Does a man's love history really matter?

Men are unduly interested in the past of the woman they are dating. They want to know the number of men she has slept with, abortions procured and how she has dealt with and broken up with men in her life. If your catch’s past were a readily available file, men would pay everything to have it.

Strangely, women never fuss about a man’s past. Save for that rare occasion the man has a child out there with an ex who is potentially psychotic; women are generally fine with a man’s past. In fact, they don’t even care. I will not go into academic justifications of male dominance and patriarchy for the female apathy towards a man’s past.

Your new catch laid out her past, which is so rich, it is a potential movie. You wanted to judge her; that she is more susceptible to bad decisions. But now that you are older, you know better. You really can’t judge her without examining your own past. You equally have skeletons and stinking bodies in your closet. You don’t know if to tell her or not.

You think of the many women you walked away from without an explanation. Their calls went unanswered. Text messages, unreplied. For some, without an ounce of shame, you contrived a situation that precipitated a breakup. You remember acting all drunk, grabbing other women’s backsides in the club, acting violent just to be as repulsive as possible to ward off a clingy woman. It didn’t work. You came up with an even stupider strategy: You staged an alcoholic-addiction problem and even started wetting the bed, but she proved sticky. The true ride-or-die, chick. Panicking she may become pregnant, you turned violent, until she was persuaded by her friends to give up on you.

You think that one evening spent at an abortion clinic. Waiting, several hours on end, praying that Murphy’s Law does not come to haunt you. You know, things might go wrong. Awfully so. The overpowering silence in your bedroom that night after the abortion. It changed your ex’s life for good. She never thought of men in the same way. You remember the moral quantum that you lived through the ensuing months.

You have been stupid too. Like when lust got the better of you and you slept with her friend against better judgment. The drama, their parting ways, was more than you could have asked for. There is more but the underlying theme is that you have not been a good boy. You had been a serial abuser of women’s emotions. You were selfish and you have never regretted.

So as you sit by the corner table waiting for Cindy, it hits you that at your age, you can longer hold it against a woman on account of her strange past. We all have dirty little and big secrets in our closets. You want to embrace her hoping she has the capacity to embrace a future and live through it unencumbered by her past.

By the time she arrives, your mind is pretty much made up that you will try and date her. In any case, you have not been seeing someone for sometime. She is not the most ideal woman. But sometimes, you don’t need a perfect match. You just need someone real. You are real. And she seems real too. Will she change down the line and be the woman who wants to change you?

Time will tell.

@nyanchwani

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