The marrying type: Understanding Men-Guide to Successful Relationships
The last thing Nancy Wekesa got from her boyfriend of eight years, before he ran off to marry a woman he had just met, was a pink card.
“He was a good man. In fact I believed we were soul mates. I had met his parents and I featured prominently in his future plans, so nothing prepared me for what I was about to find out.”
The couple, who had met at their local church along Thika Road, talked about settling first in Buru Buru before building their house in a suburb and having two children. Things were going so well. But what Nancy found in the lovely pink card shattered her heart.
It was a message ending their eight-year relationship and telling her that her boyfriend was marrying someone else.
Nancy has since forgiven him and moved on to marry another man, but she still wonders why the man she believed was her husband-to-be left without an explanation and married another woman.
Invested emotions
Talking to women who have had to count their losses and mourn ‘wasted’ years in a long term relationship, a nagging question remains: Why did the man in whom they had invested their time, love, emotions and trust go off with a woman he barely knew?
Lance Mckeithan, in his book Understanding Men: A Guide to Successful Relationships writes that women are quick to invest their emotions in a man they think would be good for marriage, even before he considers what they have as a relationship.
He further explains that men take advantage of such women by giving the impression that they are on the same page, whereas they are not.
Thus a woman maintains a rosy view of the relationship and imagines that since she has found the right man and spent so much time on him, the relationship will automatically lead to marriage.
But it is not so with men. Timothy Kiama, 34, who got married two months ago, discloses that he left his girlfriend of four years and married his current wife within four months of meeting her.
Even his friends were shocked when they attended his dowry negotiations only to find a different girl from the one they were expecting.
So why did he throw out a four-year-relationship for a woman he had known for only a couple of months?
“When I was dating my former girlfriend I was just looking to have a good time. I was not thinking of marriage. And when I felt I wanted to take the next step, which is marriage, I could not marry my former girlfriend because she would not make a good wife. She was good company but she is the type who will cause you stress,” he justifies his decision
He had only known the other girl for a month when he decided he wanted to marry her.
Indeed, some men claim they can tell within a month of knowing a woman, whether she is the one they want to marry or the one they want to have fun with.
John, a 33-year-old gym operator, gives it no longer than four weeks to figure out whether he would marry a certain woman.
“You do not need much time to figure out if a woman is nurturing, concerned about you, respectful and one who will not stress you out,” he says.
If she misses the wife cut, there is nothing to stop a man from going along with the relationship especially if the woman is eye-catching and interesting and provides good company.
John says that if a man has not labelled you ‘the one’, he can still choose to stay on for years until he is ready to marry and meets the right woman for him.
Then he makes a snap decision and leaves the long-term girlfriend wondering what she did wrong and why he chose someone else over her.
The best option
“It is all about convenience. He stays with the woman he has because even if he does not plan to marry her, he is getting some benefits from the relationship. But he jumps ship as soon as he gets the deal he has been waiting for,” says John who has been married for three years.
Johns adds that since men do not make decisions based on emotions, there is hardly ever the chance that he will stay on due to the guilt of having ‘wasted’ a woman’s time.
“Unlike women whose decisions are influenced by emotions, we rationalise and then choose what we believe is the best option.”
Mckeithan writes that due to the trusting and emotional nature of women, men take advantage of them by acting in ways that reinforce the woman’s trust in them.
Eliud, 35 and a bachelor, agrees that men can be deceptive when it comes to these kinds of relationships, which he terms relationships of convenience.
He says that some men go as far as inviting the women to move in with them, always dangling the carrot of marriage in an unspecified future and throwing in hints of a solid future together that never comes to pass.
Source- http://www.nation.co.ke/Features/saturday/The+marrying+kind/-/1216/1245598/-/item/0/-/nkx8qw/-/index.html
