"Men and women are not the same. The consequences for cheating can never be same."
If you say this because more women choose to accept continuously unfaithful partners and continue in the relationship/marriage because they want to get married or rather stay married, that can pass. But when you say it to validate a man's unfaithfulness, it doesn't make sense. Just because someone stays with you after you cheat does not mean they are not hurt. Not all pain is visible. Sometimes, people stay for other ancillary benefits.
Contextually, the consequences might not be the same because you view it from the angle of flinging her away if you catch her cheating, but honestly believes she will not end it if she finds you cheating. So what happens if you find yourself with a partner that has zero tolerance for cheating and would rather be single? What if she doesn't give a damn about the consequences and chooses to cheat and wants you to do your worst?
Consequences.
- Regardless of gender, cheating hurt people. It affects their self esteem and make them feel like they are not enough. Everyone wants to be enough for their partner. So many homes habe been destroyed because of this.
- What happens if you contract STI from your tryst? You bring that infection home to your partner and infect them inspite of their commitment.
- Once you start cheating, you start lying, you start commiting financial abuse because money meant for the family would be spent outside to fund your lust.
This is not a judgement. We should all encourage healthy marital relations. The society is broken enough as it is, and we dont want more broken homes. There is always a face to the pain you cause. Once you take that wedding vow, it should mean something to you - to love and to cherish. You don't want to destroy the very person you vowed to love.
It's interesting how they understand the financial pressure on their dad and bro, and how difficult it is to stay afloat financially, but don't extend the same grace to men they are dating. You can never see them.tired of being an "understanding" sister or daughter.
Again, understanding and grace is a proof of love.
Sometimes, we hurt people and we blame them for getting angry at us, judge them and get angry with them for ending the relationship or marriage. In this instance, there is a double offence - the infidelity and having a child with another woman.
We judge women for paternity fraud. We cannot play ignorance on this matter. Her anger is valid, and honestly, she deserves to be angrier. If she walks out of the marriage, you should understand why she walked out. You would want your child to return home to you in such instance - except you have a different value system. It is a lot for the wife to deal with because the family will never be the same again. The other woman will always be a part of the man's life by virtue of being the mother to his child.
You can show remorse and ask for forgiveness, and let her decide for herself if she wants to forgive you and continue the marriage. But don't play the "we are in Africa and it is a man's world" card. There is a face to the pain you caused. She is your wife, a human being, not a ram. I don't buy into this "it is a woman's world abroad" and "it is a man's world in Africa" as an excuse to hurt people. We all know what we are doing and we ought to do better. If you say you want to do life with somebody, you owe them respect, consideration and dignity. The marriage vow says "to love and to cherish, till death do us part, according to God’s holy law. In the presence of God I make this vow."
God bearing witness to the marital vow should mean something above gender based agenda.
Some of you are blurring the lines between casual sex and relationship. If you can't do relationship, stick to casual/paid sex. If you can't do casual/paid sex, stick to relationship.
This idea that you are not loved enough or you are being cheated if your man is not paying for your time, is a very nonsense mentality that only happens here. Your man should not be paying for your transport to go and see him. You are going to see your man whom you claim to love. Many of you sre using relationship for street. To outsiders, you have a man, but you know you are there to get paid. You should be excited to go see him, and spending your money to do that should naturally give you satisfaction. You even want to be paid for your time there because in your head, he had sex with you and if he loves you, he should give you money. Are you selling the sex or not? Stick to one script.
It is called love making because two people in love are having sex. Anytime you monetize intimacy and companionship, the love is absent. You know this bevsuse you know you do not love him. NOBODY under heaven wants to be paid for sex by someone they love.
If you are billing your man for spending time with you, you are a terrible person. That one needs to be said because some of you are taking pride doing it and shaming those not doing it as "forming good girl." You are terrible. It is not a flex. Similarly you are are not different for not asking if you still expect to be paid. Love comes with responsibility. To love is to GIVE. You cannot be expecting to be paid for your time. Are you rendering a service?
This is why it is much better dealing with foreigners. Someone in love juat want to love and be loved. Spending time with you is the love in and of itself. She pays her transport/drive to your place, bring you gift and still chooses to share the bills because love is responsibility. The guy does same because it is a two way street. Every action is motivated by "I love him" not "make I chop him money." The ones doing casual sex just wants to fuck. They transport themselves to you and get enough fuck and everyone is happy. If you offer her money for any reason, she would take offence because you are now calling her what she isn't. You'll end up begging and explaining if you no want problem. The ones selling sex are upfront about it and will tell you they expect to be paid and how much. In all of these, there is consent and clarity. Nobody will claim they don't know what they are doing.
