He has been saying it for three years.
I will settle down when I am ready. When the business is more stable. When I have hit a certain financial target. When I have sorted out a few things. When the time is right.
The time never quite becomes right. The target keeps moving. The few things never fully get sorted. And he is still single at 37, still waiting for a feeling that has not arrived, wondering privately whether it ever will.
This is not a story about a man who does not want a relationship. It is a story about a man who has confused waiting to feel ready with actually getting prepared. And that confusion is keeping him, and many Nigerian singles like him, stuck in a holding pattern that has no natural end.
What Feeling Ready Actually Means
Feeling ready is an emotional state. It is the sense that everything is in order, that the timing is right, that you are in the right place to begin something significant.
The problem with waiting for this feeling is that it is almost entirely dependent on external circumstances. And external circumstances, particularly in Nigeria where economic instability, family pressure, and professional uncertainty are constant variables, rarely align perfectly enough to produce the feeling of complete readiness.
There will always be one more thing to sort out. One more goal to hit. One more reason why now is not quite the right time.
A person waiting to feel ready before pursuing a relationship is essentially waiting for their external life to produce an internal state. That is a long wait. For most people it is an indefinite one.
What Being Prepared Actually Means
Preparation is different from readiness in a way that is practical and actionable.
Preparation is not about your circumstances being perfect. It is about you being developed enough, self-aware enough, and intentional enough to enter a relationship and show up well inside it regardless of whether everything in your life is sorted.
A prepared person knows what they are looking for in a partner and why. They have examined their patterns well enough to understand what they bring into a relationship and what they need to work on. They have the emotional skills to communicate, to handle conflict, to give and receive love in ways that are sustainable. They have done enough personal work that they are not looking for a partner to complete them but to complement them.
None of that preparation requires a specific salary. None of it requires a particular living situation. None of it waits for the business to hit a target.
It requires intentionality. And intentionality can begin today regardless of where your circumstances are.
The Waiting Trap Nigerian Men Fall Into
For Nigerian men specifically, the waiting pattern has a particular shape.
The cultural expectation is that a man must have arrived before he can pursue a woman seriously. He must have a certain level of financial stability, a certain professional standing, a certain ability to provide before he is in a position to commit. This expectation is not entirely unreasonable. Financial stability matters in a marriage.
But it has been stretched into a justification for indefinite delay that has nothing to do with financial preparation and everything to do with emotional avoidance.
A man who is genuinely preparing for marriage is building his financial stability and developing his emotional capacity simultaneously. He is not using one as a substitute for the other. He is not hiding behind the career as a reason to avoid examining whether he is actually emotionally equipped for the kind of partnership a marriage requires.
The man who is waiting to feel ready is often a man who is afraid. Not of commitment in the abstract. Of the specific vulnerability that genuine intimacy requires. And financial targets are a much more acceptable thing to say out loud than that.
The Waiting Trap Nigerian Women Fall Into
For Nigerian women the waiting pattern looks different but the mechanism is the same.
She is waiting to be chosen. Waiting for the right person to arrive so that she can finally begin the work of becoming who she needs to be in a relationship. She is holding her preparation hostage to the arrival of a partner.
This is backwards.
The preparation is not something you do once you are in a relationship. It is something you do before one so that when the right person arrives you are actually in a position to recognise them and to show up for what you are building together.
A woman who has not examined her patterns will bring those patterns into the next relationship regardless of how right the person is. A woman who has not developed her own emotional vocabulary will struggle to communicate what she needs even to the most emotionally intelligent partner. A woman who has not done the work of understanding herself will keep looking to her partner to define her, which is a weight no person should carry for another.
The right person does not complete your preparation. They arrive to find it already underway.
What Preparation Actually Looks Like
It looks like genuinely examining your relationship patterns and understanding where they come from. Not just acknowledging that they exist but understanding their origin well enough to interrupt them.
It looks like developing the communication skills that intimate relationships require. Not reading about them. Practising them. In your existing relationships, your friendships, your family dynamics, your professional interactions.
It looks like building the kind of self-knowledge that makes partner selection intentional rather than reactive. Knowing specifically what you need, what you cannot compromise on, and what patterns to look for and look out for.
It looks like doing this work consistently, not because a relationship is imminent, but because you are the kind of person who takes the most important decision of their life seriously enough to prepare for it.
When the Right Person Arrives
Here is what changes when you stop waiting and start preparing.
You stop being passive about the most significant area of your life. You stop leaving your relationship future to timing, luck, and the hope that the right person will find you before your window closes.
You become someone who is actively building toward something. And people who are actively building toward something carry a quality that is immediately recognisable to other people who are doing the same.
The right person does not want someone who is still waiting to be ready. They want someone who has been preparing. Because they have been preparing too. And what two prepared people build together is something fundamentally different from what two people waiting for the right moment stumble into.
Stop waiting. Start preparing. The work is the point.
Learn more about what genuine preparation for a relationship looks like at jojeanimohita.com.
You do not have a love problem. You have a clarity problem. And clarity is something you can actually work on.
About the Author
Jo-Jean Imoh-Ita is a Certified Relationship and Marriage Coach and Relationship Clarity Strategist. She is the founder of Soothing Solutions Ltd and RFC Academy, and has coached over 150 clients across Nigeria and the diaspora. Her work helps career-driven Nigerian singles choose partners with clarity, not just feelings. Learn more at jojeanimohita.com