Most people seem to think that men and women cannot be good friends without them being sexually involved. However, I have a different view because I have enjoyed close relationships with men through the years and never once became sexually involved with them.
So because of my own experience, I often dismissed talk that any man I was involved with was seeing another woman just because he had female friends.
My thinking was: “If you kept a man on a short leash by being with him just wherever he went, together with treating him really good, then he would have no time, opportunity and energy to spend with another woman.”
But I was so wrong!
I can now say that when a man wants to cheat on his woman, he will do anything to get access to the woman he is attracted to.
And this is what I want to share with other women: you need to recognise that if your man is the type who will cheat, no matter what you do for him and with him, he will betray you.
No matter how much time you spend with him, no matter how much sex you give him, and no matter how much he tells you it is the best he ever had, he will still cheat on you.
I put it down to a testosterone thing where men have to prove to other men that they can hunt, catch and subdue a female of their choice, and do it while still actively professing their love and devotion to another female.
In my case, my husband of eight years not only had an affair, but also got the woman pregnant as well. What I found ironic about the situation was that he had told me a short time before that he did not want to have any children.
He told me then that he wanted us to enjoy our lives together for as long as possible as when children came along we would have to attend to their needs first, and would no longer have the privacy and time to enjoy each other as much. And I agreed with that, only to get hurt by this situation.
It all started when he began going up by his mother’s home more often to play games, and then afterwards he would lime with the fellows. Though I didn’t like him going up there so often I didn’t complain because I was studying and I needed the peace and quiet in the house.
But then he started going up there every evening in the week after work and would come in sometimes late at night.
That meant I would only see him for a few hours in the morning and a few hours at night.
This started to bother me but each time I called his mum’s house he was always where he said he was.
I figured, though, that given our closeness I would be able to pick up any telltale signs that he was having an affair. But as I later realised, the indicators of cheating we formulate are not often foolproof. That is why there are times when infidelity is undetectable as some men work extra hard to hide all traces of it – and my husband certainly did that.
He began having an affair with a 25-year-old woman – a youth leader at a Christian organisation at that – who lived near his mother. And, believe it or not, he got her pregnant.
Because I never suspected a thing, when I started hearing the rumours about this situation, I dismissed them, so you could imagine the impact it had on me when the child was born and he was forced to confess that he had strayed.
At first I felt as if I wanted to die. Then, as the realisation of what he did hit me, I wanted to seriously hurt him. All I could think about was him having unprotected sex with her without even knowing if she had some infectious disease.
He could have caught something from her and brought it home to me. Even now the thought of what he might have exposed me to through his infidelity hurts me to the core.
As a result of my experience, I now feel that you can never tell if a man is cheating, no matter how close you are to him.
All I can say to women out there is you have to give men enough rope and let them enjoy their friendships; let them know you trust them, but warn them if they stray just once, you’re done with them. Stick to your word because if you don’t they’ll never respect you afterwards. (NA)
