AOKO OTIENO: Are you an average dude? Then, by all means, marry a girl who doesn’t read

Hey, you…Yes, you, are you an average man? I mean, are you the ilk that is slow, and incapable of making intuitive leaps? The kind of man who lives by the rules cast on stone and needs explicitly-stated instructions to be able to do anything at all.

One who cannot reason circumstantially or have things figured out as the events play out; is predictable and prefers structure and routine over novelty and stimulation. Ideas or the process doesn’t pique your interest? Good, here is your kind of woman- the type that would rather flip weaves than pages of a book.

Yap. Find yourself a girl who does not read. Marry her. This is how it is likely to pun out. First things first- find her. This is easy. You will get her on social media, being basic and rudimentary in her posts. Showing too much skin in photos because her ass is the most salient feature of her anatomy.

Or find her in the weary squalor of a city bar. Drenched in sweat after vigorous twerking, engulfed in shisha smoke in some varicoloured light upscale nightclub. Wherever you find her, find her smiling. The kind of smile that lingers even when the souls around her drift their attention away. When you find her, do not fret, all you have to do is engage her with unsentimental trivialities. In fact, unleash those lousy pick-up lines you heard from some low rated stand-up comedy.

Take her home when the night is about to give way to the day. Since lust, not love is at play, discard making love. Plough her. That will mark the unwitting and slow beginning of a relationship.

Because one is average and the other basic, your common shared interests will be like love for a favourite socialite, noodles and rap music. Get crazy over her twerking skills and build an impenetrable bastion upon flimsy grounds. When you are together, your conversations are as bland as jelly. Talk about nothing of significance. Both of you are destitute of thinking.

Slowly, but surely, months will pass unnoticed. Then ask her to move in. You will not even need to really do so because half of her wardrobe is already at your crib. Every time she comes over, she leaves a pant here, a comb there.

Once she moves in, she will move the furniture this way, that way. This will herald your first fights. They will be over inconsequential things like how the bloody toothpaste needs to be squeezed.

The years will pass. Two kids down the line, you will fall into boredom and indifference. Then you will suffer a mid-life crisis. Grow old. Wonder at your lack of achievement. After a glass of whiskey, you will feel contented, but mostly vacant and ethereal.

In your sunset years, you will notice that this wife whom you met as an average damsel who eschews the warmth of a book has never made your heart oscillate with any significant passion.

Oh, but a girl who reads! Damn it! She grasps a vocabulary too cathartic and provoking to lead you into a life that is amorphously discontent and unfulfilled. Rather, she will open your mind and challenge you to view the innate beauty of the world and its alien wonder.

A damsel with a camaraderie with books possesses the wherewithal to distinguishes between the specious and soulless rhetoric of someone who cannot love her, and the inarticulate desperation of someone who loves her too much.

She is smart enough to know that when her questions of ‘why were you not answering my phone’ are met with irregular pauses and the hesitation of breath, then the answer that follows is a lie.

A girl who reads perceives the difference between an incidental moment of anger and the entrenched habits of someone who is a sadist and a cynic a** whose moments of tantrums will run on well past any point of reason, or purpose.

From the plays of Shakespeare, she fathoms the import of plot. She can trace out the edges of a prologue and the suspense of a climax. And should you not live to her expectation, she will bid you farewell like the thousand heroes she has watched go in her novels. Let you be she will do with only a twinge of sadness

Avoid a girl who reads if you are a simpleton because they are the storytellers. She will make you want to be everything that you are not. She will settle for nothing less than passion, a life worthy of being storied.

 

Twitter: @MaverickAoko

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DISCLAIMER: VIEWS EXPRESSED IN THIS ARTICLE ARE THE WRITER’S. THEY DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT VIEWS OF VIUSASA.