Nobody warned me that being married is tough, especially for men. Marriage is a new world with its own unique set of rules. For starters, I had the following conversation with Sophia just this morning:
“Honey,” I said, fixing a belt around my waist, “I’m running low on cash. Do you have a hundred shillings for bread and milk this morning?”
“Yes,” she said. Then nothing.
“Uhm… so?”
“So, what?”
“Are you going to give it to me?”
“I said ‘yes’, I have the money. But it’s no.”
“Yes, you have the money and no you don’t? That makes no sense.”
That’s when she sat up in bed and fixed me a long stare. “You want to know what doesn’t make sense? A husband who can’t buy his wife breakfast. Why did you want to marry me if you can’t feed me?”
“You wanted to marry me, too. It’s supposed to be fifty-fifty.”
“No, Makini. When it comes to money, it’s actually one-fifty to fifty.”
I feel my head about to explode. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“You see, Makini, what I mean is, what’s mine is one hundred per cent mine and what’s yours is fifty per cent mine. And that makes you one of the luckiest men alive.”
Boom! Head exploded. “How does that make me lucky?”
“Because, dear husband, I am having to break the laws of mathematics for your sake.”
“You’re breaking some laws, alright.”
“What I mean is, in every other marriage out there, it’s two hundred-zero. What belongs to the wife is hers and what belongs to the husband is hers. Two hundred-zero. But you know me. I don’t have a greedy bone in my body.”
“Jesus Christ! I married Dracula,” I blurt before realising I probably just made the first blunder of my marriage.
“No, dear,” she says in a rare moment of civility. “Dracula sucks blood. I’m letting you keep yours. For now. But if I don’t get breakfast in the next half hour, I might not be so accommodating, if you catch my drift.”
I think of a way to get around the problem. “What about you lend me the money then?”
Sophia throws her head back and laughs.
“What’s so funny?” I ask.
“Your naivety, dear. Don’t you know the first law of economics?”
“I don’t, but I have a feeling I’m about to learn.”
“The first law of economics says that you should never do business with family or friends. It’s either money or friendship, or money and marriage,” she says.
“Now, I could lend you the hundred shillings you want, but if I didn’t get it back, I’d have to send some people around to collect. And that means you might end up with a few broken bones.”
“A few broken… what are you, the mafia?”
“Exactly. You don’t want your wife being the one responsible for your limp, do you?”
“Dear Lord. What side of the bed did you wake up on? You were never this vicious before.”
“I was never married to you before. Didn’t your fellow boys warn you about what you were getting into when you decided to get hitched?”
I grab my chin in thought. “Now that you mention it, one of them heard I was marrying you and said—”
“Do you know the first law of self-preservation? It’s simple. You never say anything negative about your wife. Especially not to her face.” She laughs again, gets into her purse and produces a hundred-shilling note. “Here, go get us some breakfast.”
“Thanks, honey.”
As I leave, she shouts: “It’s a loan, dear. Money or marriage, remember?”