A man doesn’t have to be much if he has much.

“In two years I plan to be pregnant by a rich man so he’ll have to marry me and support my life of luxury”

– Louisa Mason, proud to be a gold-digging Piranha

I was once made fully aware of what an ex required I think she was. She made it explicitly clear to me that she was not a gold-digger, but that she was not cheap….

I never understood what she meant by “not being cheap” since, to the best of my admittedly limited knowledge, I had not asked to buy her, nor could I have afforded to buy her anyway if I wanted to, which I did not….

 

This particularly sordid period of my chequered love life had been the culmination of a spat between us brought on by an amicable break-up –as if there are ever amicable ones– which had then gotten sour because a busybody, out to make sure we threw away whatever little decency we had left between us, had intimated to the ex in question that I had supposedly called her a gold-digger; this in fact was ridiculous because both she and I knew there was no gold to be had (a fact she pointed out in the most brash of manner to the detriment of whatever little was left of my ego).

 

So what happened here was that I had managed to make one lady very angry by leaving early when maybe she had forecast that I had the potential to be the life of the party. It didn’t help matters this just happened at about the same time I managed to secure funding for a chugging jalopy that I had been dreaming of for months; she even made to me this statement: “most men leave their girlfriends when they buy a vehicle”, I had never heard this said anywhere before but I understood her anger at the missed opportunity for bar hopping in style; you see she was a student and still in that phase of life where it is more important to stay up all night in a club than it is to worry about starting a family or even looking for a job.

Ironically the jalopy left me more indigent and deeper in debt than I was when without one, a fact that was completely lost on my ex, naturally.

 

Fast forward to twenty or so months later and I’ve met this established professional lady and everything is going fine. However, slow glimpses of the same attitude with my clubbing ex start rearing their ugly head yet again. You see this new lady was shocked to know that my life on the fast lane was lived by the mantra of faking it till you make it; to her it was a matter of actually having the goods to back up your dreams, talking of real moves being made and not being projected to be made in the future, here was someone who was basically much more stable than I have ever been and with a much fatter bank account than me (granted that’s hardly a great feat) yet somehow she would keep repeating things to the effect she never needed to pay for anything if I was around, and this line of thinking was not a question but was rather like a memo to the donkey of a man she took me for.

Eventually it became a question of actually forking over money to her rich self because she had “run out of spending money”, I am sure it is unclear to others how it is possible for this moneyed contradiction, with means far beyond mine, to ask someone not that far removed from a church mouse for cheese, but it happened. And the explanation was that they “usually don’t carry a lot of spending money” not even on MPesa (mobile money), and guess who carries the spending money for two… the braying ass of a man that yours truly was. Even worse this girl in question was a finance person who by all means is a better manager of cash than most, well maybe that was the point after all.

 

Needless to say I chose to cut my losses, moved on promptly, and kissed whatever had been lent goodbye. It had dawned on me that I was looking at yet another “I am not a gold digger, but I am not cheap” person. Ask around, there are many of those; they swear by the thinking that a woman, no matter her worth, should not spend a cent of her money on herself if a man can be made to folk out the cash; they also condemn a man who thinks otherwise as a cheapskate and an ungentlemanly scrub.

It is little wonder there is a new generation of proud gold-diggers that confess their intent to become “Piranhas”, thankfully I am too encumbered with penury that I haven’t enough flesh for these to sink their jaws in.