I do not have problem with casual or paid sex. I've said it countless times. In fact, I also encourage it because it is a societal necessity and it is also 100 times better than the monetized relationship you people are doing. I have a problem with blurring the lines between relationship and casual/paid sex. Dont bring paid sex mentality into relationship. Relationship is for lovers. You are there to give. It is the love you give that you deserve. People into paid sex can factor their transportation into their service charge. That does not apply in relationship. This thing is just common sense.
To wrap up, there are ladies in Nigeria who do casual sex with you because they like you and see you as mature, and you cannot offer them money because you both know it is disrespectful. You are simply helping each other satisfy urges and respecting what yourselves and what you share. I had to say this so they know we are not grouping everyone together. The difference between this and relationship is love and commitment. Note that, it is very okay if you want to be paid for your time, just be honest about it upfront, not keeping quiet and dying from unfulfilled entitlement. This does not apply to relationship. Relationship is for lovers and love comes with responsibility.
There is nothing good about poverty.
But Nigerian men have a poor conception money. You want money so you can fulfill a woman's billing because you feel useless without money to buy her affection.
Money is for paying bills. Knowing your bills are paid, gives you peace. Look after your family and love ones.
When women see how good your life is, they would want to be a part of it. It is that simple. It is not for you to be using money to chase them. You cannot buy anyone's affection with money. There is nobody under heaven that loves you, that puts financial pressure on you - whether you have the money or not. That is not the point of relationship. The whole essence of love is to find someone to love and to cherish, whom you want to spend a better part of your time with and be accountable to, because your lives are better together with each other.
Money is not the cake. Money is just the icing. Love is the cake. Money will help you buy one or 2 gifts to express your love because you cannot love without giving. Money will help you come through for your partner and throw random surprises. But the love has to be present first. Money will not create love that did not exist prior. You can buy relationship, but you can't buy love. This monetary spend also has to be mutual. As you're spending, she is spending because it shows commitment to the relationship on both sides. Where your treasure is, that is where your heart will be. Allow a woman to invest the whole of herself in the relationship, and it will continue into the marriage.
This whole act of giving is relative to capacity. Regardless of your economic class, everyone can love because love has nothing to do with money. But even in your little, there is always something to share. Always remember that whom you're with is more important than what you're doing, where you are and how much you spend. A love relationship is a love relationship even if it is in Ajegunle or London. A toxic relationship is toxic even if you are on a $20k trip to Paris. Special moments are special because of special people. Find your special person.
It's a human thing, not a female thing. It happens in different variations.
You show interest in someone and keep showing up while they keep dismissing you and acting indifferent. The day you stop, epiphany hits them that you were genuinely in love with them they could have actually treated you better. They might try to reach out snd do better, but sometimes, it is too late. They get to live with the pain because compared to other alternatives, you were a lot better.
Other occasions, you hurt someone you love and they forgive you and you do it again. A person's grace has limit. When they pull away, you suddenly realize you could have done better. You could even fix the problem and be a better person, but you've lost them. You would wish they gave you another chance but a heart gone, is gone forever. Now you have to live with the guilt.
Therr are other variations of this. Humans are complicated, but actions have consequences.
I was having a conversation with a friend and he asked me - "if someone promised you money, can you press them to fulfill the promise?"
I thought hard about it. Promises are made with good intentions. But sometimes, things happen that makes fulfillment impossible or delayed. However, you can send a reminder to the person in good conscience. You shouldn't be dragging them to fulfill the promise.
This is a counter to Frank Underwood who stated that, 'the nature of promises is that they are immune to changing circumstances.' This means that regardless of your personal issues or situation, you remain obligated to fulfil a promise made.
I understand the nature of humans and that is why I don't make promises. On the flip side, it is unfair to raise people's expectation with a promise, only to let them down, especially where that promise was made publicly.
Q1. Beyond finding the right partner, what practical qualities or red banners do you think people should prioritise when considering marriage in today’s Nigeria/world ?
Q2. You’ve helped a lot of people publicly. How do you balance personal ambition with the responsibility of lifting others without burning out or enabling dependency ? Sincerely asking
Q3. Why is it that premarital sex is at upsurge in this generation ?
There is something that is killing our generation with respect to inter-gender relations. That is strength or the need to be seen as strong.
In projecting strength, many of you have desensitised yourselves from emotional attachment and vulnerability. In extreme instances, you become toxic. That is not healthy.
It is okay to be kind. It is okay to be nice. It is okay to be considerate. It is okay to have affection. It is okay to say "I love you." It is okay to say "I miss you." It is okay to apologize. It is okay to be vulnerable. You cannot love without being naked on all plane.
