I find it interesting when a man says he is marrying someone this girl, because “when she comes home she washes my clothes perfectly, scrubs every corner of my house spotless-clean, even changes the sheets after we have sex and then leaves meals for me in the freezer”. One said, “She demonstrated that she knows exactly how I like my eggs in the morning” so, he married her. Or a woman says she married this man because he was taking care of her family financially, paying her school fees, and “one day he bought me a car after he lost his temper and punched me”. Look, people meticulously prepare for boardroom interviews and ace them, but later prove to be hapless employees. What makes you think they won’t prep for a ‘domesticity/bedroom interview’ if marriage is what they really want from you? As it turned out, people were not as crazy about cooking, sex and cleaning as they claimed; they were not that generous and responsible after all, when ‘Babe’ became ‘Maama Danny’. The problem? Dating couples thinking they are married; couples in courtship not talking about/preparing for marriage; married people acting single. One puzzled man I recently talked to about this asked me, what then he should do during dating, if not watch his girlfriend clean and cook after they have had sex. But that is how many people end up with spouses they cannot even hold a decent conversation with. Try having fun! I told him. Dating is the adventurous, explorative part of the relationship. And in adventures, things are fun, but someone could get hurt, because there are no promises that it will ever end in marriage. Back in the day when families brokered marriages between their children and chastity was a given, ‘dating’ just never happened, because it allows for cars to be test-driven without being bought. That is why some people now go into marriages all cried out and broken, because they put so many hopes and effort into everyone they dated along the way. They scrubbed, they cooked, they gave their best sex, they invested heavily – all in the hopes it would progress to courtship and more, but alas! True, sometimes dating can progress to courtship, but more often than not, people meet someone they truly want to marry while dating others. It does not necessarily make them the devil. In the West, you even have to explicitly declare whether you are dating exclusively or not. Here, we simply start beating up perceived rivals in bars. Gundi, you are dating, not engaged, not married! Yet there you are, paying their siblings’ school fees, scrubbing pots and tiles, and still calling it dating. Tsk-tsk. What you really want is courtship. This is seeing each other with full intentions of marriage. Whatever you do in courtship is supposed to be fun and romantic, but also steering both of you closer to tying the knot. Some call cohabiting their way of courtship; hmmmm…well, to each their own… But courtship allows you to discuss sex, finances, children, dreams, keeping house, spirituality, etc, all while seeing the world together, meeting each other’s families and friends, getting counseling and advice and comparing your views on everything as you go along. Again, depending on how you roll and what your beliefs are, courtship for some includes sex, for others, it is intentional celibacy till marriage. And then comes the marriage, and the real deal starts. Marriages that handled the dating and/ or courtship stages well, will have no hang-ups or stakeholders behaving like they skipped a stage. You will still have fun together, lots of romance and sex, but also comfortably accommodate the inevitable hard work that comes with making a marriage work, as opposed to behaving like a ‘married bachelor’ or a ‘married slay queen’. caronakazibwe@gmail.comThe post Sex Talk: Careful; don’t let marriage find you tired and broken appeared first on The Observer.