He asks her out for a dinner date. She dresses up, shows up 30 minutes late, orders chicken alfredo and a bottle of red wine. As she swallows, he adjusts himself almost immediately and unashamedly asks, “How do you usually resolve conflicts? What investments do you own? What are your plans? Where do you see yourself in five years?”
She looks at him, then the wine and wonders if this is a romantic date or an examination. If she answers right, she will get a second date; if not, the dream of ever being a girlfriend or a wife ends here.
For many Kenyans ripe for marriage, the search for a good man or a good woman has become increasingly hard. It is like playing a game of chess or a game of blame. The men say the women, especially those in their 20s and 30s, are “as aggressive as opposition leaders.
They are wall-hitters, having spent their younger years living carelessly, and now, in their 30s, have found their way back to church, to settled values, and to a sudden interest in a good man. Or some are like marrying a child, looking for her father in a husband. Or they are all beauty and no brains. Or they’re very ready to be mothers but not wives. They want providers but cannot be submissive…” and the list goes on.
To pick a potential wife, the men are now turning dating and courtship into something closer to an examination. Unlike Generation X and millennials, younger men are skipping the “what’s your favourite colour?” stage and moving straight to questions testing a woman’s intelligence, problem-solving, and critical thinking.
Reason? They say many of the marriages they see around them appear to lack value or offer no substantial benefits to men, or end a year after the wedding, or many people are stuck in toxic relationships, and few, if any, seem genuinely happy because the men never properly interrogated the women they married.
Others put it plainly. They are not on earth to rescue anyone, so unless and until they get the woman who fits their desires, that is when they will marry. But if they do not find, they will stay single. Some say they are delaying marriage or choosing not to marry because of childhood trauma.
Mike Guantai is 38 years old and works as a project manager at an interiors company in Nairobi. When asked whether he is single or married, he answers quickly. “Single. Very single,” he giggles.
To pick a potential wife, the men are now turning dating and courtship into something closer to an examination.
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He says he doesn’t really have a good marriage to look to as a model. Mike grew up in a home where violence was regular. His father was a social worker. His mother was a teacher. “I grew up in a very violent family,” he says.
His father would come home drunk, very late into the night, and fighting would begin. Mike, being the firstborn of three children, saw all of it. “I saw my mother being beaten,” he says quietly, adding, “my younger sister and a friend asked me recently why I’m not married, and they said that I have trauma that I need to deal with.”
Mike says it doesn’t mean that he has never dated. One woman left for abroad, and they could not manage a long-distance relationship. Another was a good match, he says, smart and warm, but Mike found himself pulling back because of the fear of being like his father.
He has desired many other women, too, whom he says aren’t interested in him because he is a pastor.
“They’ve told me outright, we don’t want to marry a pastor,” he says.
Mike’s childhood trauma may contribute to a fear of conflict resolution in marriage, but other men have different kinds of turn-offs to marriage.
One concern many men raised is that women seem focused mainly on money rather than shared values. “Some ask for nails or cooking gas money in the first week. Surely if you cannot take care of your small financial needs, why should I and I’m not your father. That’s why we ask them tough questions on dinner dates. If she fails, I move on so fast,” said Brian, a 29-year-old who requested to be referred by one name.
It’s an exam, not a dinner date
But if men turn dates into exams, won't women shut down before any romance develops? I ask. The feeling of being assessed so early and so thoroughly may kill any chances of romance. Some men argue that not finding love with one woman isn’t a problem; they have made peace with waiting. The idea of chasing someone in search of love, lowering their standards, or choosing a wife out of loneliness or pregnancy is a mistake their parents made that they do not want to repeat. They say desperation is the real enemy and that patience is a form of masculine power.
There is also the aspect of wives being a financial burden. Men say “the girls nowadays are materialistic; today, tomorrow, next week they want money. Their hunger for money is insatiable.” So men are waiting until they feel they are rich enough for marriage.
