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When your husband is a philanderer...
What you need to know:
In marriage, women pray that their men will not cheat. They use every trick in the bag to ensure it doesn’t happen, only to end up disappointed, writes Agnes K. Namaganda
Some argue that women also cheat but by and large, men cheat much more than women. Matters are made worse in our African society, which is predominantly patriarchal and polygamous. The Christian vows made on the wedding day before God and the public are not even stringent enough to keep men from straying.
Jesus spelt out infidelity as the only ground for divorce. Not so in the African tradition. Cheating is not reason enough for a woman to walk out of her matrimonial home; actually, it is expected and acceptable for a man to cheat as long as he is capably providing for a wife and children.
But how do women in such marriages sanely survive the pain of betrayal and the humiliation brought on by their husbands’ philandering? Women who know that their husbands’ cars are always parked by girls’ hostels at universities, women who know their husbands are having mistresses elsewhere?
It would be immature for a woman to leave her job because she’s brooding over her husband’s unfaithfulness so she’s expected to report to work and with a good attitude at that. Then she probably has children to raise, children who may have no idea about what is happening and thus expect her to have fun with them as usual.
For Jennifer, it was through a gossip column in a local tabloid that she discovered her husband was in a serious relationship with a girl fit to be the couple’s daughter. Apparently “he had built her a house, gotten her a job, bought her a car and she had in turn popped him a tot,” the article said.
“The whole world knew (or so she felt) - my family, friends, colleagues at work and neighbours. Some people never read newspapers and maybe they never get to know but your mind tells you everybody knows so you feel ashamed and embarrassed at every turn. I lost weight, my self-esteem was in tatters and I felt less of a woman. It’s a terrible feeling!” she confesses.
Her consolation was in God. “The good thing about the word of God is that you cease to see your spouse as your enemy, which is very important, otherwise you go ballistic every time you see him and say things you should not in the first place. Knowing God gave me a lot of peace, I was calm enough to tell him I would not be sleeping with him any longer and that I expected him to play his role as a father figure in our children’s lives.
However, it wasn’t easy – the pain of betrayal, seeing him and knowing he was coming from seeing her… I didn’t want to talk about it so I gave him no rules. I didn’t want him to make me empty promises that he would not keep. I left it up to him and he has never apologised.”
Connie was lucky, at least she thinks, to have been told by elderly female relatives that such things happen so she handled the situation much better than Jennifer. “I got married expecting and ready for it to happen. I had been told to create my own world with its own sources of happiness. If my husband involves me in his life, well and good; if he doesn’t, I make my own plans and make myself happy. Whether he comes back home or not, my life continues. Of course it feels terrible when he behaves opposite to his vows but he is a mature person and I cannot begin telling him what to do,” she says of her husband, a well-known “skirt-chaser”.
Sharon’s husband kept breaking the promise to stop philandering. “I have resigned myself as I cannot leave the marriage. I tried and failed. He keeps telling me he loves me each time I catch him. I guess I should stop pursuing this because it doesn’t look like he’s about to stop cheating any time soon,” she says.
Other women block these embarrassing painful incidences from their minds to keep happy. They carry on as if nothing happened and decide not to think about it at all. But for all of them, having a cheating husband is a very big challenge because they have to stay in their marriages anyway.
