Sekkle down

At twenty five I had requirements. Unwritten, but firm. She must be able to cook. She must have ambition, but not so much ambition that she outgrows me by Thursday. She must not have male friends, a rule I enforced from inside a Supermetro I was still paying for in instalments.

I called it having standards. It was fear. Fear wearing a nice shirt.

Nairobi teaches a man to negotiate, and not with women. With himself. First you drop “must be from a good family.” Then you drop “must not live past Ruiru,” because Bolt to Rongai three times a week is a financial position you don’t want to be in, not a romance. Then one Saturday in Kikuyu, with the choma taking suspiciously long, you look across the table at a woman laughing at a joke that was not that good, and you think, this is fine. This is actually more than fine.

Meanwhile the weddings kept arriving. I have been a groomsman three times. Three. My history of hired suits is longer than my career. There is a WhatsApp group in my phone that has never been renamed, it simply changes purpose, and every eight months it demands 5k for a man I last saw in 2019. My mother stopped asking me directly and began praying loudly in my presence, which is worse. My shosho no longer asks about a specific girl. Any girl. She has lowered her own standards to meet mine, and she just wants to hold something before she goes.

And I kept repeating one sentence. “When I stabilise.”

I said it at twenty seven. I said it at thirty. I said it in a bedsitter in Juja after the job went and the boys who loved me suddenly became very busy men with tight schedules.

I said it to a woman who had every reason to leave and did not.

She came that week with pilau. No speech, no lecture. She sat on a floor that had no sofa on it and asked me what I was applying for.

Nobody tells young men this part. The standards you are guarding so fiercely are usually a wall built around a boy who is terrified of being seen while broke. You want a woman who matches an image, and the image was assembled from other men’s Instagram and your uncle’s commentary at a funeral.

So people say I settled. Sawa. Let them.

She does not resemble the list I never wrote down. Her opinions about my life are, irritatingly, correct. She belongs to a chama and will not disclose the amounts. She laughs at things that are not funny and refuses to laugh at my best material, which I consider a form of assault.

But when my father was admitted, she reached the ward before my own brother.She calls him on Sundays and never mentions it, and I only found out because he told me, and the way that old man said her name opened something in my chest that has not fully closed since.

That is the whole thing. The bar was never complexion or a woman who makes other men look at you twice. The bar is who is in the room when there is nothing to gain by being in it.

Whatever you do with this information is upto you.
Peace out