Angry wives

My wife is reading an introduction to diverse ways of how women can be angry.

There are two major ways for a wife, or a woman in general, to be aggressive: positively or negatively. That is what she is learning from the book.

I have to say that her readings had an emotional transfer on me: I also got angry, and I guess negatively.

It was an interesting observation. Reflections on a handbook of female aggressions make a male aggressive, even via a digital connection. Another indication of the reality of the digital world. And the North-South connectivity.

In general, I told to my still dear wife, I would not need a manual to learn about the anger of ladies. Or of the anger of gentle(?)men either. Nowadays, I just want to be, live and work with people that I like.

And I appreciate if my mates and partners, whether in work, at home or elsewhere, retain their aggressions behind.

My family members – not that many others – would know that I have not been very good at that art at all. I am trying to de-learn aggression in Africa, the location of my anger management program.

At least for me, fun, not aggression, is the key factor for creative energy, ideas and – how is it called? – flow.

Way back I read the famous story by Hans Christian Andersen What Father Does Is Always Right (or in some other translations, the Old Man – well, I am both).

The story tells how the husband traded the property of a modest household finally for a basket of rotten apples.

But the wife had not read the anger guide.  So I guess it was the wife’s overwhelming confidence in her husband’s miserable mistakes of his businesses that transformed the threating poverty into richness and happiness.

Or maybe it was love? Blind love. Positive love? (At least it must not have been negative love, although maybe the book would have clarified my thoughts here.)

I wonder what the feedback of an either positively or negatively charged wife would have resulted in.

I guess I have received so much of the undeserved and unfounded love from my wife – with my mistakes and my anger and my aggression – that she needed to do the reading of the manual.

At the time of emerging aggressions, hate and conflicts, it might be more constructive to learn from Andersen than from the Finnish therapists.

When we talk, hours and hours, day and night, with my Namibian friends, but also digitally with others, the anger horizon of the whole world opens up.

People have so many reasons to recall all the unjust that they are all the time encountering in life.

Like my grandmother who kept writing letters to her ex-husband throughout the rest of her life. Decades. And as far as I have understood, they were not traditional love letters.

Many years back I was chairing a keynote by President Benjamin Mkapa. With no other questions after his great talk, I needed to give mine:

Why do so many people in Africa look happy, even within a range of difficulties that they are living in?

Of course, most people with more judgment than me would regard the question childish and not very well informed.

Maybe it is the sun, the President was joking. But more seriously, the relations are still there, within a family, he continued.

At the time that people are talking increasingly about healthy food, maybe we could get a step further up in Maslow’s hierarchy and talk about healthy relationships.

We don’t talk about aggressive food either, even with chili (but maybe it is an example of positively aggressive food).

A call for another book?