The Global Girl in a Traditional Cage: When Ambition Threatens the Ring
“Don’t tout your own horn.”
“Don’t be too ambitious.”
“Let him lead.”
“A man still wants to feel like a man.”
If you are a globally educated African woman, you’ve heard at least one of these before, maybe even from a fellow woman. We all are walking on this tightrope of aiming for excellence while downplaying our accomplishments. We try so hard to be accomplished, but still be malleable. To be internationally educated but still deemed “wife material”.
This is the lived tension of the global girl stuck in a traditional cage - taught to soar in boardrooms but shrink in relationships. Groomed for leadership, while quietly socialized to downplay ambition in exchange for emotional safety.
When Your Brilliance Becomes the Burden
It always starts subtly.
A man asks what you do, and when you say you’re in medical school, he nods and then makes a joke about you “being in school forever.” He then starts to ask about your timeline for child bearing and how you plan to navigate that with residency.
Or you tell your long term boyfriend about your acceptance to a top MBA program in the United States, and he says, “Just don’t become too Americanized, sha.” as some warped form of “congratulations”.
Or you mention a fellowship you saw online that you’re thinking about applying to and your new fling changes the topic to a friend’s birthday party he wants you to accompany him to next weekend.
Suddenly, your ambition, the very thing that made you stand out in global spaces, has become a liability in romantic spaces.
As the quick learner you are, you have now learned to:
Be more “approachable” by censoring your confidence
Seem less “exposed” so you downplay your travel experiences
Talk less about your wins to not bruise his ego
Perform submission to pass the cultural compatibility test
Slowly but surely, you put on a mask to fit into a role that was assigned to you by society. You become two versions of yourself: the girl boss that your friends see, and the docile partner that your partner craves.
The Soft Life Trap
In the past couple years we’ve heard so much about “soft life” and influencers throwing the term around as some sort of trophy. But the truth is, you have to work very hard for a soft life. It’s not that softness is wrong. It’s the performance of softness, demanded as the price for being chosen, that begins to cost you. For most they are not resting in their femininity, they are shrinking in silence. And their consistent wearing of a mask and shape shifting for male comfort, slowly becomes normalized under the guise of “compromise”. But what these women fail to realize is that they're compromising more than just their tone, they’re compromising their trajectory.
The Clock That Complicates It All
Like this conversation is not heavy enough, here comes the biological clock. Even when you’re not actively thinking about it, it’s thinking about you. It’s present in how you plan your career moves. It starts to whisper during your mid-20s in the club and starts to scream when you’re in your early-30s single at weddings.
And here lies the cruel bind:
Do you keep building your career abroad or move back home to chase the possibility of partnership?
Do you pursue your medical residency or do consulting to have better work life balance to start a family?
Do you freeze your eggs or freeze your goals?
These aren’t theoretical questions. For ambitious African women, they are deeply emotional negotiations. They come with guilt, pressure, and grief. Because while men are praised for delaying marriage to build empires, women are penalized for doing the same.
What Tradition Never Taught Us About Love
The unfortunate reality is that we were not taught to choose men who admire us.
We were taught to choose men who provide for us and allow us.
We were conditioned to choose a man based on his financial presence and his ability to allow us to be ourselves, in the constraints of his own sense of control.
No one told us that:
The wrong man will dim your sparkle.
The wrong man will shrink your world.
The wrong man will destroy your destiny.
And even when we do know these things, we still perform because we’re scared to be too accomplished to be loved.
Clarity in the Chaos
At Ziora Health we believe the future looks like:
Normalizing women choosing later marriage without shame
Honoring those who walk away from love that costs them their calling
Uplifting soft power that is authentic, not strategic
Creating space for African women to be fully expressed and fully loved
Truly, the right man for you will not be emasculated by your purpose, he will admire it. The right man will not require you to break yourself into digestible pieces, he will cherish the whole you. The right man will not ask you to dim your brilliance, he will seek your advice.
You, my dear, are not running out of time. You’re running out of patience with narratives that were never meant to serve you..
Because being loved shouldn’t mean being less.
And being chosen shouldn’t cost you your calling.
Yours,
Ziora Health
