Unlikely Casanovas

Three of my close male friends have been out of the [dating] market for some time now. One just married the girl of his choice, the other has been married for as long as we knew him, and it hasn’t been more than 6 months since the third saw his wife and kid off at the airport with tears in his eyes and ‘baai baai yene fiqir’ on the lips. In short, guys you won’t hesitate to put on your speed dial list come doomsday.

Still, it’s a general joke between the rest of their [male] friends that if you seek them after 7 (p.m.), you seek them in vain. Their mobile phones go out of reach the minute the sun sets. “Stray women bothering them” is the usual excuse given by these guys, so they hope to spare themselves hours and hours of arguments by making themselves inaccessible.

But how honest are these reasons? The last married guy who tried to pick me up and make me his ‘bed fellow, outta marriage pleasures play fellow’ (as Shakespeare would have observed, had the good man been around with ink and paper) has come back with a bright eyed ‘me too!!’ when I protested ‘but.. boo.. I’m married’. I guess if he saw nothing wrong with it, you are set for life. Before we parted, and I started crossing the street every time I saw him, he’s tried to dictate his mobile number to me in the hopes I’d change my mind. Not too hard to understand what a “stray women” maketh. Is it now?!

Now, we all know there is ‘someone’ out there for everybody (and if that everybody is a male in his prime, ‘many ones’). For each pot a lid, as we say in Amharic. Not perfect, but just perfect for him/her, et cetra. No doubt we have all come across, too, one too many pots dissatisfied with the lid they have drawn. Pots to whom looking for ‘better fitting’ lids may not be a choice. Who, in the attempt to avoid their better half & face their children every evening, try to bury their agony in work or alcohol. And who, when willing to stick around, generally make everybody else’s life a living hell. Yes! Regardless of ‘what the story books say’, the pot-to-lid satisfaction ratio is a gloomy one. But, surely, hiding one’s head between other [equally imperfect] pot’s legs can never be the solution!?

Casanovas, I’ve learned, many of my [male] friends, relatives, colleagues and classmates become the minute the eyes of authority is removed. The saddest thing, the most depressing and one that shows you just how ‘a man’s world’ this world of ours can be, is that most of these guys have neither the brain, nor the look, nor the wit, nor the money that could make them desirable to a girl with an ounce of self respect. [Forgive me! I speak the truth!] They are, mostly, the type out of whose head your eye would pop at the herald of an engagement, or sometimes, finding a date. Grateful, once more, there is providence that ‘giveth to each according to his ability’.

Yet these same guys, whose pimply teenage years are spent at following a homely girl’s eyes with the pathetic hunger of a lost puppy and obsessiveness of a stalker, who would call back any ‘missed call’ they got on their mobile and demand, breathlessly, ‘did you call me?!’ as would a waiter who lives on your generous tips, suddenly become ‘playas’ when they hit 27. Yanked out of their mediocrity, no doubt, by the sad fact that there aren’t enough guys to go around for all the females the womb is popping out each minute.

And go around they do, without even the decency of hiding their circle band [of trust] or bothering to wait for darkness to put a veil on their shameful deed. ‘BeteRaRoch lai endemizel … endeSseba emBossa’, they reincarnate as, come the fateful birthday! A calf just released from a long imprisonment, free at last!!, to cheat and lie on a lady who was way out of his league to begin with.

Can you even blame them ?! Not I! I blame society. I blame God. I seethe with anger every time I saw a pretty girl with a jerk of a man who maybe measuring up every passing skirt with his eyes even as I seethe. Don’t blame him. But you might want to tiptoe to his side of the bed from time to time and check his mobile phone. If it’s on, you are safe. For now. If it’s not, there is a chink in your armor. Your man, girlfriend, maybe a liar lair.