Wealth or Love and wellbeing?

Some women have become multi-plugs where each man plugs to different side of her

I have waited all these years to get a wedding of my dreams. I cannot give up on that now simply because you claim to love me and yet you cannot give me my heart’s desire. I may compromise on the wedding but I cannot settle down with you until you have a better car and a better job to comfortably take care of us both!

Glitter and glamorous life of modern life is empty and soulless.

Marking the Valentine day has brought to the fore the emptiness of many love relationships and marriages today. The incessant search for material possessions, the yearning for more, albeit because more is better, could not be better expressed than in the story of one Karl Robeder, a millionaire who reached the end of the rat race of more is better- celebrity- lifestyle.

With more than Ksh. 360m, Karl seems to have reached the end of the tether and simply snapped; he gave up in his own words: “I came from a very poor family where the rules were to work more to achieve more material things and I applied this for many years”

Indeed this links with many in this continent where poverty and deprivation have been the twin synonyms of what it means to be born in Africa.

Many a young women dream of Mr. Perfect, not only handsome physically but also endowed with the material to fulfil their wildest dreams, an exquisite wedding with full glamour, a sumptuous reception where guests spoil themselves with food and wash themselves in wine from golden tumblers! And thereafter to a hideaway honeymoon in dreamland where they walk hand in hand on beautiful sandy beaches of Kusadikika under the full moon, and a happy fulfilled life thereafter.

While some of the foregoing may have come to pass for some of the lucky lasses, the full script of life lived in such a dream has been the undoing of many a relationships and even marriages.

Today many young people get into relationships with the presumptions of what the other has. In a patriarchal setup, like many in Africa, men are expected to have it all, physique and the wherewithal to make; not only the heads of the young girls spin but also turn their hearts upside down.

Valentine is an apt demonstration of this, where those with the chums, took their sweethearts to the top of the cream places, restaurants worth their names and spoil them. And those at the “bottom of the ranks” who may be struggling to put one square meal on the table were forced to be contented with the little they could afford.

In the words of Karl, these ordinary folks, “they live the real life, meet and live with real people not actors.” True love and happiness may not be found in the extremes of deprivation, where cannot afford a sensible meal, yet as Karl proofed in his own experience time after time true life is not in the “five star hotel lifestyles- where everyone is an actor” where others play the role of being friendly while others to be important and nobody is real.