As a man with many Facebook friends and few real life foes, I SMH’d (shook my head), scratched my scraggly dreads and said out-loud, to no one in particular “Jesus, why all this bile?”.
As it turns out, the intrigue was soon revealed. Some other writers and myself had given a talk in a campus in Eldoret and given out our Yahoo and Facebook addresses.
Some young lady, let us call her Tabitha, had in-boxed’ me saying, “I admire you,” to which I replied, “You’re welcome.” Her boyfriend, Jay Patel, not understanding the context, flew into a jealous rage, calling me unprintable names.
But the mildly amusing social media incident I’ve just shared with you left more questions than answers. Top of those questions was — why would Patel have his girlfriend’s Facebook account password?
This is the very height, or should I say bottoms, of possessiveness and intrusion of privacy. If a couple has joint bank accounts, I say fine, for their prosperity together. But why I would demand the Facebook password of my girlfriend, let alone wife, beats the life out of me.
INSECURE DUDE
Then there are the possessive guys who want to go through their women’s text messages, and every time anybody calls, they growl, “Who was that?”
If the caller happens to be male, then woe betide her, because the bugger will act in a manner that beggars belief, putting her through an interrogation so intense it is like he’s KGB — and all that is missing is the duct tape, low watt bulb, nipple-pincher pliers and the loose cheap cigarette, dangling from the corner of fleshy lips.
I do not know why any woman would put up with this type of scrutiny, instead of just raising an arch eyebrow and asking in a sweet but hard tone: “What are you now, honey? The Scotland Yard?”
On New Year’s Day, we were with a group of pals somewhere at the Coast, and this one lady kept getting calls literally every five minutes and sneaking off to a corner to talk in low agitated phones, even when 2013 turned to 2014 at midnight.
“Hey, Jemima,” I teased her at one point to our group’s general laughter,
“Inakaa hujalipa rent kutoka last November na landlord anakusumbua.”(Looks like you have not paid rent and your landlord is on your case).
But it was her insecure fiancé, as it turned out, who couldn’t make it to the Coast and was now keeping tabs on Jemima’s every move and moment — where is she? Who is she with? What’s up?
Can you imagine Jemima’s matrimonial life if she marries this chap? There are men who never let their women go out on their own because they are scared she will be ‘snatched’ from them.
This is daftness personified! If someone, say a woman, is ‘snatched’ from you, that’s the Lord’s way of telling you, you two were not meant to be.
I remember, years ago, letting go of a lady I had been ‘sliced’ of, yet a year later, I met my dream woman.
The moral of that sentence is it is better to be relaxed around and about your lass, and if you lose her, sawa, it is better than to be one of those over-possessive men who end up with long jail sentences over a woman — like that man in Umoja accused of killing his journalist woman, or the guy in Kimathi Estate jailed for the death of his KQ lassie.