Alex Kyalo is 31 years old. He is among those who feel that staying unmarried helps him keep his finances in order. He is a team leader at a microfinance firm in Nairobi. He is the firstborn of six children. When he was in his second year at the University of Nairobi, he had to take a semester off because he could not pay his fees. For someone already carrying the expectations that come with being the eldest child in a large family, he fears adding a wife and children to this big stable. He feels a wife is an extra financial weight he cannot afford.
“For me, marriage is not an achievement,” he says. “I never heard of anyone rewarded for marrying.”
He says his only long relationship, which lasted a little over a year, drained him in ways he still thinks about. He was a student and a girlfriend provider at the same time. He would take her out, spend money he did not have, and go home exhausted and hungry. “I was suffering,” he says. “I couldn’t just get up in the morning to go get myself something to eat.” But he kept going because he did not want her to feel neglected. When the relationship ended, he says he felt relief more than grief.
He tried again after that, but the story followed a similar path. The woman he was seeing wanted things that did not align with his financial situation. The relationship quietly fell apart. Alex says he believes that to hold a marriage together well, a man should be earning somewhere between Sh80,000 and Sh150,000 a month. To him, this is perhaps enough to handle rent, food, transport, emergencies, and still have something left.
“The moment you have it, it will start to control you,” he says of money when it runs thin inside a relationship. “I know where I stand, and I’m working toward the right income quietly, without pressure from a wife.”
Some men feel that a wife is an extra financial weight they cannot afford.
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Right now, Alex says he is at peace. There is no noise in his life, no pressure, no one calling to ask what’s for dinner. No competition with anyone over who earns more or who spends more. He goes home when he wants to. He travels when he feels like it. “No one is bothering me,” he says. “I feel I am happy so far.”
However, he is not closing the door on marriage entirely. He thinks 40 might be the right age to revisit the idea, once he has worked his way to where he needs to be and has learned what the past few years have been trying to teach him. “You never know the future,” he says. Thomas Mburu is 33 years old and works as a sales advisor at a mall in Nairobi. He was in a relationship that lasted about four or five years during his university days. When it ended, he stepped back from dating entirely and spent those years watching the people around him instead.
He says what he has been observing is not encouraging. One close friend fell in love and had a child before marriage. He rushed into a wedding at the age of 25, and within a year, the marriage had collapsed. Money problems led to distance. Distance led to betrayal. The woman left with the child. Thomas was there to watch his friend sink into depression. That same friend is now paying off a loan taken out for a wedding that no longer exists. “He's paying a loan for a wedding he did, but he's no longer with his wife,” Thomas says.
Thomas and many others that Nation Lifestyle spoke to are not against love. They are against going into marriage without a clear plan. They argue that a marriage should be like a business, and if you treat it as such, it will hold. In business, they say, you come in as equal partners or depending on how much investment you are putting in. Meaning, if a marriage breaks up, a man does not walk out with less.
They want a partner who understands what they are building and who can move with them in the same direction. Others describe it as looking for an ally rather than a lover. They want someone who adds to their vision, not someone who functions as an opposition leader in the relationship, criticising everything and offering no better solution. “I asked my ex-girlfriend if she could invest in something. She just shouted ‘no’—no thoughtful explanation behind it,” said a 30-year-old man looking for “a God -fearing woman. “I’m glad I left her. She once told me she doesn’t want to use a single brain cell, even when crossing the road, because I am the man of the house and should do the thinking for both of us. Is she a child?”
As mean as they may seem, these men say they had to change tactics so as not to repeat past mistakes. Thomas says he took lessons he saw around him and decided early that he was going to do things differently. He was not going to follow the same road. “Let me be my own book,” he says. “Let me write my own.”
Marriage aside, there is the position that many young men don’t want. A boyfriend. They say it's one of the worst positions to be in. As a boyfriend, you often take on the responsibilities and expectations of a serious relationship, but without clear commitment or certainty about where the relationship is going. “The most useless thing to be right now is someone's boyfriend,” a post that attracted thousands of responses on social media read.
