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.
