become ever so predictable. Present a cast of ‘strong’ women who excel in their jobs, 1 of these women will be a nymphomaniac or a ‘cougar’, another …

We’d been talking religiously every night for two weeks. Conversations organically developed from simple greetings to soul-baring confessions. I clearly remember one night we spoke from 9pm until 2am. We would have continued until the break of dawn if we could; we hadn’t had enough of listening to each other, but his Blackberry battery had, cutting us off prematurely.
Our new relationship was blossoming. It was clear he was interested in dating me. He wanted to be more than just my midnight caller. And that would have been nice too, only there was a problem. He was white.
Now, I was previously married to a white man, my children are of mixed heritage, so you’d be forgiven …

Friday. 5.30pm. Time was of the essence. He had a plane to catch, I’d been stuck in traffic. There was only time to grab the cases, snatch a hug and a kiss goodbye before the dash to the airport. 5.32pm. The hug lasts thirty seconds too long, yet he doesn’t seem as anxious as I. He holds me and as we peel ourselves off each other, he asks, “Will you marry me?” Time stops…
Having dated L for almost a year and a half, the question of marriage is not new. Without wanting to boast, he’s been proposing for a good six months now and up until last Friday, my answer has been a categorical ‘No! …

Okay.
So what is this?
Don’t men or women ever go straightforward in love anymore?
Do we have to do this perpetual swan dance?
Makes me sick. What with the power play already?
 
I like you, and you saw it; and because you were also feeling something for me, you made the first move and asked me out. But I can’t handle someone taking the game outta my hands, so no I won’t go out with you. In fact, I’ve lost interest in you for asking me out.
It means you like me, and it means I have nothing to conquer. So, know what? Let’s just be friends for now.
Let’s just be friends? … For now?
What does that even mean? Is …

“Nana, why is it that people who are married want to get out of their marriage, and those who are not married want to get married?”
This is a question a friend posed to me a few days ago. Let me answer what I perceive as the simpler question first.
People want to get married (and here I speak specifically of the Ghanaian context) because we are brought up with the expectation that by a certain age we should be married. That’s just what happens (or so we are told) in our society. As a dutiful daughter, (or son) once you are ‘of age’ you get married. Our society does not expect you to sow your wild …