Love and friendship not synonymous

A couple of weekend’s back I ran into this South African couple at a view point in Tsavo West who were gasping at the beauty that our game parks pack.

They were on a two-month road trip from Cape Town up to Kenya and back. Two months spent in a dusty and jaded looking Pajero.

He sported a month-old stubble, while she looked like a daisy against the scorched backdrop of the Tsavo. They had walked down the aisle six months earlier but had been friends for five years.

I asked them what they had learned about each other in the month they had been on the road, and then I listened to what they didn’t say.

While she was exuberant and bubbly and answered my questions earnestly he was calm and tended to listen more. When he responded to a question, I noticed that even though he was addressing me he looked at her.

I later asked our tour guide- a 40ish-year-old weathered guy- what he made of that and he quipped, “Huyo amekaliwa achana na yeye”.

But after being cooped up in the car with her for that long the only reason, I think, he would like at her like that, was because he liked her. Not as a wife or woman, but as a friend. Remarkable couple.

I’m certain that a few hopeless romantics are probably reacting to the man’s demeanour, “Awww, that’s so sweet.” Some male bashers might even mutter, “Something for Kenyan men to sleep over!”

The way I see it, for a man to jump into a car and drive for thousands of kilometres through borders and tricky terrains with his woman, must have quite a high threshold for because really, there are some things you just don’t do with your woman; road trips of this nature being one of them. Why you ask?

Well, how do I put this simply; because women sulk. They sulk because you refused to ask for directions. They sulk because you forgot to buy wet wipes as she had requested.

Or because you constantly released air in the car, which ideally is a great part of road trips really. As the South African informed me, road trips will break you or make you. But most likely, break you.

People fight, nasty fights that involve maps being hurled out the window and into the wind. Patience is tested, so is tact in communication.

Men prefer road trips together because nothing is ever personal on the road; it’s the spirit that counts. Plus a man will not cringe if you took a leak by the roadside, and nobody takes offense if they are told that they drive “like a girl”.

Road trip aside. There is a grand misconception among women that finding love is the epitome of emotional balance.

That life will suddenly smell better if they have someone who loves them (I believe the right girlie expression is “someone who cherishes them”).

And so they wait for the butterflies to kick in their belly when they meet a man. When they supposedly meet “the one”. What women should be waiting for instead is a friend, not a lover. Lover is fickle, it’s mercurial sooner or later it will be gone.

Love and friendship are not synonymous. I know of lovers who are not friends and friends who aren’t lovers. The saddest lots are lovers who aren’t friends.

But men generally seem to make better decisions when it comes to choosing which from what while women are more prone to choosing love first because it curls their toes. I think for a man to be his woman’s friend he has to learn to be brutal.

By brutal I don’t mean banging her head against the wall, I mean telling her things she doesn’t want to hear but things she needs to hear nonetheless.

Things like lose weight, or don’t talk with food in your mouth, those legs and that skirt don’t work, your friend has tatty tendencies, lose the hat, your brother is a pest, stop whining too much, your boss isn’t the problem, you aren’t being a good friend to your friend, not everybody is an idiot, you aren’t a victim and Jesus loves you.

Because indeed it’s only a man who truly cares as a friend who will have the nerve to put you straight and women should learn to take it on the chin because her girlfriends seem to have an aversion to pointing out flaws because they might be accused of being jealous or unsupportive, or both.

Here is how you can tell if your man is your friend. Friendship is when a man tells his woman jokingly that her hairstyle looks like an animal and she doesn’t sulk for days, she actually laughs and changes her salonist.

Love, on the other hand, is when your man doesn’t notice the animal on your head. Unfortunately most women prefer love because its escapist, a safe cushion against the hard realities of life.