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“A relationship should either take you to the altar or to the bank. If it only takes you to bed and the kitchen, then my dear, please say no to slavery” …goes my favorite quote on marriage and relationships.
Last year, my mother’s friend walked up to me one Sunday after church and asked me “Young lady, now that you recently graduated and have a job, when are we selling you?”
I was taken aback by her question. Oh, for those who don’t understand what her question was all about, the good old lady was simply asking me when I was planning to get married. Because her question caught me off guard and I had never previously entertained the thought of marriage, I simply smiled, replied ‘soon,’ and walked away hurriedly.
Well, looking back a year later, I have an answer for you, my dear lady; I will only get married as soon as I land a fabulously wealthy man who will not only sweep me off my feet with his romance but spoil me with his moneybags.
In the few years I have been in the dating scene, I have met hordes of men who come in all wallet sizes, shapes, careers and characters. There are the playboys who think with their gonads and believe that the world revolves around them. There are the sweet, nice guys but are deathly boring and dull. There are the bad boys whom I have dated for the mere thrill of dating a bad boy and for once having to say ‘It’s just us against the world’. There are those born-again church boys, who eat, live, think the Bible. Finally, there are the extremely rare gems, the ones I would love to meet and marry, the rich or wealthy men.
I hate to sound like a gold digger; seriously, my parents raised me better than to love a man for his money. But then again, I believe I am a smart girl with valid dreams and ambitions. While I am the quintessential Miss-Independent girl who pays her own rent, foots her bills and purchases her heels, I am a lover of the finer things in life, which I have come to appreciate do not come cheap.
I am a firm believer that every woman worth her pair of nude-colored heels must have what I like to call ‘a couch’. A couch is simply an insanely rich man who will take care of you in case your business goes down under or in the likely event that you lose your job. I am not teaching you how to be a gold-digger, just think of this as a valuable ‘investment lesson’.
Kenya’s sensational and often misunderstood boy band ‘Sauti Sol’, in their song “Money Lover’ truthfully sing, ‘Heri ulie kwenye range rover, Ama ucheke kwenye boda boda,Ukose usingizi runda Masaibu yanakufuata…” (It is better to weep inside a rangerover than laugh on a bodaboda, it is better to be sleepless in a mansion in Runda.) I couldn’t agree more with Sauti Sol. Any day, I would rather be unhappy in a sleek CLS Mercedes Benz than be happy behind a crappy Toyota Premio. I would rather spend sleepless nights in a mansion in Karen than sleep soundly in a cheap rented house in South C where running water comes only thrice a week. I would rather be married to an ugly, rich man than a handsome man who cannot even buy me my dream car. What is a man who has no money?
Men get into relationships and marriage for various reasons such as personal fulfillment and living up to societal standards. When picking out a wife a man will go for the prettiest, most virtuous girl in the room. If a man would date me for my looks, why am I not allowed to pick the richest and wealthiest man in the pack?
I am not seeking a rich man for the mere fact that he is moneyed, far from it. Money begets respect from society and that is exactly the kind of man I want to marry. A famous swahili saying goes “Tangu Lini Tajiri akadharuliwa?” (Since when was a rich man disrespected?). I want to be the wife of a man who commands respects from all quarters in society; I want to be the society’s first lady.
He could be uglier than former Zimbabwe Premier Morgan Tsvingirai, older than Mugabe and uneducated as he can be, as long as he is stinking rich, then I have a perfect candidate for marriage.
Before you judge me, let me say that I am not only looking out to cushion my life in the near future, but also trying my best to secure the future of my children. Just like any caring mother, I want my children schooled in the best schools in the country, I want them to go on play dates with children of the who’s who in this country, I want my children to grow up in a financially stable environment.
Ladies, if you are dating a man who requires you to go Dutch on dates, he is probably the kind of man that will ask you to forego that trip to the salon and pay house rent. If you are dating a dawdler who drives a cheap Subaru Imprezza or a low end Toyota Mark II, he is a struggling loser, who will barely afford to take you and the children for holiday only once a year, as opposed to my bare minimum of three or four times a year. Such a man can only afford to take you out to cheap joints like Tribeka, Mojos or Natives (Thika Road) and can hardly afford to buy you a decent dinner.
If you are a beautiful, well-endowed woman with several men hot on your heels, then I suggest you pick the wealthiest, and it doesn’t matter if he is ugly or smells like a shoe. Money is the name of the game here.
I haven’t found my Mr. Moneybags yet, but as I await him, I will have fun dating this Mark X and Mark II driving losers, but catch me dead marrying any of these riffraffs.
BY NJOKI CHEGE
