Dear Men, did you really think the people of Facebook will leave you hanging like that? NO! We love gender equality and we dish it hold and cold. So here comes advice for husband material written by the one and only Viola Ifeyinwa Okolie. (If you missed the advice for women, please click here…You should not miss such sensitive information)

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Dear Young Man,

If your fiancée invites you home to meet her parents, it means she is serious about you. She wants you for keeps, but are you ready?

Remember that you never get a second chance to make a first impression, her parents will be watching you closely and your actions and reactions are what will determine whether they will consider you a husband material, good enough for their daughter.

Tantararataraaaaaaan, Aunty Fawola to the rescue.

You may thank me later.

Tips for the Young Man Visiting His Prospective In-laws for the First Time:

1. When you arrive, you must go down flat on your belly to greet your In-laws. Children without home training will stand and stretch out their hands for a handshake as if the father is their age mate; or just bend from the waist.

First of all, go down low.

The lower the better.

Lie down flat there on your belly, let your in-laws know that you were “proper brought up”.

2. If it is an overnight visit, do not spend a night with your fiancee in her room. Her parents might act like they don’t mind, but it is a trap. Matter of fact, if they offer you the guest room to sleep alone, refuse.

Insist on sleeping in the same room with your prospective father in law. Spread a lappa on the ground and lie there at the foot of the bed.

If he coughs at night, jump up and offer him drinking water, or massage his back, or something.

3. You must be the first to wake up every morning. Wake up and fetch bathing water for your father in law in the bathroom. Enter your mother in law’s bathroom and fetch bathing water for her and check the temperature of the water.

You have to show them you can care for their daughter.

4. Fix all the broken down electronics in the house during your stay, wash the car every morning, polish your father in law’s shoes and iron all your mother in laws clothes.

Collect all their underwear and soak them, then wash them after like fifteen minutes.

Remember to use joy soap to wash your prospective mother in law’s pants – don’t use key soap or canoe soap if not, your destiny and their daughter’s own together, will be finished.

5. Once you are in the house, don’t allow your in-laws spend money on anything. If they want to pay for fuel, jump down from the car and give the fuel attendant money. If your mother in law is going to the market, ask your father in law to hold his money and force her to collect yours instead.

Remember that you are under observation, and you must show them that you can take good care of their daughter.

6. Can you hunt? No? And you want to get married? What of farm? No?

*pulls down glasses to the end of my nose and scrutinises him carefully*

You cannot hunt and farm and you want to marry?

Wanda!

See ehn, better go and learn how to hunt and farm now. When you go to visit your In-laws, you must pull your shirt, enter the kitchen and hunt all the rats and wall geckos. Any rat as big as your head, should be carefully skinned (by you of course), roasted and kept aside as “bush meat”. When you are done, go the backyard and till the land.

Plant some corn, yams and pepper there.

Na now we go know say you don ready to marry.

7. If your mother in law asks you if you want to eat pounded yam, and longatroat like you, you are unable to control yourself and ask for crackers and water, you say yes to pounded yam; then “off” your shirt and trouser, enter the kitchen in your boxers and singlet, and go and pound the yam.

The question is a trick question, if you say yes, then you must be willing to show them that your husband material is not shorting cloth.

8. If you are served food by your prospective mother in law, don’t start swallowing like a Somalian refugee. First of all, form like you are not hungry. Then mold your lumps small small like you want to feed a baby, then daintily dip it in one corner of the soup, place it in your mouth and ensure your Adam’s apple doesn’t jump up and down as you swallow.

If you eat rapaciously, then you are a womaniser.

They will be watching your Adam’s apple, control it if you truly love the girl.

9. If there is meat in the soup, then remember these formulas. Like Physics, you don’t need English to understand it:

Even if there are one million pieces of meat in the soup, you should eat only the skin of the dried fish, half a piece of meat, the chicken bone, half a periwinkle, two mouthfuls of ponmo and one crayfish.

Don’t fail the test, mbok.

10. When your father in law puts on the television and tunes it to a sports channel, please control the urge to start shouting and screaming and acting like ndi shoozin, ndi ara middle of the night.

These are your In-laws.

Not your friends.

The only time they will expect you to make noise, is when the five year olds in the compound are outside playing football. Then you must ensure you go out and join them and play and roll in the mud and make noise.

This is the game: if you make noise when your father in law is watching football, even if he tempts you by making noise himself, you are just showing him that you are not a “proper brought up” somborri.

You will be making noise and disturbing his daughter and be shouting all over the place like a castrated bullock.

Going to play ball and make noise with the five year olds will be normal, trust me her parents see them as your age mates.

So, if for some reason or the other, your girlfriend takes you home to see her parents, and then after you return, she spends Monday to Thursday with you, then disappears on Friday for a “family function”, returns on Monday and starts avoiding you; then you hear from her friends that she got married over the weekend, my brother, sorry.

You failed the husband material test.

Her family were observing you during that visit while you were just doing anyhow, and have decided that you don’t have enough home training to marry their daughter.

Ndo.

But I have ‘epped you now sha o.

Next time, use the tips above.