One of the more exciting and illogical aspects of dating in Nairobi is seeing mature, financially stable 30-year-old men dating 20-year-olds, who are on an allowance of Sh1,500 per week, inviting them out to their untidy one-bedroom apartments (often in an entirely different county), then referring to them as beggars on social media or as demanding when they ask them for money as if love happens in a vacuum.
These girls often have to traverse three different levels of traffic from their hostels to go visit men, who think paying a woman's Uber fare makes her a gold digger.
Men expecting unemployed 20-year-olds to have money is one of those little ironies that still shock me.
You will always see them posting on social media; "the day you meet a woman, you owe them money."
Meanwhile, they are referring to a naive first-year girl, or to the financially vulnerable one starting out in life. The ridiculousness is a case of men wanting to have their cake and eat it too.
They consider the career woman to being too independent and too macho for them but they also require 20-year-olds to bring the independence of a career woman in relationships. It doesn't work that way. Something has to give.
Maybe Kenyan men grew up hearing stories of how their fathers courted their mothers by flinging stones across their windows and sitting by river banks. They are not aware that the dynamics of courtship have not been left untouched by the jaws of capitalism.
Dating costs money. We might like to act like money is a thing only gold diggers require, but money is the one thing that defines every aspect of our lives among them love.
Love is built on the basis of dating. Dating requires constant transportation which is often aided by cabs, it requires proper dates in restaurants unless you are a bare minimum couple that stays indoors all the time like house plants.
Dating requires a strong internet connection, airtime and travel and gifts among other things and it is immoral to think that these things should be catered for by a girl, who has to lie about projects to extract extra coins from her parents. These men were broke university students once so you would expect them to understand that these girls do not have money, but perhaps with the recent economic downturn, the logic went the same way.
It goes straight into the downright absurd once you casually observe them insist that the best age of women to date are "fresh" under 25s and yet still have tired, endless musings on why the women they are "dating" don't have money to get to Syokimau to visit them on Thursday. If you didn't have money at 22, how do you expect your 22-year-old girlfriend to have it?
The solution to this would be for men to date women they are on par with economically but they will never. They hate dating their equals. They deliberately seek out younger women believing they will be more, "submissive" or "malleable", not realising their preference comes at a monetary cost. Or perhaps, they realise it and are simply not ready to accept the consequences of their choices and prefer to apportion the blame to women instead. As I said here before, Kenyan men are chronic whiners.
If opening the wallet is too painful for Kenyan men in their 30s and over, they should leave young women alone.
If they want women who pay for their cabs, and who give them money they should focus their attention on older women. Go to the gym. Learn how to cook. Be good at sex and fix your wardrobe. A lot of older women are out here financing men for simply existing with six abs, and toned bodies and they do it without whining.
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