She was two hours late for our first date. I thought she wasn’t going to make it. I wanted to leave but I waited. I didn’t want to go through the proposal rehearsal again. I’d rehearsed everything over the week; how I was going to propose, the questions I would ask, the answer I would give to certain questions. Everything was planned so when she wasn’t coming and I was tempted to leave, I pepped myself up and told myself, “True love is patient.”

She walked in briskly as if she was being followed. She took her seat and started apologizing; “I’m sorry. The traffic was too thick. My mom wouldn’t stop sending me around and it took a long time for me to get a car to this place. Please forgive me.” The romance in the night was robbed by her lateness. My heart was bruised and angry. My mind was all over the place thinking about how she didn’t respect my time and all. I didn’t propose. We had a normal night and we said goodbye.

Days later, I proposed to her on the phone and she said yes. She was late to our next date and was late to her own friend’s party she invited me to. She told me the party was 6 p.m. I got to her place at 5:30 p.m. to pick her up and she was on a sofa watching a movie. Immediately she saw me, she looked at her time and said, “But it’s not yet 6 p.m?”

She used one whole hour to get ready. When we got to the party, she was angry she didn’t get meat. I told her, “You were late, what were you expecting?” “They knew we would be coming. I was late isn’t an excuse for them to give me food without proper meat,” she responded.

She was late to her final exams and blamed me for not waking her up on time. The exam was at 9 a.m. I called her around 5 a.m to wake up so she could get ready. She told me, “It’s not even 6 a.m. Why are you waking me up at this time for an exam that is supposed to be written at 8 a.m.?” I asked her to study for a while and get ready by 6 am to leave the house. When we hung up the call, she slept again and missed the paper. She failed that paper and blamed me for waking her up too early.

During our pre-marital counseling when the counsellor asked me to mention one thing I didn’t like about her, I mentioned time. “Pastor, Eli is never on time. Ever since I met her, and I’m not exaggerating, she has never been on time for anything. Even her own exams, she failed because she couldn’t get there on time to write it.”

In her defence, she said, “You’re not a woman so you won’t understand.” The counsellor asked if that was my only problem. I told him it was the only thing I found bizarre about her. He talked about it casually because he couldn’t understand how deep the problem went until our wedding day. We were supposed to start the service at 9 a.m. She got to the church premises at 11:45 a.m. after several calls had been made to beg her to leave the hotel.

The pastor came to me and whispered in my ears, “Is that what you were talking about?” I answered, “It could be worse. Or I should go there and pull her here.”

When she got to the church premises, she blamed everyone but herself. “The makeup girl was too slow.” Meanwhile, the makeup lady was there a whole hour before she got ready to be made up. The pastor preached about time consciousness at our wedding when he should have preached about “A virtuous woman, who will find.”

After marriage, I changed my strategy. When it was 9 a.m., I told her it was 6 a.m. I would wake up early, dress up and wait for her. She would go up and down, looking for what does not exist, asking questions that don’t have answers and later scream, “Why will anybody think it’s a good idea to have a program at 6 a.m.? Don’t they know we have lives to live?”

We would be late and she would still turn around and say, “You’re not a woman so you won’t understand.”

I changed my strategy. Whenever she was late, I would leave the house without her. On many Sundays, I went to church alone because she was late. She would give me silent treatment afterwards but I didn’t care. Gossip started feeding on it. That both of us were experiencing turbulent marriage, the reason we went to church apart. It even got to the table of our senior pastor and he called us. He didn’t believe us when we said we were ok. My wife blamed me, calling me impatient. I told her, “You’re not a man. You won’t understand.”

Last year was our fifteenth anniversary. Nothing has changed. I’m still not a woman so I don’t understand.

Things got worse when babies started coming. We fought a lot over little things such as getting ready for weighing. Sometimes she would forget and later in the evening scream, “Wow, I should have been at weighing today. What happened?”

When kids started going to school, it was another series of problems. She would spend all morning in bed and wake up very late and be screaming at the kids. Kids as young as four and seven were screamed at as if they were as old as time. I took everything on me and asked her to just prepare their meals. We would be ready, sit and watch a horror show of how she forgot to add this or that. We would all end up being late. She blamed it on childbirth. She said, “If three kids have gone through you, you would understand.”

I’ve spent many years with women and have spent over fifteen years with this one but I still don’t understand the relationship between women and time. It’s one of the mysteries of the world, I guess and she hates it when I tell her all women are not like her. So these days, I’ve stopped talking. Anything that has to do with time, we handle it differently. I go to church with the children when she’s not ready. After church service, she would say hello to everyone, including the pews in the church. I would scream, “Is it not time to go yet?” She would respond, “Please let me talk to this or that person. I will be back soon.”

Some days, I get angry and leave her behind. She comes home to give me silent treatment. But I think both of us have grown to understand that some things will never change no matter how old we grow together and that thing is how we deal with time individually. She understands I will leave her behind often and that’s ok and I understand when I leave her behind, she will give me the silent treatment. We both can live with the consequences of our actions so we are good. We are fine. We laugh over everything and frown when it comes to time.

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She’ll be late for the graduation of our children. She will be late to their weddings. She will be late to my burial if I die before her or she will be late to die when the time comes. It’s something we’ve all agreed so we don’t fight when the time comes but I want to know, what is it about wives and time that husbands can’t understand? We are always out while they are looking in the mirror to fix what doesn’t need to be fixed.   

—Benjamin

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