Men’s say with Bob G. Kisiki
You’ve heard the adage and you have had the opportunity to know it’s only good in its role as a sedative for hurting women; the adage about every successful man having a woman behind him. Feminists use it to claim a place of honour on the Planet of Success, while chauvinists say yes, there is a woman, but she is only following the man to have a share of his success. My take: No Comment.
My concern is the man I saw in Wandegeya one day, who gave this adage a new, rotten meaning. He walked with someone I later gathered was his wife. Between them, they kept a well-calculated distance of about three metres. If he walked slowly, she walked slowly. If he increased his pace, she followed suit. Which is okay, because she needed to keep up with him.
What shocked me was that when the man stopped walking to do some window shopping, the woman stopped right where she was, about three metres away and waited for her man to move on, before resuming her trailing. For a fleeting moment, I got the temptation to make light this terrible sight by thinking, why does he treat her like his dog, but I thought no, that is to join him in such sordid thinking. I failed to get the right image to use to describe that relationship.
I once worked in a community where a graduate man who had married a woman two academic rungs below him did a similar thing. If they went to watch a movie together, he either rushed on ahead of her, or trudged behind her. They never walked together, like other lovers in the community did.
Let me tell you men. Do you see those women you marry? They are mature, rational beings, but they are also intrinsically subservient. Maybe not all, but many are… naturally. So even when they know they would rather get better, they will grudgingly accept what you put on their plate. Sad, but true.
While they would rather walk by your side, if you train them to walk behind you, they will be there. Not necessarily appreciating your posterior build, but thinking, when I was single, I had company who appreciated me. We walked together, sometimes holding hands and laughing at life as we passed by it…
Now see this. See me walking behind this man, like an evening shadow! And since she has only her solitary mind to commune with, she could actually advise herself on some of the most gruesome ways to pay you for treating her like a contagious malady.
Have you seen men who, when they use public means, either let their wives enter the bus/taxi first and, seeing where they have perched, the man then proceeds to find either a vacant seat, or one with another woman which he occupies, and begins to chat animatedly with her? Or have you seen them in church, at parties and in other such forums, sitting miles away from where their spouses have sat?
Of course, in some cases, it is the women who make themselves repulsive; asking questions that are off-syllabus and making demands on the man that he can’t possibly, humanly handle. Like, you see that woman there?
I would love it if we arrived in the car she and her husband arrived in (an Alfa Romeo, as opposed to your Spacio); or when I find time off at the office, I am going to Akright; we should get one of those houses in their Namanve estate. And the man’s job? He’s a teacher at a seed secondary school. See, you didn’t even know there were such schools.
Besides such men whose separation from their women is a form of exile, there should really be no cause for a man to abandon his woman, for ideally, the two are meant to make one whole. It sounds funny when one says ‘one whole half’.
Why would a man treat his spouse as a servant and not as an equal partner?
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