Meet 'the other man'

Eli is the kind of a person you would call the other man. Eli and Stacy were family friends before they started having an affair. Their romantic relationship began at an event held by Stacy’s company.

“It was an end of year party so let’s just say the drinks were flowing and everyone had let their guard down,” Eli says.

Eli, 35, spent most of the evening with Stacy.

“She was plastered. I walked her to her hotel room, made sure she got into bed, locked the door and left the keys with her friend in the next room. She called me in the morning wondering if anything happened between us. I assured her that nothing had, then I took her out to lunch.”

What Eli couldn’t resist about Stacy, 45, was their mental connection. There is a new word that has been coined for this, sapiosexuals, which means people whose attraction is based on intellect.

“We clicked. We talked about everything: life, children, careers and of course marriage. She wasn’t happy in hers. He was never around. She couldn’t even remember the last time they had sex. And when they did, it was more functional than anything else.”

The first time Eli and Stacy slept together was in Mombasa, six months after their relationship started. “She had applied for this training that was to last for a month. She asked me if I wanted to go. And since most of my work was online at the time, I agreed.”

One and half years later, Eli and Stacy are still going strong. I ask Eli what makes a young man date a married woman with teenage children?

“She isn’t needy. She knows who she is, what she wants. She gives as much as she takes.”

Of course a relationship with a married woman comes with its own shortfalls, for instance, being caught by the husband. Eli is not worried about that, since they are cautious.

This isn’t the case for Ken who met his current girlfriend, Wangui, when he applied for a job at a company owned by Wangui’s husband.

The day after he was hired, Ken and Wangui had sex. “I feel guilty that her husband trusted me right away. He asked me to drive her to see a friend out of town. After the visit, Wangui and I went for lunch. We ended up in a hotel room.”

Ken, who is 33, had no intention of carrying on with the relationship after the first incident, but it was difficult to deny the chemistry especially since he worked in the same office as the 40-year-old Wangui.

“It was bad. Her husband used to call me ‘Kijana’ since he was much older than me. He trusted me so much he would give me up to Sh3 million to go bank at the end of a work week.

“Most Fridays, he would leave the office early and he’d ask me to take ‘Mama’ home. Sometimes we used these opportunities to get intimate.”

Ken eventually left the company and got his own girlfriend. Both he and Wangui decided things were getting too complicated and they ended the relationship.

“A year after we broke up, Wangui showed up at my door in tears, she had been in a fight with her husband and needed a shoulder to cry on. Well, one thing led to another,” Ken says.

Their relationship intensified after that. Even though Ken was by then already married, he could not resist Wangui.

“If I tell Wangui I am broke, she will sit down with me and help me get more clients, generate more ideas for my business. If I tell my wife I am broke, she gets worried that we won’t afford her new car. Now tell me, which woman would a man choose?”

Ken and Wangui have been together for close to seven years while Eli and Stacy have been together for one and a half years.

Both Ken and Eli are much younger than the married women they are dating but despite the age difference, they seemed to gel perfectly.

Their situations beg the question, what makes a relationship real or honourable, and how do we determine what is acceptable or deplorable?