Dear Aunty Adeola, I love your column. I need your help so much. Three girls are forcing themselves on me and I don’t love any of them. What should I do to make them leave me alone because I have a girl I so much love but none of them want to listen. Please advice me ma. From Paul in in Ado-Ekiti.
Tell them quite honestly that you don’t fancy them and that they should respect your wish and stop stalking you. Good luck.
I am 20 years old. There is this girl named Ayo. I really love her but she lives in Lagos and I stay in Osogbo. She came to school in Osogbo and that was how I met her. I made her realize that I love her and we promised each other that we would get married when the time comes, but suddenly I noticed she stopped picking my calls when she travelled. I know something is wrong but I can’t afford to lose her. Aunty what should I do? I really love her.
As hard as it is, sometimes we just need to accept that a relationship is over and move on. When in love, we are looking through rose-colored glasses and we’re so blinded by them that we ignore those very clear signs that a relationship is caput. We do our best to overlook the obvious in place of the positives–that are slowly fading into negatives. You continue to invest your time and emotions into what has become a one-sided relationship, because she hasn’t said those two words we dread hearing: “It’s over!” but she’s doing things to drive you away without actually saying you’re done! So, what are the signs you should NOT overlook? Here you go: she’s not calling id number one and number two is she’s not answering your calls. That means she’s no longer what she was when you met. It’s most likely an indication that it’s over. So move on.
Please Madam, I have a terrible habit, and I want it stopped- masturbation. I wanna know if it has any effect on me, a young man of 28 years old. The reason why I kept doing it though is because I am afraid of catching HIV/AIDS.
Many people masturbate for different reasons. For you, it is because of your fear of contracting HIV/AIDs. The world is full of hypocrites, so I won’t join those who come out to condemn masturbation when I know these same people go behind closed doors to ‘self-help’. Before you stop, are you sure you’re going to be so disciplined that you won’t look for a human substitute? Anyway, since you want to stop, here are some tips to help you:
If you think it’s a problem then it must be, so make conscious efforts to remove that problem.
Eat chocolate, it releases endorphins which make you feel happy and mild thereby canceling out the urges.
Stay away from porn (or obvious reasons).
Distract yourself with something fun if you have an urge (video games, clean music, a hobby, etc.)
Make a gradual plan, for example try going for 3 days, stay there for a week or two, then go to four days and keep gradually increasing the time between occurrences.
Most importantly, do not hate yourself If You Fail, take it moderately, failing is a bad thing but it’s not the end of the world, by constantly hating on yourself for messing up you will cause the worst of the symptoms and ruin your social life because of shame.
Aunty Adeola, I’m a mother to three active children and I work too. I feel exhausted at the end of each day and I can’t help feeling that I’m not enjoying my life the way I should. What can I do to make myself happy after taking care of the family? – Bunmi.
Dear Bunmi, I know what you’re talking about. You come back home from work and you still have to cook, clean, serve and make sure everybody is okay. You may find yourself thinking that you’re an unpaid house help. You must know that everyone needs a day off once in a while. The tips blow are to make you know you can give yourself a treat every once in a while.
1. Get out that bubble bath and the radio. Draw a bath, of course with extra bubbles. Tune the radio to a relaxing station, light some candles or incense, and just relax! Don’t clean, just soak your troubles away. Then wash your body with refreshing-smelling body soap.
2. Whenever you are done soaking, get out, dry off, and get dressed in nice shirts or T shirt, or whatever makes you feel comfy. You can even try bum shorts! You’ll feel sexy.
3. Pull your hair back into a bun, and put on a headband. You want to make sure your hair is out of our face for these next few steps.
4. Rinse and pat your face dry.
5. Apply a facial mask. If you don’t have one, make one (1/2 mashed up banana with 2 tbs. honey. Leave on for 10-20 minutes.) Then rinse. While you’re waiting, read a good magazine or watch TV.
6. Rinse the facial and pat your face dry. Now wash with a great toner.
7. Now, it’s time for the nails. Remove any old nail polish from your finger nails and toe nails. Also file your nails and remove dirt under them with the edge of the file. Then paint your nails a clear color and leave them to dry.
8. Rent or watch on TV a good chick flick. Paint your nails and eat yummy popcorn while doing this.
9. Get a tub of your favorite ice cream plus cookies and enjoy. Or, if you’re a health nut and don’t like sweets and fattening foods, go vegan for a day, or check out recipes on Google by searching ‘spa day recipes’.
