All men should boycott Valentine’s Day flowers!

Dear Majita

Eish, magents, that dreaded day is here again! Valentine’s Day! This next Monday will surely feel like an expensive extension of the weekend for some of you the miserly folk who curse the day some good-for-nothing bugger decided that February 14 of each year will be set aside to celebrate love. What the hell is this thing about celebrating love on Valentine’s day anyway? Who in their right mind sets aside a single day of the year to prove their love to their significant other? We should actually celebrate love everyday of our lives with our partners, and we need no stupid Valentine’s day to prove our affection to our better halves. A lot of you majita right now, are planning some convenient getaways from not only your homes or town of residence, but also away from your communication gadgets. Beginning this Friday, they magents will be ‘accidentally’ dropping their mobile handsets and having them fall into disrepair just so there is a good reason for avoiding those awkward moments with their dames until Wednesday next week when they graciously replace the cellphones with more money than they would have spent had they just gone through the Valentine’s Day ritual. Ladies will be on the lookout for some unusual behavior towards the end of this week, as whatever majita are planning could lead to some total communication and romance blackout beginning Saturday until Wednesday. Some of the guys are slowly preparing their dames for a Sunday and Monday when they will be so ill they wouldn’t even be able to leave the house. The poor woman will be too focused on getting the bedridden man healthy again to think about any form of romance on the day. And ooh, other men will be out for the fabled Men’s Conference which for some convenient reason, is annually scheduled for February 13 to 15. And whatever goes on in there, remains there and can never be shared even with one’s partner. The fantastical Men’s Conference is just some other form of a stag party, where only men attend and would never give feedback to their significant other. Once the dreaded days have passed, the troubled men would suddenly emerge from nowhere with all manner of stories about dead batteries to their phones; about having had a work related trip, while the more creative who remained next to their sweethearts would suddenly have their ATM cards working again. You can’t blame the poor men you know – this Valentine’s day is just so commercialized it puts so much pressure on the stingy blokes for actually more reasons than one. For starters, it is a costly affair as many women expect you to take them out on a romantic dinner, buy them gifts, flowers, chocolates and all, while the more hopeful dames even expect to be engaged for marriage on the day. Secondly, some folks who find themselves caught up in some web of multiple concurrent relationships know it’s a day their stamina will be tested – financial stamina of course, without dismissing the other forms anyway! Each of the dames would be looking up to the man, one expecting to be taken to the movies; the other hoping for some romantic night away from the city, while a distant third maybe expecting a long night of whatsapp video chatting. You see the man here now needs to be creative, and with options not so unlimited, the man would rather go ill – for there cannot be romance with a sick man! And so it should be understandable why many men loathe this day. Of course there will be these show-off kinda blokes who have this penchant for claiming to be more sophisticated than your typical village guy – the pretenders who purport themselves to be romantic and all, the kind who will be putting pressure on the rest of us, mxm! They claim they embrace the day to celebrate love, and will be buying their women some million pula necklaces to be given out at some dinner night; buying their women some Lamborginis and Teslas before kneeling on one knee to ask their woman to marry them. Silly guys! This is the type to make other men want to bury their heads in the sand, loathing the inevitable million pula questions sponsored by what would have been witnessed next door. Guys out there are out to embarrass us. They are the reason some stores and restaurants right now are advertising expensive gift sets and dinner dates. Passing by these stores with your woman is a real pain in the neck. The woman would intermittently stop by the window and loudly express admiration for some inexplicably expensive stuff, obviously throwing the ball into your court to act. Eish, majita! But to you my brothers who have a problem remaining fully alive and healthy on Monday, here are a few things to consider. On that day, we will be at the Annual Men’s Conference anyway, and no one should ask more. Those not attending should consider losing their debit and credit cards on Friday, you will only recover them on Wednesday. Those owning some small businessnyana should have already announced a business trip to their women by now – if you haven’t, make sure to tell her about it before Friday, lest she gets suspicious when you say it a day or two before Monday. If you can’t go anywhere, just tell her that wena kana you love her everyday and that you do not see the reason to parade your affection on just one day. Gape tell her the day is not really about love, but for corporates to make money. In fact, the easiest thing to do is to start falling ill on Friday or Saturday. Your illness should get worse and worse with Monday reserved for the climax when rising from the bed would be near impossible. Towards 9pm, tell her someone tipped you to drink hot water and you will feel better. When you wake up on Tuesday, praise the person who recommended hot water and talk of how better you have suddenly become. If you lost a relative recently, no matter how distant, or even a friend or colleague, push your spirits down and continue doing so until next Tuesday or Wednesday – tell her you are still mourning the loss of your relative or friend, and that it wouldn’t look morally okay to be seen out there celebrating love when you have just been bereaved. For those with meraka and masimo, wow! You have no excuse for not having an excuse – you don’t go there on your usual Saturday. Leave on Sunday morning, and do not go with her, because the plan will not work. Just plan your things such that on Sunday evening you talk of how your car experienced a mechanical fault. Make her believe it is something you can sort out so that she does not opt for coming to help you. Prolong the mechanical fault through the better half of Monday while you keep assuring the dame that all will be sorted out soon. In good time, leave the cattlepost or masimo and arrive home exhausted, dispirited and angry at your good-for-nothing mechanic. You will thank me later. As for these other chaps who claim to have it all, leave them to the devil. They are usually the bad guys with multiple dames to please – the ones who would still lie to their wives and P’nPs about not celebrating Valentine’s Day yet on the sidelines they would be providing for the concubine. In fact, they would even be asking to join us ko merakeng while ba pakile these concubines and showing off their wealth so that rona re bonwa re palelwa. Leave them to the devil. Akere e bile a tale is told of a woman who was so excited when her friend revealed, “I saw your loving husband at a florist. He bought unusually beautiful flowers, enjoy their sweet fragrance!” But the husband got home empty handed, and even denied ever buying flowers. Things got really bad. And those men who couldn’t afford to buy the expensive flowers were celebrating his downfall. And so shall we celebrate the down fall of these uncooperative guys. Whatever happened to brotherly solidarity majita? Let us normalise working together towards a common cause – as men, we should in one voice say no to gender based violence; we should say no to child abuse and neglect; we should say no to impregnating women and running away from our responsibilities; we should meet and set up an official position on circumcision. More importantly, we should all love our women dearly, whole-heartedly and everyday, not just on Valentine’s Day. We should say no Valentine’s Day love and affection. Florists ba tlaa re itshwarela for bad business. In any case, these florists are accomplices to broken marriages. To them it is business as usual when they see a single man buying three different bouquets of valentine’s day flowers for three different women. They would keep quiet about it and pocket the money, or even tell the one woman they know. Either way, they help wreak marriages and break relationships. All men should therefore say No to Valentine’s Day and the attendant flowers!