Love and Money

 

It is yet another Friday and once again we find ourselves on this weekly routine. Having missed last Friday, I did manage to get a piece together on a Sunday to which you, dear readers gave a good response. The discussions that followed that article have shed more light of the issues surrounding the education system and I do hope that one of these days I can get one of the teachers from the readership to comment on the issues while I sit back and read what people in the profession think.

It has been some time since I added any article to the Richie Online love curriculum. The closest thing I remember to a piece in that article is the “he won’t marry you” article. That stuff got me in trouble with my girlfriend. Having looked at the content of the article (you should read it if you have not), I made it a point that the link would not get anywhere near her friends. Surprisingly, a day after I had posted it I got a text which read, “I will come to clean and cook for you; even though you won’t marry me”. I was caught unaware. Today I am writing again and I hopefully will not get in trouble with anyone.

If you have been paying attention to the social media, there has been some sort of low-key debate on the issue of love and money. In one clip of a nikah (Muslim wedding), the Sheikh was preaching to the man to make sure that he provides for his wife all the time. In what probably was the reason the bride was smiling from ear to ear, the Sheikh went on to somehow support the saying that the husband’s money is for both while the wife’s is hers alone. The clip went viral and was shared equally by both genders but the difference was in the captions. While ladies captioned it with words of agreement, male humans chose to post it with no caption. How you interpret and use that information is completely up to you.

A couple of weeks ago, one Pemphero Mphande happened to be launching his What You See at Sunrise book. Having made a star-studded line-up of speakers, I found it hard to restrain myself from parting with a K10000 sum which is what the man thought was worth a regular ticket. Apart from launching the book however, Pemphero was also launching a dating site. Here is a little background for those of you who did not read my article on the reflections from the month of love. In February, the month famous or infamous for having Valentine’s Day in it, Pemphero took an initiative to be providing counselling people with love issues and to connect lonely hearts. Having been overwhelmed with the efforts, he thought that it might be too much for him to be individually doing the job. The man turned to technology and decided to seek the services of Freelance Web Solutions who designed the 265dates website. The site is up and running now and one thing I found interesting was the level of detail they ask the participants to put in. Level of education (understandably so), work status (ok?), who you stay with (no comment) and whether you have a car! I am pretty sure in the algorithm for finding matches one can filter out the ones that do not have a car if they desire to. Perhaps they might as well add something about whether one has a stable income.

Let us talk about the car issue. In the modern day, a car has become a necessity as opposed to the luxury it may have been back in the days. I have this weird belief that ladies prefer to have a spouse with a car while gentlemen do not and before you stone me, you should let me explain. For a modern day young lady, having a boyfriend with a car would mean that she will wear the heels right at home as opposed to carrying them in her handbag and wearing them on the entrance to COMESA Hall while for a guy having a girlfriend with a car would mean that she can pop up anytime unannounced when he is up to some fishy business. And then there is the insecurity. In what others have thought of as materialism, then, some young ladies have developed this tendency of writing off male members of the society who still scratch their heads with fingernails and not car keys. That is perhaps the reason why Freelance Web Solutions decided to add in that information on whether one has a car for people to have an idea of who they are getting involved with. I will get back to this.

You may have seen pictures of some charismatic preacher in a white jacket. For some reason, several videos of this particular pastor have been going around and in three of them which I have seen, he is heard encouraging young people to get married. In one clip, he bashed young ladies for being materialistic and looking for men with cars when their own parents cannot afford one. So there we are, then. On one hand we have one Pemphero Mphande who has made asset-declaration part of the profiling on a dating site and on the other we have a pastor who is saying we should not look at material things when picking a spouse. Who should we listen to?

There is a relatively olden saying in Chichewa that says chikondi si ndalama; love is not money. That is to say that our decisions of who to take as our life partner should not be influenced by material possessions. For years, our mothers and grandmothers lived by this but the iPhone generation is in a different situation altogether. Our mothers realized that love does not pay the bills and are advising their wards to pick guys who are well off. Let me digress. In his comedy piece titled Tambourine, one Chris Rock mentioned how friends and family ask for different things about a spouse once you tell them you have found love. To a guy, the question is about what she looks like. To a lady, it is about what he does for a living. The reasoning is simple. As the good Sheikh mentioned, men are supposed to be providers and women need to go into relationships that guarantee security. The question, however is about to what extent this has to be done.

