How to know she is a wife material

You are driving home drunk but your mind is consciously sober with the reality currently confronting you. It is an existential crisis... life changing, whichever way you look at it. You roll down the driver’s window, but you cannot stand the chilly wind that painfully sears through your shirt, making you more miserable.

Your boys have voted that you marry. When you are over 30 with a proper job, you drive a good car and live in a decent neighbourhood, everyone and their dogs think a wife is the only thing you need to complete your life. Your mother and sisters will be happy of course that you are about to marry and better still you will be a father before the end of the year...Not so fast.

But can Carol make it as wife? She is beautiful... outrageously gorgeous, actually. But she is more of a trophy wife or girlfriend. She is tall, has hips and a backside that so much reminds you of Beyonce at her finest. She wears her hair natural and it is unnaturally long. She is well kept, crazily fashion conscious she reads Cosmopolitan, Vogue and every to other fashion magazine religiously and lives that life. She has a decent job, earns well and drives a German car. She oozes power, a tad snobbish but you have since established that she is just insecure. An insecurity that stems from her beauty and inability to know which man is real and which one just want to hit and run. Besides, she has never really cared to know basic housekeeping stuff. This makes her sensitive when a man criticises her.

If it comes down to it, you can marry her. But can she impress upon your mother? Your mother is trouble spelt in capital letters. She is the chairlady of the Nosiest Mothers-in-Law Association. You are sure, being the mama’s boy you are, your mother will really get on her nerves. Yet, Carol is astutely independent-minded and hates anyone who tries to tell her what she does not feel like doing. “I like my space and that’s why my long distance relationship has worked so far,” she once confessed to you when talking about that loser of a man currently doing his PhD in Germany. Isn’t it a fact of life that PhDs are for losers?

You get home and go straight to bed, painfully aware that the problem will not have gone away by the time you wake up. The following day is Sunday and you have to make a decision. If the pregnancy is to be terminated, it has to be done early. Wondering what she has decided upon, you text her, asking her if you can go out for some Nyama Choma as you catch some Manchester United-Chelsea game. She texts you back that she is in church. That inspires hope in you. If she goes to church, you can have her.

You can sense that you are gradually accepting her. Your first attraction, while purely out of lust, may have been genuine. But deep within, you feel cornered. Is that how all married men feel their entire lives? Isn’t this the very thing that you have loathed about marriage all along. You are a strapping young man with so much to live for. You know marriage slows things down but there is never the right time for everything.

You wait for her to join you for the match and hope she is less feverish and peevish.

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