10. After the movie, read a good book for as long as you’d like.
11. After you’ve read, go to sleep, or, take a nice nap and let the household take care of themselves just this once!
I am in a great fan of your page on relationships. Well done. I have a boyfriend whom I see a future with, but his penis is just 3.5 inches when erect. This concerns me as it is small beyond satisfaction. He is fantastic in every other way but I just can’t get this thought out of my head, that he’s small and that I don’t think I’ll ever enjoy penetrative sex with him.
I’ve read some of your previous responses to men who have enquired about this and your advice is that there are drugs that work with penis enlargement. Are there really such drugs and are they safe? – Shandy.
Dear Shandy, I bet you have seen those men with mega-phones around proclaiming the wonders of their herbs. And I’m sure you must know that they remain in business because people patronize them. People patronize you either because they want to try your product or they have tried it and are coming back for more. The truth however is that some of these herbs have terrible side effects as they have not passed through tests and evaluation for safe use hy human beings. Not many people will come out to say they have been embarrassed after using such herbs.
Luckily, you’re not asking about such herbs here. Yes, there are indeed penis enlargement drugs. I know because I got some bottles from the UK and gave family members and friends who reported seeing changes after using it.
Before I talk about how penis enlargement drugs work, let me ask you this: what is small and what is not small? The fear that a man’s penis or your partner’s penis looks too small or is too small to satisfy your partner during sex is a common fear. But a number of studies have shown that most men who think their penises are too small actually have normal-sized penises. Similarly, studies suggest than many men have an exaggerated idea of what constitutes “normal” penis size. Consider that:
The average penis measures somewhere between 3 and 5 inches (or about 8 to 13 centimeters) when not erect, and between 5 and 7 inches (13 to 18 centimeters) when erect. A penis is considered abnormally small only if it measures less than 3 inches (or about 7 centimeters) when erect, a condition called micropenis.
Dear Aunty Adeola,
Thank god for your column. It has taught me many things about life. I need your help now about how to heal after my boyfriend of 5 years dumped me for another girl. I still love him but I have enough pride to go and beg when I know he’s always with this new girl. I want to put him behind me but I don’t know how to go about it. Please tell me what to do. – Irene.
Dear Irene, I’m glad that you have a lot of dignity and you’re smart enough to know that there’s no point is trying to get this guy’s attention now that he’s drunk with the affection he must be feeling for this new person in his life. I know it can feel like the end of the world when you’re losing the love of your life. Heartbreak can feel equally devastating when you thought you’d found your soul mate. You may feel deeply upset, bleak and rejected. It’s a truly awful time. There are few experiences in life that are more hideously painful than having your heart broken. And it can happen at any age. But the happy fact is that most people not only get over heartbreak, but they go on to love again.
Your broken heart will heal. Yes, it won’t be so easy, but if you give yourself time, your heart will sing a new song soon, but you must let go of this guy completely as you desire. Below are tips on how to mend a broken heart:
Get someone to look after you
If the break-up comes out of the blue, you’ll be in a state of shock. You certainly won’t be thinking straight, and you’ll probably have physical symptoms such as insomnia and weeping, or you may feel completely numb. Don’t try to struggle through this alone: get someone to look after you. If need be, arrange a few days off work.
Treat yourself with care
In the weeks after a split it’s normal to feel as though you are physically ill. So try to treat yourself with the care you would if you were recovering from an illness.
Get plenty of rest. Have scented baths. Tempt yourself with healthy, delicious foods. Maybe buy some luxury fleecy pyjamas and a furry hot water bottle cover. This is a time when you need to indulge and comfort yourself.
List 50 good things about you
When your heart is broken, it’s easy to feel that you are to blame and that you are worthless. These feelings contribute to you feeling really wretched. So it would help if you could remind yourself of just how great you are.
Write a list of 50 things that are good and worthwhile about you. Once you’ve completed the list, add one more thing to it every day. This will help to improve your self-esteem, which has doubtless taken a knock.
Talk things through
Now is the time you need your confidants to listen while you go over and over what has happened. As you talk things out, the worst of your feelings will gradually lose their hold on you. Your friends will probably be very available to you in the early days. And some may even listen if you ring them at three in the morning. You’d do the same for them – wouldn’t you?
List bad things about your ex
When we’re heartbroken, we tend to dwell on all the perfect times we spent with our ex.
But, to get over him or her, you need to start seeing things more realistically. Maybe he was controlling or boring when he’d had too much to drink. Perhaps she was too possessive or had a family who kept interfering in your lives.
Make a list of everything that was bad and that you don’t miss. Put this list somewhere prominent, like on the fridge. Add to it every time you think of something new – which may well be often!
Hide photos
Some people are so angry they destroy all photos of their ex and cut him or her out of any shots of them together. Certainly, it isn’t helpful to keep seeing images of your beloved. But you may one day regret destroying all photos from this time in your life.
