Mutual Sin

When I was growing up, I thought that parents fighting, father’s cheating, husbands (or wives) beating each other up, alcoholic parents you name it, was a thing of ‘their‘ generation and not my generation. I honestly thought that my little childhood friends and I would grow up being different, that we would never cheat or fight or over indulge in alcohol because we knew it was bad. I thought that my 12 year old next door neighbor Eddie would never do these things to his wife because we were different.

When I got to college, of course that changed. I started to see that these habits didn’t stop at our generation but rather they were passed down. Imagine my shock when I heard that Eddie was physically abusive to his wife, or when I was cheated on by the love of my life, or when I realized that my friend was an alcoholic at seventeen. And so when a married man in his late twenties/early thirties started to relentlessly pursue me, I was bewildered. It was the first of many such experiences and I came to the tiny discovery that there are some catalysts that speed up this trend of married men hitting on single ladies: being in your twenties, having a job and more so in the corporate sector, liking the taste of jager bombs. Anyways.

A couple of weeks ago at the office cafeteria, I sat with two of my seniors over lunch-a man and a woman. As naturally as these conversations always pop up in almost all gatherings, we started to talk about married men cheating on their wives and more so, the other woman and her acceptance into this role. I took my position as student as the two bickered over who was right. The man, who I absolutely find hilarious on one side and over industrious in his job on the other said to me, “Listen. All I can say is that it is very very, very hard for us (married men) who don’t want to cheat.” And then I remembered something that my Aunt told me once. She said, “Julia, when I was your age, there used to be just one beautiful girl in the village. Men would all talk about this one girl and fight to get her. Nowadays, everyone is beautiful! And educated and smart. There is a surplus and men just can’t hold it together.”

My other colleague, the lady, shrugged her shoulders in half hearted agreement and said “I was in a relationship for most of my early twenties and when I used to see my friends date married men, I would look down on them. Now that I am single and realizing that good single men are nonexistent and those who exist just don’t pursue me, a married man stops seeming like such an evil idea.”

So clearly there were two sides to the coin here: men who cheat and girls who accept to be the other woman. Who coaxes who?

To begin with, let me come to the defense of the married man just a little. Within a group of married men, there is always the one single guy. He’s the guy with the plan, the hook up, the weed even! He’s the guy your husband runs to when the baby shits all over his office pants or when you keep going on and on about ‘Musyoki’ your step brother who has built a wall on your father’s land. This guy is like a poison ivy within that clique because in his house parties he invites his married boys and his single girlfriends. The worst combination for a married man is a married man, single girls and a house (party). Not that this is the only route to infidelity but it is the most common route taken by men who do not want to or didn’t intend to cheat-environments created by ‘the single guy’.

And then there’s the other woman and her acceptance into this role. Like my colleague said, single men just don’t pursue. As a woman you say to yourself that you can never see yourself with a married man, ever. And then the married man hits on you. You spit in his face. Shame on him. And then he hits on you again, sends you a rose, sends you a drink at the club, runs to pass you a hankie when you sneeze. You turn away and shun him. But then, he does it again! This time he sends you a bouquet of flowers every Saturday, sends you a bottle of expensive Rose at the club, runs to buy you a new phone when yours is grabbed in a Matatu. He stops at nothing! Soon you say, “Ok fiiiine. I’ll go for coffee. Just coffee…”

See, married men have something that single men don’t-PERSISTENCE. If you know nothing about women, well then here is the one important thing you need to know-women respond to persistence- especially if you wear a clean shirt and nice cologne. Whether in the bedroom (“no, no keep going”) or in real life (‘’no, I can’t, okay I’ll see, Yes let’s do it”) we respond. A single guy will try for a little bit and give up because why put in such a huge investment in a girl only for her to turn you down? For a married man, whether you turn him down or not, he still gets pu*sy at the end of the day (his wife) and so he puts his A-game on all the time and with every girl. Honestly, married men have the balls and drive that single men don’t and that’s what’s up.

For the wife…It’s unfair. She made sure that he has that clean shirt, she got him that cologne and she gave him all the practice he needed in ‘how to get her to bed-lesson one’. The other woman, she reaps what was sown by the man’s wife.

I don’t know why men cheat or why God implanted in them this vice that is so deep within their DNA but as women, we are supposed to be on the same side and have never been since time in memorial. Men on the other hand learnt that being on the same side works. We missed that lesson…maybe it’s because men chased and hunted one mammoth together and learnt about teamwork, while we fetched and carried our own gourds-who knows. So you know what, the guy will not stop hitting on you but he won’t leave his wife either so please do not be stupid enough to fall for the big romantic gestures…buy a romantic comedy instead.

Yeah I said it!

Peace & Love

Julia Love