Haven’t you heard the girls say, “I’d rather cry in a Mercedes Benz than laugh on a boda-boda”?
But in reality, does having more money (something many spouses focus on as soon as the wedding is out of the way) mean healthier, satisfied pink elephants in your bedroom?
“Absolutely. There is nothing as annoying as having to pleasure someone when the financial stress is too much. Seeking the pleasure for myself would even be out of the question. This would be sacrifice for the sake of conjugal duties,” Dinah (not real name) told me.
In fact, she confesses to even severally elbowing her frisky husband out of his sexy mood, because “how does he even work up that excitement when our kids are home for lack of school fees?”
But when business looks up for them, so does the libido; at least, hers. But many more couples would disagree with Dinah. In fact for one preacher, a flailing sex life only picked up when they were reduced to the basics.
“We had been so busy before, globe-trotting and minding so many other things that we inadvertently grew apart sexually. But then a few years ago God took away everything, and suddenly the only thing we seemed to have was each other. Marriage and our bedroom have never been as memorable as during that tough time and we learnt from it,” the wife shared.
It reminds me of a song back in the day when Jimmy Katumba and the Ebonies were all the rage. One of their songs – I think by Stella Nanteza (Otutte Lyaki Essanyu Lyange) – decries a husband’s newly found wealth that has sucked all the happiness out of their marriage.
It is fact that at least two things happen when a couple rises from rags to riches: one, the thirst for more money is only made worse by availability of the benjamins; so, the quest for more and more soon overrides all else and spouses and great sex are sacrificed at the success altar.
Two, there are no guarantees that a spouse’s good fortunes will be enjoyed with his or her other half waiting at home. Instead, many realise they only married the people they married because they are what they could afford, back then. So the search for a spouse ‘worthy the glamour and cash’ is on, and someone is left holding the can, singing Otutte Lyaki Essanyu Lyange.
In 2004 the New York Times published a study by David G. Blanchflower of Dartmouth College and Andrew J. Oswald of the University of Warwick in England, called “Money, Sex and Happiness: An Empirical Study”. And as they concluded: “Money does seem to buy greater happiness. But it does not buy more sex.”
Haven’t you seen the woman who marries into a huge mansion twirling to the beats of No Romance without Finance, only to sneak into the shamba boy’s quarters months later, crooning Money Can’t Buy Me Love?
The study also confirmed: “The more sex, the happier the person.” Yet for many couples whose sole focus is on getting more benjamins, there is little time left to indulge ‘silly pink elephants’; at least not in their marital beds.
According to the New York Times, the researchers estimated that increasing the frequency of sexual intercourse from once a month to at least once a week provided as much happiness as putting $50,000 in the bank.
“Possibly the least expected finding of the paper was that in general, greater income does not buy more sex, nor sexual partners,” the New York Times reported. “That was surprising to us as economists, Mr Oswald said, because by and large, we think money can buy anything.”
The study even found that men who paid for sex reported they were considerably less happy.
So… do we give up the quest for more money then?
No. Just know money will not be the solution to all your problems as you dream; it could in fact create others, so balance things out.