In a replica of what happened in our nursery days when the girl who fancied you could leave you for the guy with a pencil sharpener or better food on the break, ladies have left guys who are just well off to those who are living the life. Some of these guys happen to be those who are just starting off in life and have very good trajectories in life. As such, they may not be able to finance some of the demands of the modern day life of a girl who would like to look trendy in this social media age. Sometimes, people just do not have enough owing to the peanuts we get in these offices and the difficulty of maintaining a profitable business. And then there is the issue of supporting extended families.

On the flip side, some men are just stingy and are not able to provide anything for their ladies. In such relationships, the male human would always ask about when the lady would come visit his house (read as boys quarter) with no arrangements to go and have some quality outdoor time. Money for a hairdo? Airtime? Nope. Requests for those are met with constant litanies of excuses.

Now that we know that we have materialistic ladies and broke and stingy guys… will anybody be able to find and sustain love? The answer is YES and here is why. I am just positive that everyone will begin to run in their lane so that they find what they need and what they can manage when it comes to a love partner. If you are a guy, go for the lady you can afford and if you are a lady who wants a guy with a car, go find him where you have parked yours. We have solved it. But wait a minute. In life it may not be that simple and that is where I invite everyone to use a bit of reason in adapting the principal of getting the partner we can afford and manage to be with.

In what will be my final agreement with the Sheikh for this article, I will say that men indeed have to be providers and it is imperative that one has a good source of income before inviting a lady in their life. I am not just talking about marriage here. Relationships have their own expenses too. Even if a lady is working, once in a while they just want to feel that they have a guy who can take care of them for assurances while on the way to marriage. That means that you have to chip in on that salon money, buy her a velvet dress or take her out to KFC for dunked wings or ice cream. The problem with modern-day guys is that when we get dumped for being broke, we do not draw lessons from the ordeal. Instead of going to look for money, we go to look for another girl. Now this is something that needs to change.

Ladies! While it is important to find a guy who can sustain you, it is important to be realistic. Not every guy you will meet will be rich there and then. Some of these guys you are seeing not having cars, money or things of the sort just need some time. They have plans and visions that will see them go further in their careers and money and sometimes all you need to do is to be patient, run with the vision and support your partner as you get there together. I should however caution here that not every broke and stingy guy is worth this loyalty.

On the other hand, it is important to note that a car is not everything. When you date a guy with a car, mobility becomes easy but that does not mean that you get the car. Someone pointed out how when you get into an accident an ambulance sent by the medical scheme will come and pick the guy up and the insurance guys will come pick up the car leaving you alone on the scene. While this may be an exaggeration, it reflects on what happens when something wrong happens in relationships which are driven by material things; you get to be left with little to show for it. At the end of the day, it is all about the balance.

While this may not fit as much, I will talk about the unique situation in which ladies find themselves entangled with members of the male species who are in it for the money. We have ladies who are paying their men’s bills and that in itself is not wrong. Life circumstances may demand that once in a while but it is important to not fall into traps where your hard-earned money will get to be used by your boyfriend to finance a skrr skrrr lifestyle or another relationship. Protect your money, young lady. 

There we are, then with love and money. We may have labelled our ladies as gold diggers and our men as stingy broke men, but there is a compromise. Ladies, you will see what to do with the information I provided and gents, let’s pick the ladies we can afford.

When I discussed the idea of this article, they gave me a message for the ladies. The men are saying that you should not be asking them for K3000 for your village bank every Friday because they were not there when you were making the decision to join. They were also angry with this whole situation because they never get to see the proceeds of the village bank. Do not kill the messenger.

Written on the request of one Patrick Ken Kalonde. If there is anyone you have to blame for this, then it is Patrick.