Cheating: A Nigerian Man’s Passtime

Ok...I've had the opportunity, I guess you can say, to see this behavior in Nigerian men who are in committed relationships, and Nigerian men who are married, and it just amazes me how effortlessly these men disrespect the women in their lives. What I don't get is this: what is the obsession in having more than one woman in your life? Does it give you some sense of accomplishment? As in, have you truly HARRIVED if you have a wife and 2-3 girlfriends on the side? Be it Sunday the local molue driver, or Chief Something-or-Another, our men seem to find pleasure in having the attention of women other than their significant others.



True story: Myself and a couple of friends went out to a party in NY and we ended up meeting a guy friend of ours at the lounge (for the sake of saving their identity, his name is Seun). He happened to be there with one of his older friends who we'll call Kola. As the night goes on we're dancing, laughing, and we start thinking that the guy might actually be pretty cool. Mehn...as in, things just change towards the end of the night. We started noticing that he's focused some serious attention on one of our friends (Lara) who by the look on her face truely couldn't be interested in him. This was clear to EVERYONE else but Kola.

Lara was yawning, rolling her eyes, looking off into the distance as the guy was talking the whole time, checking out other guys that were walking past them. But out of respect and not wanting to embarass the guy, she's not disrespecting him like she would do some young guy that was yanning dust because Kola is truely old enough to be our Uncle. I know, I know, why does his age matter??. But you have to admit, naija culture and respect can be a little confusing. The guy is like dancing with her by force, holding her hand by force, not giving her an inch to even walk away. We all know that there is no way we're not going to collect the gist of the arrant nonsense he was probably spitting in her ear when we went home, so the rest of us were just giving them the space without being too far away.

As we're all leaving, the guy is feeling very very familiar with all of us because he's holding our hands, laughing and joking like he didn't just meet us 3 hours ago. Fast forward to us getting home. Lara tells us that dude was macking HARD!! Saying how he wants to fly her out to Nigeria 6 times a year, buy her whatever she wants, shopping this shopping that! She should even give him her account number and he'll just be depositing money in it whenever she needed!.

If it was some JJC babe she would have just swooned for him. He put his best game out there. But she's 23 years old, and wasn't falling for that speech. She even joked about just taking him up on the shopping offer and maxing out his cards just to show him that a man his age shouldn't be rubbing and touching on a woman that isn't his girlfriend or wife. But I guess she never went through with it because none of us got our portion of that shopping spree. LOL. Fast forward again to about 2-3 weeks later. I guess they realized Kola was on one of these social networking sites and they decided to check out his pictures. Tell me why this idiot of a man was actually in town with his WIFE HAD JUST GIVEN BIRTH???!!!! Can you freaking imagine???

Thats the kind of situation I'm talking about. If Lara had actually been one of those females that enjoyed milking guys for what they were worth, Kola would have kindly obliged and probably in exchange for something more than just conversation. It just makes me wonder why our men feel the need to deal with so many different women at once? The grown ass man clearly wasn't finding it difficult to get women since he was married with children. So why the infidelity? I know our culture allows such behaviors due to our polygamous past, but they at least made you marry the other woman even if she was just a concubine at the end of the day. Nowadays so-called Christian men take part in these activities and have numerous females in London, Nigeria, and the States. They literally have women on their payroll by giving them monthly allowances and etc. Or they have completely separate families who are unknown to each other. Its appalling because most times, the women that are their wives are usually ok with this, until one of those young girls gets pregnant or something.

Do you think it will ever stop being such a norm in our society? Who is more at fault, the men for doing it, the wives for turning a blind eye to it, or society for not speaking up when they see such indecencies are taking place in their surroundings?? As nosey as naijas are about other peoples business, aren't we in a way enabling these men to continue being the way they are by not denoucing their behavior?