Instead, collect up all photographs and put them in the loft or give them to your friend or mum for safekeeping until you’re sure you know what you want to do with them.
Don’t try to be friends
Your ex may have suggested you keep on seeing each other as mates. But this is something the person who wants out usually suggests to the partner being rejected, and is far more about the dumper’s guilt than real friendship.
It will not help you to try to be friends – at least not initially. Having contact with each other when the break is still recent just prolongs the agony. Every time your ex says something nice to you, you will interpret it as meaning that the relationship can be rekindled. Don’t do it.
Never have sex with your ex
There may come a time when your ex comes round to see your children or to sort out some belongings.
You’ll get talking, and you may even crack open a bottle of wine. At this point it is all too easy to find yourself hugging and kissing – and heading for the bedroom.
Unfortunately, having sex will only confuse and upset you further, especially if your ex leaves immediately afterwards, which is very likely indeed.
I am a girl of 16 with an O’level result and a JAMBbite! I have a boyfriend (platonic) whom I am planning a future with; he is 25 and also JAMBbite. He promised to marry me and went ahead to meet and declare his intentions to my family. My mum accepted but my elder sister who trained me right from when I was 6 and also the breadwinner (my father is late) refused with the excuse that he is broke and that I’m too young and that the boy may be after my innocence. Could it be true? I don’t believe her. The guy’s family knows me and they very much approve of me. Aunty please advise me on what to do. – Princess from Abuja.
Princess, I was watching a program on telly a few weeks ago and the couple being interviewed said they met when the girl was 16 and guy was 17 and the guy told her immediately they met that he was going to marry her. She said she believed him and started looking forward to the time they would be married. When the interviewer asked the guy if he meant it when he said he was going to marry her, he said yes, he did, but there were other girls too he could have married, but it was his father who advised him to marry this particular one. They’ve been married now for close to 20 years and they are happy together. Yes, she was a virgin when they met (expectedly at 16) and he was her first man.
When young girls hear stories with happy endings like this, they may start day dreaming and give it all to the guy in the hope that theirs too will end up that way. But, the truth is that while girls get wire for marriage at a young age, guys may want to leave it till they are financially and emotionally ready for the challenges of marriage. So at 16 when you’re already thinking of building a happy home with this young man, he might be thinking of making enough money to build a home.
As it were, he’s still looking at getting a degree and he hasn’t even secured admission yet. So, give or take, he still has more than five to six years before marriage fits properly into his plans, except he’s from a comfortable family and they’re ready to support him if he gets married early or he has a business by the side.
He might have all the good intentions in the world, but do not trade your innocence for all the promises he has to offer until you’re ready. Your sister may be wrong, but she might not be too far from the truth. Even when men love women, there’s always that thin line between love and lust. Most men will want to prove their love through intimacy and that leads to sex. Be careful and stay focused on your education. That to me is what matters more than marriage talks for now.
I am happy with your write-up always in The Nation on Saturday. Please can you educate my wife on her number: 080284… She bores me sexually. All efforts by me have failed.
Sure, you want adoration, respect, and the occasional sparkly treat from your woman, but more than anything, you want to feel like she’s still got the hots for you. Well, here’s good news: Contrary to the widely held belief that women lose interest over time, experts now know that women are actually hardwired for long-term lusting.
Below are 7 tips for your wife and women like her who may be going too cold in the bedroom
1. Utter the one word that drives him nuts
As lovey-dovey as pet names make him feel, they still don’t compare to the electrifying rush your man gets when his name crosses your lips seductively especially when you’re cozy. Just hearing it is an aphrodisiac, it ratchets up his desire because the message you send is ‘It’s you I’m thinking about and no one else.’ And men need to hear that, it’s tied to their primal urge to beat out all the competition.”
However, just blurting out his moniker as often as possible isn’t going to do it for him. You need to make it count. For instance, when you’re feeling sexy in a public setting, like in at a party, drop it into a sexy conversation and then say something like, “Ibrahim, I need you. I can’t wait for us to get home”. Those are funny things that endear us to our men. He won’t only want to make love to you when you get home, he will want to make you know you’re special. And when you’re about to go on it and he’s putting the moves on you, coo his name to draw his focus entirely on to you and kiss him to let him know you desire him.
2. Never underestimate the power of an unexpected touch: Just by stimulating his nerve endings when he’s not prepared for it, you create a positive physical connection that leaves your man wanting more. Even better, your guy subconsciously gets hooked on those mini-moments of excitement and craves them when you’re not around. From now on, be on the lookout for opportune moments to touch him “accidentally.” For example, don’t ask him for his keys…glide your hand into his pocket and slowly take them out. Don’t ask him to pass the salt…reach across him, letting your breasts rub against his arm. Don’t walk past him at home or even at an event, press your rear into his gear. These sneak attacks work like a charm.
