Mainini Beatrice: Infidelity rocking marriages

10 Aug, 2014 - 06:08 0 Views
Mainini Beatrice: Infidelity rocking marriages Mainini Beatrice

The Sunday Mail

Mainini Beatrice

Mainini Beatrice

LOVE & Beauty with Mainini Beatrice

I have met several people who have stopped me on the road and asked, “Mainini Bea, my husband is cheating on me with another girl and I have the evidence. What do I do?”

Well, I have realised that what to do in such situations is always a dilemma for many women. There are many issues which are considered by several women and there are also many options available to them.

The first one, which is emotional, is to hunt down the girl and teach her one lesson or two. But in most of the cases, hunting down the girl becomes a complicated affair when the hunter becomes the hunted. There are several women with scars inflicted on them after they invaded the girl’s house and the tables are turned against them.

The other option, and again based on emotions, is to confront the husband with the evidence and then become physical. Like the first option, this approach is not advisable since it has also left many wives wounded after the husband overpowered them.

Other women prefer to seek counselling sessions to help them to get over the trauma and torture.

But the thought of the husband having quality time with another woman will continue to add stress on them, raising the need for yet another counselling session.

Others prefer to call in their aunt or the husband’s relatives to try and dissuade the man going after other women. I have not experienced such a heartbreak in my marriage, at least for now, but that does not mean that my husband is perfect, it is only that I have not had the opportunity to catch him red handed.

I have my own suspicions, but I will not act for now until I have all the evidence which is very clear and beyond any doubt that my man is cheating on me. I have also met several other women who intimated that they have to deal not only with the pain, hurt, and anguish of unfaithfulness, but also the decision to reconcile or end the relationship.

In all the above situations, I think the best way to go about it is the last option.

Involvement of other people, especially those that are respected by your husband, will make him feel exposed.

Make the unfaithful mate struggle with issues of guilt, remorse, self-loathing and shame, but without being too confrontational.

In most cases, mending a marriage riddled by adultery and distrust may take years, and some relationships may be irretrievably broken because of that.

As long as this is done in an amicable way, the man is likely to repent within a reasonable time.

But we have another very big problem on our hands nowadays. I have met several men, and women too, who think that cheating is the fashionable in-thing. I am not sure what makes such people think that way.

These are the most uncaring people in the world who do not care about the feelings of others.

From the beginning of this article, I have been concentrating on men who cheat, but that does not mean that there are no women who are also in the game.

There are plenty of women who think that it’s fashionable to find a boyfriend to flirt with. I have seen both men and women committing suicide after discovering that their partners were cheating on them. But generally, men tend to think that cheating is worse when it is being done by women, yet this is far from the truth. Cheating is bad despite who is doing it. But in a patriarchal society like ours, it has become very difficult to convince some men that cheating is a bad habit.

Men who are in favour of cheating tend to cite polygamy as one of the means in which men are allowed to cheat.

I was pondering on the matter of polygamy one of these days and wondered why it is unacceptable for women to also have many husbands officially.

Women out there, don’t you think that this is an unfair arrangement?

I think when cheating occurs and everyone is sure of it, the best the couples can do to help solve the crisis is to consult a professional marriage counsellor, pastor, or other spiritual leader to discover how to cope with the infidelity. With the right counsel, the road to reconciliation may be difficult, but not impossible.

But it seems those who cheat have no idea how devastating marital betrayal can be.

My research on the subject revealed that for hundreds of years, marriage was held in high esteem, but the 60s and 70s produced a free love society where couples tended to be promiscuous and became less committed to the holy matrimony.

Yet this tendency to love and leave without remorse has made coping with infidelity in marriage more difficult.

In such cases, the decision to forgive and reconcile, or divorce is a very personal choice between husbands and wives, but the determining factor should be love.

I have seen couples separating for years, with the husband or wife soiling their partner’s name in the presence of relatives. Yet the couple would be seeing each other during the night and having quality sex on a daily basis.

It so happened that my uncle once moved out of his matrimonial home and stayed alone for more than a year.

He would visit my house just to make sure he says something really bad about his wife. Then one day he visits and says, “Mai Kuda is pregnant!”

I was shocked and wondered if she had already found a boyfriend within the year they had not been staying together. But my uncle looked down and simply said, “It’s my child”.

I have realised that in most cases, couples coping with infidelity take one day at a time, with the need for open and honest communication if reconciliation and the arduous task of putting the marriage back together can begin.

Infidelity is actually responsible for many troubled marriages in the world.

But the question is: why do men and women continue to engage in cheating when they are fully aware that it is responsible for most of the divorce cases?

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