Is it about lack of appreciation or hard work?

The monthly meeting (an excuse to drink) of my university and social club dudes gathered at Centenary park to think about the softness issue and the sad plight of a fellow member who ignited his woman’s rage when he said that he worked hard and didn’t want to come home to a woman who was going to fuss and give him a hard time. Our host, who has a legal mind wanted to throw the case out of court on a technicality. “The dude was poorly blamed,” he said. “He didn’t say nothing about money or lack of attention. “He didn’t have to,” Joe (that’s not his real name) responded. “He was standing there in that picture with a bad non lady, beaming like a thousand 100-watt bulbs, and the picture spoke louder than words. That was his first mistake --” “What?” “Beaming...And his second mistake was saying or connoting, it doesn’t matter which, that he had tried women and had had a hard time before climbing to the top and finding peace and salvation, among other things, in other arms.” Almost everybody agreed that this was a crime, not, you understand, finding It but saying It, like that dimwit but super-hot chick and all those rich-for-nothing men who apparently didn’t go beyond senior 1. But my other friend, Marcus (another fictional name) disagreed. “You’re all a bunch of hypocrites” he said. “In your heart, you know the dude is right. In your heart, you know every red-blooded man, let him be Black, White, Pink or Grey wants a sweet, soft-spoken, soft-acting woman who purrs and never argues or puts you down and who brings your slippers and rubs your back when you come home after slaying lions and tigers and a woman who meets you at the door in a negligee with a tall cold drink, saying: “I’m glad you are home. I have been thinking about you all day. Is there anything I can get you?” “Preach!” said Timothy, who is engaged to get married sometime this year to a lady who is holding her own with a shop that is doing better than shops of half the men I have come across. “You see the soft ones are all over the country, sitting together and talking to their men even while they are driving, patting them on the back and cooing in their ears and telling them how much they are appreciated.” “You’d be appreciated, too,” a cynic said, “if you were rich and famous. In fact, anybody can find somebody to bring his or her drink to the door if he or she makes Rwf50,000,000 a year. And that goes double for that famous lady, who says she can’t find a man who appreciates her. At the prices and perks she’s providing for an unemployed man yet she could get a ‘million man march’ wherever she decides to go.” As the argument continued, I realized that both sides were right and wrong, for both sides were in danger of forgetting that at the beginning of this century our acts were (among other things) our love and that the only reason men and women had survived was because they were so soft together that the hard blows of the past and teaching of our forefathers as being immortal beings to our girlfriends and wives couldn’t destroy them. That’s why men had softened and women we being appreciated. The important point here, and the point both sides seem to forget, is that real marriages, from the start of the century onwards, have always been partnerships in which both partners serve each other and in which the question of who comes to the door with the drink and who rolls out the welcoming carpet depends on who gets there first. It was that love that inspired by “Boyz II Men’s “On Bended Knee ,” Joe’s “All that I am,” R.Kelly’s “Heart of a Woman,” Brandy’s”Everything I do(I do it for you” and Gladys Knight’s “Midnight Train To Georgia (I’d rather live in his world than live without him in mine).” And although nobody talks about it today, that love is still alive and well and getting down in the ‘Hood where more couples than you can count celebrate their 20th and 30th wedding anniversaries every week. One of the reasons there is so much friction and foolishness between men and women today is that nobody tells us about great couples who are doing it right and who have been doing it for 20, 30, 40, 50 years, despite illiteracy, despite poverty, despite everything. These couples are all around us in Kigali and Kampala, Beijing and New Delhi. And if the media and social networks didn’t run stories on them every week, we would be tempted to believe the lies we hear on the nightly news. So while the great softness debate continues, we need to go back to the past and listen to the couples who created one of the greatest love songs written on this planet earth and who tell us today (among other things) that softness is hard work. Now, this whole thing makes a lot of sense to. That’s what my friend Ellie meant when he said on his 10th wedding anniversary that “the first 5 years of a relationship are the hardest.” That’s what one of the greatest rappers meant when he said that there are no hard ladies, or hard gentlemen. Only hard situations and hard couples! jeav202@yahoo.com