One of my readers, Joshua Kembero, wrote to me in response to a story I shared here about this woman, whose long-term, modern thinking boyfriend had suddenly metamorphosed into a profoundly traditional man as soon as they got married. It took her father-in-law to set the man straight, and now they have a healthy marriage relationship.
Joshua’s email expounded on his dating experience – the nightmare part of it - before he finally met the woman that he had all along wished and searched for.
It is not often that we get dating tips from men, and so when Joshua shared his experience and followed it with nuggets of wisdom, I thought it only fair to share the same with you. He starts by stating that dating life is treacherous. I could not agree more. Dating life is like fishing; only you keep catching the wrong fish.
It is a challenging phase, even for those in their twenties. The younger society is imbued by social media and the fallacy of comparison. ‘The spotlight effect,’ the concern about ‘nitaambia watu nini,’ gives the young people a different perspective on marriage that is primarily plagued by what Gad Saad, the Canadian professor of Marketing and a YouTuber, calls ‘parasitic ideas.’
Young men think that money is what women want. The said young men, therefore, spare no detail in proving to the young women that they – the men- are financially endowed, even if the endowment is courtesy of short-term loans. Young women look at dating as a shortcut to a ‘softer life’ and treat every relationship, or the possibility of one, as an opportunity for financial advancement.
Unfortunately, the parasitic mindset has taken root, so much so that most young men think that they must finance a girl, pay her fare to their date, pay for her salon, and so forth. There are many young women who also view a dating partner as a source of income. This means that young daters who hold a different mindset get frustrated, especially those seeking a meaningful relationship.
During my dating days, I often found myself getting frustrated because of such expectations. One behaviour that irked Joshua was when a woman he was interested in asking for a ‘loan’. Especially right after our first date, à la ‘I need a favour’. It was subtle yet so predictable that I wondered if that was all there was to dating. As if this was not bad enough, Joshua lost his job at some point, but he did not lose his desire to date.
That was a character-developing moment when I was in between jobs. It took me a miracle to get a wife. His wife came in the package of a colleague. I realised that what I had been searching for was right beside me, all this time.
What impressed him most was that she never asked for ‘favours’ or ‘soft loans’ neither did she portray any beggarly attitudes. Joshua was smitten, not just by her beauty but by the fact that she would show up for their date, looking all lovely without asking him to finance her. The rest is history.
We tend to go round the world looking for potential dates or mates, get conned, cough up money to pay for fair and other expenses, yet the person we need is right in front of our eyes.
A lady wrote to me, complaining that there were no good men worth dating. Joshua had this to say to all the single men and women on the verge of giving up. There are good men and women available to date and wed. Look closely at the people around you. That boring guy in the accounts department could be what you have been looking for all along.
And yes, Joshua concede that some men are mostly conservative, but he also added that they are loaded with progressive thinking. I believe marriage should have a mix of both. I am progressive on certain issues while conservative on some, and I think that is the homeostatic balance that life needs.
A reader nudged me about the promise I had made sometime back, to start a dating school. Joshua should be one of the facilitators, don’t you agree?
