SUBTLE SIGNS THAT YOU NEED TO MARRY

In life, somehow, we thrive under deadlines. Just imagine what wouldn’t have been accomplished if there were no deadlines? Many of us, if not all, wait till the last minute to type that report, or waited till the last minute to do that assignment back in school. It’s the nature of being alive and without a hurry in the world. As such things that do not have a deadline attached to them, ticking like a bomb, will never really get done as quickly as they should be. One such is marrying for the man. The ladies, I hear, have their aunties up their sleeves, nagging and nagging … because of the ticking biological clock. Luckily for men, the clock doesn’t tick against them.

But then in life, there are subtle things that just appear to us, that seem to tell as we need to find a partner, marry and settle down as quickly as possible. Of course your years must be quoted in centuries and it makes sense, such as ‘I have lived for a quarter a century.’ If you have no kid out there, then you should be worried because you are contravening against strict African customs that necessitated you had close to three or more kids at that age. Bedroom conquests, although they did not covertly say so, were strictly for procreation. Having lived such a long time must be enough a reason to look out for an offspring. You never know when you can be hit a stray bullet, or you may just be visiting a sick relative at KNH, and the next thing you know is you are in the morgue, lifeless and masked people are conducting strange experiments on your person.

As you walk across your neighborhood, you take note of kids playing with their tiny bicycles and it suddenly occurs to you that it would be a beautiful sight if that kid originated from you. When your heart goes ‘aaaaaw!’ in a strictly feminine way, my friend find the nearest cute thing, even if a tree, and go down on your knee, for its nature way of telling you that it’s your time to procreate. Even worse, all the friends you were in high school with start posting picture of little pinkish human beings on their whatsapps, and you have to imagine all yours that were trapped by latex or those that were gunned down by the ever efficient Super Agent Postinor. You may regret once or twice, until you take at least four beers and you find yourself in the same circle again.

Sometimes, on  evenings, when you trudge up the stairs to your little ‘sheethole’ the aroma of cooking food, doused with all the spices imaginable, arrests you in one dimly lit corner of the stair case and tells you in a diabolic grin: ‘you may have to get hungry, and there’s nothing you can do about it.’ Inside the houses emanating that smell, are wives doing their things. The man, if he has not passed by the local, has his feet on the table, watching important things such as lotto and sports betting adverts. What about you? You will be welcome by the stale smell of dishes that you haven’t washed since Agwambo was a toddler. Which reminds you that you have surviving on one sole culinary skill, boiling things up and adding salt. When it gets to this point man it’s time to get a helper.

As men, we are both biblically and legally allowed to be hygiene challenged. Questions will be thrown at men who are abnormally clean, and you don’t want to be one of them. These questions, mind you, put to question one of the core reasons as to why are a man in the first place. As a matter of fact and urgency, you are allowed to employ the following hygiene techniques every day, until you find a wife. When it comes to dressing, you have two techniques to use when all your clothes are dirty: looking through light to determine which is less dirty, or sniff to determine the extent of sweat you have deposited on your clothes. However, the sniffing technique is quite irrelevant when certain small insects drop dead, which you have to update you laundry techniques by getting a wife, assuming she subscribes to the traditional roles of the wife that our fathers have, since time immemorial, determined as the correct and acceptable reasons of paying too much unnecessary dowry. If not, my friend join Maendeleo ya Wanaume. Revive it if you have to, they’ve been too silent of late.

And then the cold. Although you do not want to give the wrong impression, that sijui he wants constant sex, which is hundred percent true, this is also part of the package that just demands that you marry quickly, through whatever means.