What poverty is doing to the romance industry calls for concern, don’t you think? The fraud in that sector is worse than what is being revealed in the Power Probe at the House of Representatives. Imagine this: all you need to get a girl into your bed is as little as N500 scratch card. Just text it and she will even spend N200 airtime from it thanking you. And the guys are smug. They are enjoying it. Freebies always has a catch but do my brothers care? They are too hooked on ‘awoof’ to figure out the ‘bone’. I assure them that there shall be consequences and repercussions.

Those who think they are doing the women folk a huge favour by sleeping with every girl in sight and telling lies from both sides of their mouths ought really to slow down and think. Problem is when a man is concentrating on his ‘third leg’, nothing else matters. But I must admit that this whole rubbish is a two-way thing and I am definitely ashamed of my sisters. How did things get this cheap? It’s bad enough that girls are starting out at criminally tender ages but to even reduce one’s market value to pennies so soon is sickening.

Don’t we all know how the stock market works? A prosperous company is one that is doing well and has potentials to grow into a blue chip one. Its share value is always good and if it opens an IPO, it is over subscribed. So how come 20-year-old girls are being priced for pennies? Or what do you call N500 recharge card? Geez, I even hear that these girls ride ‘okada’ (motor bikes) to meet guys on dates? I’m weeping inside. If a girl is not being given treats at 20, is it at 40 when her value would be on a steady slope that she would be treated like a queen? Who’s going to tell these girls that it is all stupid to lower your going rate so early?

Where the heck are their mothers?
Now that this sounds like I’ve reduced things to shares and equity, guys aren’t exactly going to send me flowers. I’m also spoiling the market for them. But my worries today are for how we all are spoiling everything for tomorrow because of a few months of pleasure today. The girls are settling for one-third of what they are worth and the guys are acquiring them in hundreds. For now, it looks to the players like they are having a ball but they are super losers. When the N500 recharge card days are over, these girls will have nothing left.

Nobody will be willing to trade with or in them on or off the floor. They will become desperate. Stockbrokers will warn their clients against buying bad shares and you and I know where that has left too many girls. In the lurch, on the shelf, out in the cold.
As for the guys who are buying long-playing CDs in cartons, the party will soon be over. You will have to marry one of those girls. Sure you won’t marry one of the ones you did for N500, some other ‘mugu’ will, the same way you will end up with another ‘mugu’s’ leftover. Is anybody still wondering why everybody is marrying late and why many marriages are hitting the rocks as soon as they leave the shore?

Every small girl is cutting shows, running after blokes who can hardly fix their second-hand cars and you just wonder where my sisters have left their brains. I thought girls were supposed to start out being romantic and dating good guys. I thought teenagers are supposed to invest in poems, purple prose and roses. In my days there was a sequence to these things. You start out with a guy who would profess undying love, the one who would vow to die for you and whom you will do dangerous things like blood covenant with. He would buy you designer cards, never forget your birthday. You exchange novels and plan futures that are decades away together. It is not supposed to be about money. In fact you feel insulted if he tries to ‘toast’ you with money and you issue him serious warnings for even entertaining the thought that you were for sale.

Not any more. My sisters are for sale. They are hanging out everything for sale- boobs, bums and navels. You can no longer tell the difference between a whore and an undergraduate. All cleavages are out in the open. Every girl is flaunting what they should keep under wraps. What can the poor guys do except heed the call? Poor guys who never really needed encouragement before. To them, all these things are just added advantage and they are getting drunk on it. You can’t blame them.

The most painful part of this whole cheap business is that today’s girls have no single redeeming features when it comes to what they are worth. How could any sane girl date a man who can neither offer her marriage nor spoil her with money? If you are not going to be a good girl, you should at least not end up a fool. If you must eat a toad, eat the one with eggs, pick a mature toad. Not these dumb ones. They waste the best years of their lives on unfruitful relationships and later blame everybody but themselves when their past catch up with them.

Why would a 20-year-old girl date a 40-year-old salary earner who is married? Pray, what would be there for her? The poor opportunist is struggling to pay his children’s school fees and every year he takes a loan to pay his rent. He tells a long story each time she asks for money. He’ll never leave his wife. In fact, the thought had never crossed his mind.

He even boldly tells her he’d never marry a second wife. And she is still in that relationship three years later. Haba, I thought single girls dated married men for money. If you want to be bad, be very bad. Why should his wife curse you when you have no impressive bank account to show for the embarrassment? Why should a girl ignore eligible suitors for a lover who’d never propose? He’s not even a proper ‘aristo.’ There is a difference between being in love and being insane.