Love and Taxes

Sometimes we like pointing fingers at Cupid for love affairs going sour, because, honestly speaking; he can be really irresponsible when he chooses to. Such are the times when you feel like he threw a hunting knife at your chest, rather than the magical love arrow. Well, as I said, this only happens sometimes.

This time it is not the boy goddess who pulled a fast one on the prospects of college romance. It is the freaking government and their irrational tax law.

Love, ladies and gentlemen, just got a new price tag. We cannot simply afford it, and I believe I speak in earnest for a majority of the male population when I say this; our relationship goose just got cooked.

Here in campus, we have people who are statutorily married in a matter of speaking — presumption of marriage on the basis of cohabitation for a period of six months or more. The trend here is that girlfriends move in with their significant others. It’s more like a convenient symbiotic understanding whereby the dude provides money, and the damsel cooks, cleans and provides sex. That is the campus definition of love. And we do not complain, because we know this caricature of a marriage never lasts long. So long as the equation of roles is at a balance.

But now here comes the evil queen in the disguise of the taxman who wants to bludgeon this equation. He has added more weight on one side of the equal sign, and now the equality in the equation has gone vamoose. We are in a state of ‘intaxification’.

For the love of God, how do you pledge free education and then increase the price of books? We men are now required to step in for this. God help you if your two weeks anniversary is just around the corner, because you will have to sell your pancreas to get her that Ideos phone she has been nagging about.

As for food; bread is a luxury and milk is more costly than gas. Breakfast is for the illuminate- only those who have sold their souls can afford white tea. What do they expect us to feed our ‘families’ with, jet fuel? I guess it is now perfectly justifiable to cry over spilt milk.

This government has a funny sense of humour, because like a punch line to a bad joke, it turns out that they were just pulling our legs when they pledged the Sh. 20,000 increase in Helb student loan starting this semester.

The government’s honour isn’t worthless; it’s virtually non-existent, yet we still fell for it. Look at where it has gotten us now — broke. And you know no campus girl is ready to cook, clean and warm a bed for a broke brother. In campus, if there was a family tree, money and love would be like newly weds. But now that the former has taken a hiatus from life, she has taken along her other friends too; romance and coitus. That means love is gone too. Poof! Like fart in the ocean breeze.