I have heard answers of “I dress up for me; to feel good about myself ”, “I choose comfort first; husband can also do what makes him happy”…
But usually, the same people will complain bitterly when their spouses look elsewhere with admiring eyes, or follow up those lusty looks with actual action outside the marriages. I think on a whole, because of the few options left to them, men dress appropriately on a stay-at-home day – don’t make me break it down to who looks good in shorts and who looks outright comical.
But at least for them, you will find him in shorts, sweat pants, or regular jeans and a tee-shirt; save for the day he goes a little crazy and walks around the home without a shirt, showing all and sundry his butt crack and big belly. Seriously, that is so not sexy, gentlemen. Your wives just don’t want to make you feel a certain way, so they keep quiet. But me? I don’t mind making you feel that certain way. Throw a shirt on, already.
But the real issue is us, women. We have a wide variety of what we can wear at home, and somehow, we manage to come up with that cheap, but oh, so comfortable long dress made out of cotton or polyester that husbands seem united about hating lately.
It is like our universal home uniform. Every woman I know has one, and it allows one to walk around the house sans bra and panties. You would think men would appreciate that last detail, but wapi! The amount of complaints and wrath those outfits attract on social media …!
But anyway, once we have had that conversation with ourselves and stop pretending that we do not care what the men think about our dress code as long as we are comfortable, we shall burn those bu dresses.
They came as an upgrade from the lesu/kanga. There is a generation of wives that spent entire days wrapped in just a lesu and little else, but following intense backlash again from men and ssenga sessions about the need for a wife to be properly dressed in her home, out flew the lesu and in came the long dress that is neither boubou nor kaftan.
Some wives own just one. She gets home, peels off her makeup, bra and power suit, then slips into this dress (it is not necessarily always clean or fresh), slaps a bonnet over her hair, and goes about her business.
“It is not even that ka dress that other men hate; my wife has a long, old maternity dress that basically sweeps the floor when she walks, now that she lost the pregnancy weight,” one husband weighed in recently to this debate.
“It has tomato stains, baby vomit stains, food stains, name it…but she seems to really love it and all the different badges of motherhood it bears that she hardly ever washes out!”
He says it has, however, affected their sex lives, because gone is the sexy, corporate girl he had the hots for 24/7, and in her place is this sloppy person, who on a public holiday can take her first shower at 4 pm.
“She is quite opinionated, so I just let this slide, but banange, say something about appearances while at home!”
Don’t take your spouse for granted. Why spend an entire day without brushing your teeth, because “I am not headed anywhere important”.
Men, I have been told, do this a lot. They have no qualms walking around with mouths smelling like a scavenger’s, even as they rant about our beloved bu dresses.
Which, I hope we are now going to tone down, ladies. You can wear shorts, leggings, bikers; you can wear an actual skirt and blouse; tailor proper kitenge outfits; you can wear your jeans… anything; just give the ka dress and hair bonnet a break. There is nothing sexy about that monotonous look.
The people most likely to bring you the utmost joy or the worst-possible misery are the ones you share a home with; look and smell good for them too.
inarticle} inarticle}