There are no good men out there. That is according to ladies. Because the current crop of men are not living out to their standards. Or perhaps the ladies have themselves to blame for not finding the Mr Right.
Jackson Biko, alias @bikozulu, thinks otherwise. Have a read:
Take a lady. A professional lady. Age: 32, well schooled and with a decent enough job, probably works as a logistics manager at one of those NGOs that dig boreholes in Turkana and helps goat farmers in Mwingi market their milk better. She swears she loves her job.
She drives a VW Polo – silver – a car that also
doubles as a shoe rack given the number of shoes on the floor at the
back. She lives in a clichéd neighbourhood with the rest of the
middle-class types and goes to church diligently because she was raised
in a staunch catholic home.
Her value system is solid. Oh, and she’s a single
mother of one. A boy. Or girl. Doesn’t matter. But it would be nice, for
the sake of this story if she had a girl because visually you’d see her
matching her little girl’s attire with her own shoes. And purse.
You might have guessed by now that this girl is
single. She doesn’t talk about the “baby daddy” as they are now called.
But when she does, he’s referred to using colourful adjectives like
“useless”, “pathetic” and other words that my editor won’t allow to be
printed here. But she isn’t bitter, oh God forbid no, as she says of
him: “He isn’t worth my emotion and time.”
You shouldn’t be surprised that the sum total of
her experiences has made her exceedingly cynical of men. But to her
credit, this stand isn’t too unrealistic because apparently the dating
game is marred by men who are virtually undatable. I wouldn’t know, men
aren’t my type.
This woman will tell you a story about her driving
to work one morning, and how at a junction, while waiting to join a
road, she saw this gentleman in a swanky BMW X5.
“He was young, hot, neat and looked very well put
together,” she’ll gush. And you will picture that guy too, I mean we see
them in traffic; those pretty boys who have the windows of their
juggernauts all rolled up in traffic because the smell of their success
might come out of the car and suffocate the underserving masses.
So yes we know what she is talking about. Then she
will finish this story by posing a bemoaned question, “ where do you
find a decent man like that in this town? Unbeknownst to her, with this
question she joins a chorus of women, wondering what happened to good
single men to date.
Her routine is depressing: she goes to work until
6, goes home early to “bond” with the child, dinner (only salad remember
she’s searching and she got to keep her waistline from forming a
restless coalition with her bum), then curl in bed with a chapter of a
book like Shades of Grey (which doesn’t help her sense of reality much)
then black out. Repeat this the next day. And the next.
Once in a while, she will attend a random
cocktail. Saturdays she works half day, then heads home to check on
baby, then perhaps later she attends a chama with her girls. Or
a random play at the theatre. Sunday is church then lunch and afternoon
with her baby. Repeat this every week. Every month. Every year.
So in essence the only time she sees a man she
almost likes, is in traffic which limits her pool to men in traffic
(with their windows rolled up) and traffic cops. Tough life.
But it’s not that she isn’t hit on. She is hit on
all the damned time: by married men. And losers. The married crowd you
can understand, but losers? That she has to define. “ Oh,” she explains,
“There are men who have no future; jokers who just want to drink and
have a random shag. Boys!”
Her narrative goes back to her question: where are the good men like the hot chap in the BMW.
What she doesn’t know is that there is a good
likelihood that the “hot” chap in the BMW is married. Women know how to
clean up a man. So yes, Mr Hot-shot BMW could be spoken for. Or he could
be gay.
Let’s be honest, the gay guys scrub up well. The
guy could even be a mess – serial womaniser, control freak, childhood
issues, druggie, commitment-phobic - and he masks his weaknesses with
the car and the clothes. All that glitters…
What this woman might not know is that to meet a man she might
like she has to change her routine, open herself up for interactions. So
take a different route home; join a gym or drink in a different bar
(and for goodness’ sake, drink less!) and most importantly be open
minded to interact with men who isn’t “her type”.
Self-help books are also to blame. They have made
women rigid in their tunnel-visioned quest to “go for what you want,
what you deserve.”
In the process they miss out on good things
because they have ridiculous pre-conceived notion of what they deserve.
The result? They continue staring at men in traffic.
