Matchmaker, matchmaker!

A friend of mine invited me to his wedding last Saturday. A blessed event I would have liked to be a part of if I didn’t have a “Study of Ethiopian Language” exam that starts at the exact p.m. his wedding ceremony would be launched. Not because I like weddings, even my own was something to be put up with, but I was burning with a curiosity I hope to have satisfied after staring long and hard into the bride-to-be’s eyes.

This friend of mine, a jounalist by profession and not a day over his 33rd birthday, was marrying a girl we both knew. I knew her before him. Knew her distantly as that girl whose passport resembles “Sene GoleGolta” due to American Embassy’s rejection stamps forbidding her to go join her fiancée she’s confessed to loving more than once. Not more than a year and a half ago, too! So the announcement came as a surprise, if not a shock. But not as much of a shock treament as the male part of the contracting party administered to the sister this morning.

After the usual “lemeDachuh woy?”, “eQa beSelam temelese?”, “beTu moQe?”, I asked how he managed to maneuver the girl to his camp in so short a while. Kindly note that I didn’t ask my friend when it hit him that she was the missing half of his soul he got split with on birth. Men can have many a twin souls, I’ve learned, sometimes overlapping-ly so. In answer to which he laughed and said “remember how you used to push me to her?”.

“Wot?!” was the question that came to mind. A question i, ofcourse, kept to myself. The man is hot out of his honeymoon bed, ferChrisake. You laugh, you joke, you agree. You don’t go about resenting accusations and counting witnesses. That doesn’t mean his comment didn’t shock the abesheet soul to the core. I remember having said she was pretty and decent. That she speaks good English and that I enjoyed our little chat every time we came across each other infront of OCR building at AAU. What stands out, however, is his lack of enthusiasm over her beauty (“not my type”, i believe, was the words he used), his total disinterest to keep talking about her while I sadly observed how she’s likely to dissolve and disappear infront of our very eyes if the Embassy didn’t give her her visa soon.

Ofcourse I should have known better than to say anything to my male friends about girls. For I’ve learned, long ago, that you can never trust a man to handle an information like this maturely. It seems to me, until some woman (a mother, a sister, a girlfriend/fiancée/wife) came to the rescue, men are like those little children Paul talked about in Ephesians. Who get “tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine. It doesn’t seem to matter whether it’s a suit to wear for work, a commitment to make one’s mind over, a house to rent & a furniture to stock it with. Without “an iron hand beneath a silken glove”, men won’t know their hand from their feet. They’d rather sit in the dark, than turn the light on; gloomily look out the window shaking their heads despondently if the kids of the house forgot to bring the “ejj wuha”; or stand outside in the biting cold until the Misses come.

You always hear of a man deciding to date, go steady with, sometimes marry a girl he doesn’t have the butterfly-in-the-stomach for just because his cousins or colleagues said she would be a catch to some lucky fellow. You may have even heard of that guy who dumped the girl he’s fondly remembered as singing “woy fiQir” to in the streets only to replace her with a girl two of his guy friends aren’t on speaking terms over. Yet you never seem to hear a man wanting to commit to a girl his mother didn’t like, or vowing to go to the gallows for her sake as women always do for the men that caugt their fancy.

I don’t know if this inability to grow up on men’s side can be explained away with the power of nurturing in their cradle days or if Freud has anything sick and twisted to say about it. But I hope I haven’t made a mistake when inadvertently fixing my friend and his new wife up.

I kindda like them both 😦 .