Over the weekend, I overheard an incredulous, (in my opinion) conversation that a male relative was having on phone. From what I could gather, the person on the other side of the phone, who I would later find out was a “friend”, had abandoned my relative at around 2pm in a bar they had visited together.
He lied to this relative that he was stepping out to make a phone call and would be back shortly, but what he actually did was get into his car and drive away, never mind that he was the one who was to drive this relative home. The poor man ended up walking home.
Thankfully, the bar was a couple of minutes away from where he lived, but it had rained cats and dogs, and being inebriated, he walked into all the water-filled potholes that littered his way home. And they were many, so by the time he got to his destination, his shoes were water-logged and the bottom half of his trousers clung to his legs like a second skin.
Now, what I found incredulous was that he was actually laughing about it, as if being abandoned was the funniest thing in the whole world, as if it was something that happened every day. When he hang up, I asked him whether I had heard right, that someone he considered a friend actually abandoned him at 2pm knowing full well that he had no means of returning home.
“Yes…” he answered, looking surprised that I sounded so surprised.
“It’s no big deal,” he answered, “I have also left him behind once or twice…”
I was shocked. Shocked because my friendship with my women friends would not survive this kind of betrayal. If we leave for the shop together, leave alone a bar, we go back together, no one, I say no one, leaves the other behind. It would be disrespectful, disloyalty of the highest order, and it would be unforgivable, marking the end of that friendship. It’s an unspoken rule that women have.
Clearly, it’s different for men. You can go drinking with a friend, and this friend will casually get up and leave you there without a word. And the next day you will laugh about it, go drinking together again and act like nothing happened. And then repeat the same thing in the near future. Sacrilege.
It would also be unforgivable, for us women, if a friend you were to meet up with for, say, a coffee date, failed to turn up, or kept lying to you, saying, “Niko hapa nakam…” knowing very well that she has no intention of turning up. And yet I am told this happens with men all the time, yet these ‘friendships’ don’t fade. Women? It never even occurs to us not to turn up.
The one who wrote that book titled, ‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus’ had done his research. From that story I told, it is obvious that the rules that govern men’s friendships are totally different from those that guide friendship between women.
Turns out that friendships between men are more casual than intimate, on the surface, if I dare say.
Friendship between women, however, is intimate. We invest our emotions into it and we invest our time and resources into our friendships. This is probably why acts that men would disregard, dismiss and think nothing of would be akin to cardinal sins in the view of a woman.
The writer is editor, Society & Magazines, Daily Nation. Email: cnjunge@ ke.nationmedia.com
