FOR decades, a cheating husband could come home with the most ridiculous explanations known to mankind and still receive the traditional Nigerian verdict: “Men are polygamous in nature.” But let a woman have a side man and suddenly everybody remembers the Qur’an, the Bible, culture, morality, family honour, ancestors and possibly the village meeting. The double standard has been so deeply embedded in our society that men could commit the very act that would destroy a woman’s reputation, yet somehow find themselves excused by biology, culture and tradition.
Now, something interesting is happening. Women are no longer asking questions; they just act. If a man can cheat and still call himself a husband, why must a woman who cheats be called every name in the dictionary? And therein lies the uncomfortable part: maybe the women have misunderstood the assignment. The goal of equality was never supposed to be that everybody gets to misbehave equally.
Women’s sexual agency and equality are legitimate conversations, but using men’s historically tolerated wrongdoing as the moral standard is not liberation. It is simply expanding the number of people doing the wrong thing. And social media has made it much easier for women to have “sides” from the comfort of their matrimonial homes. But then, one cannot help asking: why wouldn’t she?
There’s this family I know. The oga works in the capital and lives quite comfortably there, with three wives, two in different states in the North-West and another in the North-East. So, when travelling towards the North-West, he simply branches off, spends a night with one wife, continues his journey to the other, and does the same on his return. One of these women can go a month or even two without seeing her husband for up to 24 hours. I am not justifying infidelity, far from it. But when a woman is married and yet lives most of her life alone and unappreciated, what happens when social media puts attention, companionship and affection right at her fingertips?
Girls talk all the time, right? So, this person said her husband doesn’t have her time and is always running after anything under a skirt, so she kept herself busy with her ‘friend’ too. They only FaceTime and talk. He keeps her company and takes her mind off things. I asked her, “Until when?” Her answer was simple: “As long as he keeps chasing things outside.” And that got me thinking.
What exactly is the point of this? To what end are we taking this ridiculous competition? Are we really trying to create a situation where the response to one person’s bad behaviour is simply another person’s bad behaviour, until everybody becomes equally guilty and nobody is willing to admit that the entire thing is wrong?
I am not justifying the behaviour. Wrong does not become right because the other person did it first. But we cannot pretend that the environment in which this behaviour is growing does not exist. There is a reason these conversations are becoming louder, and there is a reason some women who would ordinarily have been expected to endure quietly are beginning to question the rules that society has imposed on them.
Women of this generation are increasingly refusing to endure what women of previous generations endured silently. Ironically, the men of the past even cheated with a little bit of dignity. One or two women outside the home, and quite often, the relationship eventually led to marriage. But the modern-day husband? Give him a smartphone and an internet connection and he can have a full-time roster. Ten to fifteen different women in his DMs on one app, another collection on a second app, plus the ones already sitting comfortably in his WhatsApp. Meanwhile, the woman at home is slowly dying of loneliness, and all she wants is to be seen by her husband.
And because society has made divorce such a frightening sentence for women, many would rather remain in the marriage and find their own ways of coping than walk away and become another “divorcee” for society to gossip about. In many Nigerian communities, divorce still comes with a social punishment that can sometimes feel heavier than the problems that caused the marriage to collapse in the first place.
A woman may be unhappy, neglected and emotionally abandoned, but the moment she says she wants to leave, the questions begin: What did you do? Couldn’t you endure? What about the children? What will people say? Yet the man who created the unbearable environment may continue living his life as though nothing happened.
Then there is another story, and this one did not begin with another woman. It began with suspicion.
For years, this woman believed her husband was simply a low-income earner. She repeatedly encouraged him to join cooperatives and save whatever little he could, hoping they could gradually build a more comfortable life together. Sometimes he listened. Most times, he didn’t. But something never quite added up. His income said one thing, but his lifestyle was saying something completely different. The shoes were expensive, the perfumes were premium and the clothes were not exactly what one would expect from the income he had consistently reported to his wife. Everything he bought for himself seemed to belong to a different financial reality.
And then came the thought that has probably crossed the mind of many suspicious spouses: If you really want to know who a person is these days, don’t ask his friends. Check his phone. So she checked. First, the bank accounts, and there it was. The balance in his account was nowhere near what he had spent years telling her he earned. In fact, it was so far beyond the figure she knew that the shock alone could have ended the investigation. Then came the transactions. Different names, transfers, payments and narrations to people she did not recognise.
And then she entered WhatsApp. That’s what any person would do. Further investigation, and that was where the real story began. Apparently, Mr. Man was living very, very comfortably. Comfortable enough to send money to women, some of them married, simply because they sent him their pictures. At other times, he was paying for spa treatments, salon appointments and whatever else caught his fancy. Meanwhile, his own wife had to go through negotiations before he would give her money to make her hair. And the most insulting part was not even the money. It was the unapologetic attitude.
So, what exactly do you tell a woman who discovers that the man she has been struggling beside has been financially comfortable all along, only that his comfort apparently had a guest list and she wasn’t on it?
What do you tell her when she has spent years trying to build a life with a man who was busy building a completely different lifestyle behind her back? How do you explain to someone that the sacrifices she made were real, the struggles she endured were real, the dreams she had for the family were real, but the man she was making those sacrifices for was apparently living according to an entirely different set of priorities?
Again, I am not making a case for retaliation. But we need to stop pretending that these reactions happen in a vacuum. Sometimes what looks like sudden rebellion is years of disappointment finally finding an outlet, and that is the uncomfortable conversation we are refusing to have. There is a point at which years of neglect, loneliness, humiliation and double standards begin to produce consequences that society did not anticipate.
The truth is that there is nothing particularly progressive about copying bad behaviour. A woman does not become liberated simply because she has acquired the same capacity to hurt her husband that he has always had to hurt her. Neither does a man become justified because society has historically looked the other way when he behaves badly. If anything, the real conversation should be about why we continue to tolerate behaviour in one gender that we condemn violently in the other.
So here we are. This is Nigeria’s latest achievement: gender equality. The men demanded the freedom to misbehave; the women have apparently decided they want the same freedom.
And somehow, nobody seems to be celebrating this particular form of equality.
Because perhaps the real achievement should not be that men and women can now hurt each other equally. Perhaps the achievement should be that neither has to.
The goal was never supposed to be equal opportunity for betrayal. It was supposed to be equal dignity, equal respect, equal responsibility and equal accountability.
But then again, this is Nigeria. We have a way of turning almost everything into a competition.
Even infidelity.
Men are like that, until women become like this.
And suddenly, everybody is uncomfortable.
Voice, just cleared its throat!
- Kabara is a writer and public commentator. Her syndicated column, Voice, appears in News Point Nigeria newspaper on Monday. She can be reached at hafceekay01@gmail.com.