There are professions whose process of qualification is truly more vigorous than others and take longer.

To be a doctor or engineer costs six intense years or even more if the student happens to encounter any delays on the way. Throw in another year of rigorous internship when people who opted for sociology, anthropology, and teaching are already earning an income and you will start to understand just how much one has to sacrifice to earn those prestigious prefixes before their names.

The sad bit is that life as a social platform remains an equaliser that holds no regard even for the perks such professions might confer.

Social interactions also owe no recognition to whatever title education might confer one. This is why a lowly placed housemaid might just marry the pilot who lives next door or an engineer might decide to take home that curvaceous lass with a killer smile that serves him at JAVA cafe frequently.

The point here is that human relationships still view a woman from a point of beauty before anything else. I know this is something that men are grappling with and would wish to change. It is a matter of prime concern that has dominated headlines each time a supposed men’s conference is called to discuss the dynamics of why and how the boychild is sacrificing and suffering in heterosexual relationships.

But some realities of life are hard-wired and take long to challenge. For example, the positioning of women in social space is predominantly judged by their sexual market value, which is largely only based on how beautiful she is – pretty face, small waist, and a substantial posterior in the case of Africans. We are born with it. We don’t have to work hard to be beautiful in the eyes of men, all we need is to grow into it with age, and the moment our hips spread out life butterflies are ready to take off, the sons of Adam are already lining up with offers in exchange for an opportunity to mate.

They all want to further their genes and are looking at a valuable vessel that will either add value to their babies in terms of beauty or at least not erode their features if they are those rare handsome cases. Now you fathom why the man is always the lesser attractive one in most relationships.

When a man who is a civil engineer cries out publicly, expressing so much pain and emotion, it gets everyone’s attention because of two reasons. First, the fact that he is a man already requires that he is less prone to express emotions of weakness publicly and secondly, to have the stamina to endure seven years of training as an engineer and then be able to endure the heat and discomfort of a helmet throughout the day while delivering the beautiful highways and breathtaking skyscrapers take some solidness beyond the regular Tom, Dick, and Harry who can get away with tears.

So, when I recently encountered video clips of an engineer crying in front of cameras, I was not surprised that it was caused by a woman. Apparently, like all other disciplines, engineering does not prepare men to understand the shrewdness of women.

It turns out the good man spent years educating a woman at the university in the form of a girlfriend with the promise that she would marry him upon graduating.

It is not the umpteenth time this kind of investment is ending up in premium tears. Men simply do not learn that you can only invest in a woman around whom you have built a firm ring wall that can stand the pressure of competition and silence hypergamy.

First, marry her publicly in front of man and God and take her to your people then spend the next four years reproducing with her so that assuming she takes off you will have at least harvested her beauty and passed it down to your next generation.

But do men listen?