One man’s girlfy is another’s wifey

Your live-in boyfriend walks out of your house one day and the next thing you hear is that he is getting married, to another woman.

Women would call it the highest form of deceit and betrayal, but I think it’s just the highest form of compartmentalisation. You know the rare art of not mixing your apples and your beans. This is a skill that requires a level of numbness on the man’s part.

And what this scenario shows isn’t even the “coldness” of men.

Once you have gotten past the emotional debris, it begs the question of what guys really look for in a wife.

What makes a guy date a woman for ages as he prepares to wed another? This is an age old question akin to the egg and the chicken debate.

But let’s be honest, there are some girlfriends who can’t transition to the wife tier. In fact, they shouldn’t. Not because they can’t, but only because that would be like trying to put a collar on a jaguar (the animal, not the car). Or cook ugali using unga wa ngano, or using a kitchen knife to shave off stubble. 

OK, you get my drift. It doesn’t mean the kitchen knife is bad. Neither is the stubble. In fact, as far as kitchen knives go, it could be a great kitchen knife, reducing a piece of beef into shreds in a few minutes. Vegetables might quiver at its sight and so on.

However, what you need for a shave is a Gillette razor. And what you need for onions is the knife. Life has a way of demarcating things if you pay a little attention.  And because life is not one-dimensional, it follows that not everybody looks for the same qualities in a wife, and someone’s wife could as well have the qualities of a girlfriend, and vice versa. However, there is a general thread, a golden thread, which clusters most in the common narrative where they belong.

Carefree versus grounded

As shallow as this might sound to women, there are only two categories that a man who is dating can classify the women he interacts with: the wife material (WM) and the girlfriend material (GFM).

These two ladies might shop in the same shops, wear the same height of heels and even use the same brand of eyeliner pencil, but they still remain chalk and cheese. The truth is the girlfriend material is a bit on the fun side.

She is “random” to use urban lingo. She is mostly feisty, open-minded (sometimes scarily so), and can match you drink for drink on a good day.

She knows how to shoot pool. Some can play darts. The GFM isn’t just a person; she is an idea, a thought process that shores you through your period of searching for yourself, the things that define you. She is life impersonating a human being.

She is like a vessel

But once a man’s soul has settled, and he has finally discovered where his true north is, the guy normally picks the girl who isn’t anything like the GFM. He picks the wife material. The wife material usually has lots in common with the guy’s mother. Most likely she is very contained. She never really does anything on a whim, and probably frowns on a lot of stuff the GFM would do.

Contrary to popular belief, the WM doesn’t have to wear a scarf and read the Bible every night, neither does she have to drink green tea (that’s what the girlfriend material would do actually) and wear a Mother’s Union panty.

In fact, that old model where the wife material was one who could do the dishes, clean the house and whip up a good meal isn’t applicable now. Wife material could be fun and exciting too; the difference is that she calibrates her fun and knows where to draw the line. She’s like a wheel with deep treads, a wheel that keeps you on the road. I’ve seen some GFM turn to be WM. But most of them don’t because that’s like putting a hat on top of a fox’s head. It’s cartoonish. The good news is that it doesn’t matter what a woman is, there is always somebody for everybody.