Can we stop looking at other men’s wives?
There a lot of theories out there. Kenneth Kaunda died with the coordinates to where Zambia has oil fields and diamond deposits. Nkana FC is a football club. But none is more ridiculous than the one where you can deduce a man’s success simply by looking at his wife.
Ati if you want to assess a man, look at his wife. Her wardrobe, where she shops for shoes, quality of the fake hair she wears, her iPhone, the car she drives, her handbags.
We’re told to look at a bunch of outward and cosmetic metrics of a grown woman to determine if her husband or boyfriend is a successful man.
Bowman Lusambo famously asked us if we had seen his wife. That just her perfume could pay rentals for other people. Frankly speaking, I have no business looking at or smelling another man’s wife. But there’s a lesson in this.
Men commit a huge portion of their life proving that they’re men, when they could spend most of that time actually enjoying the remaining years they have on a spinning rock suspended in air, eating well, keeping in shape, learning new things and traveling the world when they can.
Nobody looks at a well groomed man and asks who his wife is. His dress sense, the car he drives, money he makes or the shoes he’s wearing, the house he lives in – everything is on him. An unkempt man is an unkempt man, he’s not been abandoned by his wife. A man’s well being is his responsibility, not who he is married to.
Even when a married man is dancing in Dacapo at 2AM, nobody is wondering who his wife is. It’s why he doesn’t have the sense to go home. It’s never about her for us. It’s about us. Men.
We move with the heavy suitcase of the warning lights on the dashboard of our partners’ vehicles, the month’s grocery bill, school fees, the loud bang in the middle of the night and all the carry-on luggage that masculinity comes with.
We’re more than how our wives are put together.
To be a man is to be in a quandary. If his wife and children do not look the part, he’s failed in his duties. And if he doesn’t spend a bit of money on himself to buy a shirt or shoes, then surely there are more bones than meat in his bank account.
Looking at a man’s wife as a measure of his success is a disservice to the many sacrifices and selfless acts of a man doing his best for a family. There is more to it than a wife with an iPhone.
There are men who flash cash to their wives more than they ever flash a smile at them. What you see, if you care to, in a man’s wife is exclusively in the shop window of that relationship.
Behind the happy mannequin, if you’ll allow me a lazy reference, are the long hours to provide meals, protection, emotional availability, leadership and sidestepping your lows to provide familial highs. Apart from one, we’ve had seven well-dressed and polished wives as First Lady of this country. Were their husbands successful?
