Men only: Dear society, wives can cheat too

Cheating used to be like those exclusive golf clubs of yore in which only men were allowed.

A lost world of green acres, wood panelled floors, brandy in the hand and cigars in the mouth that rich Africans with English pretensions used to inhabit.

Not anymore!

I was at the Blues Restaurant (at the basement of Barclays Plaza) with its red ambience and cool blue music, having a drink with three ladies (after one of those Euro-film events) ranging in age from 27 to 43.

Let’s call the 43-year-old Catie, the 35-year-old Dora and the 27-year-old Eva.

The three of them are all married, to men who are 45, 40 and 35 years old respectively.

Are we together?

The wonderful thing with wine is this – that in wine, there is truth!

Or as they say in Latin, in vino veritas!

I can understand how the ‘civilised’ world dumped Greek as the formal world language. I mean, who has the time to master an 845 letter alphabet and thirteen to twenty letter words.

But why they dumped Latin for English, I will never understand!

What I got to understand – as this trio of women got to the middle of their third Sh. 2,000 carafe of red wine – is that in spite of their marital status, they are all quite ready to cheat on their partners.

Why is this so?

For 43-year-old Cate, it seems to be all about the money.

For years, her husband was a furniture retailer doing well, even as she did her interior design business.

They each had a good car, and took their twin daughters – now newly in high school – to expensive schools.

But starting around 2017, the hubby’s business began to tank, then drown.

By the end of last year, he was bust, the business bankrupt, and the last of his warehouse goods auctioned.

That is when Cate says the man went into a stupor that borders on lazy paralysis.

“I’ve been working my fingers to the bone these last six months, but I get home and find this 45-year-old playing video games! I have borrowed up to the eyebrows, including to bail out his old dad from hospital.”

Now Cate has a loaded older widower (55) seriously hitting on her.

“He’s a client who can give me millions in business, and although I’m not that attracted to him, I feel he can help save my family with money.”

Dora’s problem with her husband is the opposite.

He is an NGO boss with way too much money at 40!

Already from a well-off family, Dora says the man was a playboy when they met seven years ago.

“I was just one of his many chicks,” Dora says, “but when I got his son five years ago, he seemed to change. He proposed to me, we got married, and settled down.”

At the behest of her hubby, she became a real life ‘Kilimani Mom/housewife.’

Three years ago, his NGO posted him to Uganda – but he had to flee for dear life back to Kenya after a year due to an affair with the wife of a senior soldier who found out and wanted to ‘finish’ him.

Dora thought the ‘near miss’ would reform her horny hubby, but she recently found WhatsApp messages from his 21-year-old ‘mpango wa kando.’

Now she has been having an emotional affair, constantly chatting and confiding in her college sweetheart, “My first great love who regrets not marrying me,” she says.

The third case is of Eva, a young banker at 27, married for three years to an academic eight years her senior.

They have no child, and he does not seem interested in one! In fact, Eva swears that for the last 18 months, he does not seem interested in her at all.

“The sex is dead,” she says, “but I know it is not another woman.”

The problem is that ever since her hubby began work on his PhD, he has become a total workaholic.

He carries papers home with him, locks himself in his study for long hours, and seems absent-minded, distracted and abrupt with her.

“It is like I married one of those scientific mad men from the movies,” she laments.

Eva now feels very lonely in her marriage and has lately found herself feeling receptive to the attentions of a handsome, flirtatious office colleague.

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