Girls, listen up; the boys are talking by Fadhili Kanini

Boys will always be. End of discussion. Our ladies will have to understand that before becoming a man, we were once boys. The same way they expect us to “understand” that girls have emotions, note, not ladies, but girls. When they go out to meet their friends for a hairdo, manicure and pedicure, or just for ice cream, they say “I am going out with the girls today I won’t be back until nine”. You see, there is a lot of weight to this mere term.

The thing is, when children are growing up and they go out playing with other children, they come back home and tell their guardians that they were “out playing with other girls” or boys for that matter. There is always a sense of attachment to these friends children have. They are their “best friends”. They are their confidants and they get to do things that their parents will never get to know about.

I therefore admire our sisters’ protection of each other, their care and most of all, how they “look out” for one another. These are some of those aspects of childhood that they carry on into their adulthood. Not to say that they are childish, but that, just like little children, women are very emotionally attached to their friends. And this is a good thing.

So, a man is meant to understand all that in a simple text message telling him that his better half will be late for a dinner he has been planning for for the last two weeks, because she had to “check on her friend who is having an issue”? Very convenient.

He not only has to step into this pub and drown his temporal anger in a bottle of God- knows-what, he now has to battle out the attention of other “girls” on the prowl for frustrated men like himself.

The situation is made no better by a second text message telling the man that the lady will not make it as she found the friend in a “harder situation” than she earlier thought. That’s where the “boy” in the man resurfaces. He calls his boys who coincidentally happen to be in the same neighbourhood. It’s Saturday evening so either the English Premier League or the Spanish La Liga is on. Perfect. The boys have such a fantastic time together, the anger and frustration in the host fizzles out with the drinks.

They part ways at around 3 am and everyone goes home. The man in question goes home to his wife who is unsurprisingly furious. The man came home late and so for the next 45 minutes, she goes on and on about how men are annoyingly insensitive. At this point, the man is half asleep. To him, all this is a well needed lullaby to sooth his drunken state.

Come morning, the man apologizes, but only after the lady has been made aware that she was the initial cause of all that. It takes that long for them to understand a man- a night, at least.

The thing with a man is that he will behave like one, when he is treated like one. He will always be a nagging little boy whenever mistreated. The same, sadly, cannot be said about the girls. They just are, girls.