Good evening ma. I’m Prince, 23 from Imo State. Please ma, there’s a girl I love so much but I don’t know if she loves me. I lose concentration whenever I see her. What can I do? Please help me.
How would you know if she loves you if you wouldn’t interact with her and get to know her better? She may not even love you now because she may not know you love her. It’s possible you act shy whenever you’re with her and she might have noticed this. But shyness might be misinterpreted for so many things. For instance, she might even think you don’t like talking to her, not knowing you’re already losing your head for her. Buy her cards that say it all. Send nice messages to her and take her out for a drink. That giddy feeling in your head will soon start disappearing when you start spending time together and getting to know each other. And if she’s not interested, don’t force it. It’s possible she has her own guy. In that case, leave it till you find another person who makes you lose concentration n and then try these tricks all over again.
One trillion naira is a lot of money in any currency in the world. Except perhaps in Zimbabwe where it’s said, you will need a trailer load of banknotes to buy a loaf of bread. That must be one very expensive loaf indeed.
Anyway, for a developing country like Nigeria facing serious challenges and is crying out for development, that kind of money would have come in really useful. Just imagine for a moment what the country could do with 1 trillion naira. Let’s pick just three areas of the economy. It could fix some of our very bad roads, we could invest some of it in education so our students don’t spend more time outside the lecture halls than inside due to incessant strikes by their disgruntled teachers and buy some much needed equipment and life-saving drugs for our hospitals so our people no longer die from treatable ailments. There could even be some ‘change’ left after all that expenditure for some boost to the power sector so our towns and cities can be lit up at night instead of the dense jungle-like darkness all around us daily.
But like a fool and his money, what does our country do with that mouth-watering sum? We spend it on just a very select and exclusive set of citizens, our lawmakers who must be the most pampered in the world. Indeed, if a former Minister of Education and ex-World Bank Vice-President, (Africa Region), Mrs. Obiageli Ezekwesili, is to be believed, our House of Representative members (360) and Senators (109), are the highest paid in the world. According to her, that huge amount of over 1 trillion was spent on salaries and allowances of these legislators between 2005 and 2012 alone.
Now I’m not an economist and I was not very good in Maths back in my school days. But even with my limited calculation abilities, I can tell that there’s something seriously wrong in this sort of situation. How can a developing country struggling with serious socio-political and economic problems with one of the lowest per capital income in the world ($1,500), with a poverty index of 112 million people (out of a population of about 170 million) spend so much money on just 469 people? What special work are they doing that we should spend so much of our hard-earned resources on them to the detriment of the remaining millions of others.
I know a lot of things don’t just make sense in this country but this is one of those senseless things we are doing in this country that is seriously holding us back as a people. As Ezekwesili noted, most of the nation’s income from oil, taxes and other sources are spent on recurrent expenditure- a whopping 82 per cent of its budgetary appropriations- leaving a mere 18 per cent for capital projects. Now, you see why nothing works in this country and like an intoxicated masquerade, the nation keeps moving round in circles with occasional steps backwards for variety’s sake. In sane countries, capital projects take the lion share of budgetary allocations as such money is sorely needed for infrastructural development and to service other areas of the economy. But here, we spend most of our money on the over pampered lot at the National Assembly whom many Nigerians don’t even understand what they do in the first place.
We don’t even get value for money for all the investments in them. How many laws for instance have been passed in the past five years that have impacted positively on the lot of the long suffering masses of this country? If they are not debating on how they can increase their already bloated allowances and salaries, they focus on such depressing issues as child marriages.
Obviously, we are all hungry for change in our country and a better deal for our people who have suffered so much at the hands of those at the helm of affairs. But all that desire for change will be meaningless if areas that drain our resources are not plugged. So, something needs to be done about these lawmakers and their pay.
The military in 1999 bequeathed to the nation a very costly presidential system that is draining the nation of already scarce resources. We simply cannot afford to continue running such an expensive system. Perhaps, the time has come for the country to adopt a more cost efficient system of lawmaking that will not milk the country dry.
Ezekwesili advocated this much when she advised that the job of local, state and National Assembly members should be a part-time activity rather than a full time job.
Maybe this will arrest the abnormal situation whereby the more money the nation earns, the poorer the people become with the poverty index rising in geometric proportions from 17.1 million Nigerians living below poverty level in 1980 to a frightening 112.47 million people today.