"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others"

I follow South African soapies Isidingo, Muvhango and 7de laan. Lately, all three have been running subplots around cheating husbands. I like these soapies for the genius scriptwriting and relevance to everyday life. The cuckolded women’s flaws are accentuated so much that it becomes natural to feel sorry for the poor husband, victim of his neglectful and haughty wife who drives him to have unwanted sex with other women. It’s the same in real life. Men are pushed to cheat against their will, it’s the last thing they want to do, they actually go to other women kicking and screaming, right? It reminds me of George Orwell’s Animal Farm where the pigs tailored a privileged life for themselves and ate all the good food while sitting on their butts and the other animals worked themselves to the bone. They changed the rule “All animals are equal” to “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”.   Did I just say cheating men remind me of pigs, hahaha, that came out completely wrong!

Problems happen in the home and I think the solution is to sit down and talk, not take the cowardly route of running away from them.  There are counselors available, and if people are determined to solve their problems, they will. Men cheat because they want to cheat, period. Society allows them to, it normalizes cheating in men but if a woman do the same, nail her on the cross.

Men will come up with all manner of excuses for cheating and the blame is usually laid squarely at the wife’s feet. Even when there aren’t problems at home to blame the cheating on, they will look for them until they find them. If they don’t find them, they will create them. If women had to adopt a similar approach, heading for the hills because their husbands have problems, there would be no woman in any home because men also have serious flaws. I think men cheat because their egos are perforated by their inadequacies and instead of finding a way of managing that, they just go and hide their heads in other women’s panties.

When a married couple fails to conceive, it’s socially acceptable in our African culture for the man to go and find another woman to have a child with, even though he doesn’t divorce his wife. People say, “He can’t just die without a child of his own”. But if it’s the man who is impotent, no-one expects the wife to find a man who can give her a child. They encourage her to accept the situation and stand by her man. She is encouraged to remember her vows.  You said you would love him, comfort him and keep him in sickness and in health, forsaking all others, be true to him as long as you both shall live. We were there when you declared you would have and hold him for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer to love and to cherish till death do you part.  Wedding vows have a knack to spring on people’s minds only where women are concerned. Men can piss on those vows and it’s perfectly fine! Even when a man cheats and the woman wants to leave, she is reminded of the day she said only death would separate them.  No-one asks the men to remember the time that he said he would forsake all others.

We are always told how men can’t help cheating, that it’s in their DNA. Then we are also told the man is the head of the house who womenfolk should submit to. Is this the same man who can’t control himself and is now supposed to be the head that leads the whole family? Where to, a ditch?  I don’t want to subscribe to that school of thought that says men are dogs that can’t control themselves because I’m aware that there are a few very good ones out there. So I will hold the conviction that they can control themselves, but make their own choices.

I think men who cheat on their wives don’t love them, simple as that. You don’t deliberately hurt someone you love. I think these men have a low self-esteem, maybe they feel like losers among other men and want to compensate by amassing women to feel better about themselves. It’s never usually about the wife’s shortfalls. It’s more about the man feeling sorry for himself and thinking he will get an ego boost from sleeping around or just having a sense of entitlement and thinking he owes it to himself to continue sleeping around even though his wife isn’t allowed to do so.

My friend cheated on his wife and was asking me how to make amends. I told him I wouldn’t know how to make that right because it cannot be undone. The best way to handle cheating in marriage is simply not even start, because once you do, you’ve bitten more than you can chew. When you bring a third person into the mix, you might as well say hello to a fourth one which your partner will also bring to the party. When a man leaves his wife at home and starts chasing after other skirts out there, he creates a void, one that another man will happily come and fill because there are always men lurking in the shadows, waiting to comfort broken-hearted wives. Once a man cheats, he’s making the statement that “You are undesirable, you are not enough for me, I have found better”, to his wife. In the event that another man makes a pass at the spurned woman, she’s naturally quite flattered to get some appreciation, which she’s not getting from her husband because he’s busy giving it to other women. Affected women might then cheat to heal their broken hearts and to seek validation elsewhere, get a second opinion on their desirability, so to speak. Then society will descend on that woman like a tonne of bricks.