By Daniel Kakuru
Last week, three of my friends went down on their knees, scooped out priceless rings and proposed marriage to their girlfriends whom they have known over a protracted stretch of time. It’s been a long, rough way home. The obvious has been happening; they have been swapping genitals; the female victims swallowing emergency and long-term contraceptives; the male protagonists cumming and coming back to their senses. Once in a while (and I am certain about this) things have gone wrong: improptu pregnancies have come calling. Thank God, most of my friends are medics; they know what to do with unwanted pregnancies. They know how to strangle and ostensibly murder intrauterine babies. And they have committed several of these murders. According to Catholicism, that is sacrilege, but so the hell what?
As expected, the girls hid their faces behind their palms and shed tears. Such is the kind of pretense I hate. Having jumped into bed with a man for three years or thereabouts, having terminated three or four of his pregnancies, and when he says he intends to marry you, you (pretend to) cry. What sort of thing is that? Are those tears (of joy) genuine?
Nonetheless, we were happy for them. The outrageous ideas borne of our personal sentiment did not get the better of us. We shared their photos and captioned them with words like ‘congs bro’. We sent them messages and wished them safe and enjoyable marriages. We extolled them for taking the not-so clever leap of faith; for walking into this cage called marriage guided by their own volition.
There is nothing for men in marriages. Absolutely nothing. For women, at least there are sporadic patches of exuberance: fully funded weddings, bridal showers, baby showers and whatnot. It can always be a perfect opportunity for them to proudly pose for photos and show off their thrifty wedding dresses and cakes. But what, apart from the obvious and sometimes elusive sex, do men get from marriages?
In the October of 2020, a married man was murdered. He was a senior branch performance and customer experience manager at Housing Finance Bank in Kampala. His name was Ivan Kituuka. For long, he had been having what he thought was a clandestine affair with a married woman who worked under his supervision in the said bank. Then warnings started coming in. Leave my wife alone, a one Ssozi, husband to the woman with whom he had been eloping wrote complaining that his marriage was falling apart, and because of that, his mental health was on life support.
I watched the grotesque video of Ivan Kituuka being sprayed with bullets. He was on the floor of a room in the lodge in which he had been caught red-handed dancing to the tune of the married woman’s enhanced genitals. With his amorphous belly on the cold tiles, he begged for his life. The hired gun-wielding men were not there to listen to the explanation from his yabbering mouth. The first bullet hit his skull, tore open his head and spilled all it’s contents. Many more bullets sank into the already lifeless body and after that, the video was cut short.
Only Mr. Ssozi knows what prompted him to perpetrate murder as a solution to his failed marriage. Only he knows how hard he was pressed against the wall by a rich bank manager authoritatively claiming a place that he wasn’t entitled to.
Men do not forgive women for infidelity. That betrayal hurts them so much that they never get over it. Men, when cheated on, feel inadequate; unclothed. They might feign smiles pretend that everything is okay, even when they’re boiling inside and are on the verge of exploding. Even some of the greatest men in history did not forgive their promiscuous wives. When Ragnar Lothbrok, arguably the greatest ever Viking warrior, discovered that his wife Aslaug had been sleeping with a self-proclaimed god Habard, he died without ever forgiving her. Much as he didn’t directly punish her for it, never again did he touch her sexually.
I am not sure if you are willing to believe it, but today, all women have extramarital affairs, and that is not the order of nature.
To wake up and make the decision of walking into a marriage, you are letting your guard down. You are setting yourself up for disappointment. You are precipitating your own suicide without knowing it. We are living in modern times and these career women are so emancipated, there’s no place for marriage – at least in the traditional sense. One day you will find out that your wife – your most prized possession – is sleeping with her boss, with your best friend, with her former classmate, with her pastor, or with the boda boda guy who rides her to and from her workplace. She will cry and prostrate herself at your feet begging for your mercy when you find out that only two of your four kids are drops of your manly fluid. How do you plan to go about that situation?
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The writer is nothing but a MugOfPorridge