Kindness and compassion are not weakness. Consideration is not weakness. You are not a sucker for being honourable, for having integrity and for treating others with respect. Let's not destroy the fabric of society by losing our humanity. We need each other.
In every sphere of human relationship, there is an acceptable code of conduct. Please have healthy value system and stick to them.
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Importantly, don't take people's grace and kindness for granted. Nobody is stupid for loving you, for treating you with respect, for being vulnerable with you, for forgiving you, for being nice. Returning a person's kindness towards you with a negative attitude is witchcraft. Do better! The relationships in our lives should inspire us to want to be better because we owe it to these people to do right by them. Nobody can do life alone. We are each other's life raft.
There are many cheating stories in the anonymous. We are breaking people's heart, self esteem and romantic plans they have for themselves. If we want to create a better society, we first have to start with a stable family. There are real people the infidelity is hurting and they have to live with the pain of feeling they are not enough. This puts a wrinkle in their emotion anytime they think of you.
Some of you want to forgive and continue the relationship but your fear is whether it will repeat itself. Continuing the relationship is one thing, but trust has to be earned. As much as you want to trust your partner again, trust is not a gift. You can't trust them into faithfulness. They have to earn the trust through behavioral changes and faithfulness. Trust needs evidence of character changes to stand. They have to reach that point themselves where they decide they want to be committed to you and the family and nothing else matter. Ensure you get that in the relationship before you get to the point where you say "I do."
Infidelity is cruel to committed lovers, and you have to come together easily to have such a relationship where you feel like you're living in a dream, and cruelty doesn't sometimes intercept. Some of you are not street, but you decide to step out because you know people who step out and get away with it. But life has a way of punishing you for stepping out of character. The day you do it, you lose the person that matters most to you, and even worse, break them.
It takes an astronomical amount of work and courage to disrupt a familiar pattern. Sometimes, it seems easier to just keep running in the same familiar circles because people do not want to do the work. If you love someone, love should make you want to be better for them and the family you want to have together.
For the broken hearted, I know that preventing your heart from forgiving someone you love is actually a hell of a lot harder than simply forgiving them. But the dilemma of forgiving and continuing the relationship is valid because even if there is a possibility they could have changed for the better, it is a tough tell without guarantee, especially when those risks have failed you in the past.
Everyone needs grace and compassion but we can't continue abusing it, hoping it will always exist to save us. Love is consideration. Consider the person you're hurting. We have the mind of Christ. My prayer for you is that you'll marry once and marry right.
Words have meaning. This is a common mistake people make on X. You people can't separate explanation from justification. Explanation simply tells us WHY. Justification says the behaviour is VALID.
It is basic sociology that when physiological needs like food, clothing and shelter are threatened, people will resort to alternate, albeit unseemly behaviour to survive. It is rules that regulates us. Ordinarily, man exists in a state of nature. In the state of nature, it is survival of the fittest. Dog eat dog.
Why people do what they do to survive is simply a sociological explanation. It has nothing to do with Justification.
Explanation does not automatically make a behaviour justified. If you cross a legal line, you'll be punished. If you cross a religious line, that is between you and your God. If you cross a moral and ethical line, that is between you and your conscience, family or organization.
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Let me make a couple explanation to make it easy to understand. I'll use things you've seen on movies
1. A man is arrested for robbing a bank. He is going away for life but the police are bent on finding out why. Motive is a vital element in criminal justice. It addresses the root cause of the problem. You find out his daughter has a rare disease and no bank was willing to help him, his company wouldn't help him.
Now that explains his actions. Any father would do what they can to save their baby girl (sociology). It does not justify the crime, it explains it. This explanation(WHY)determines motive, it would help in court during allocutus (plea for mercy) before sentencing, it helps in establishing rehabilitation, it determines retribution, it establishes precedence for addressing similar future cases.
2. A lady decides to sell her body for sex. You wonder why she is doing it when she could just get a job. But she has been looking for job for 2 years. Her mother's health is deteriorating and her younger ones are home because no money for fees. Feeding is also a problem. She does the maths, she has a good body. Women are not helping her or the family. Men are not helping either. The few men that offered to help want something in return. The jobs she wasn't getting is not paying as good as the men offering money in exchange for sex. She gets to make more in one night than she would have made in a month. She even knows women with jobs/business selling sex as main hustle to top up their account. So why not?
This explains her behaviour. She is doing what she can for her and her family to survive in a tough economy (sociology).
Whether it is justified is an entirely different matter. Actions have consequences regardless of WHY. Explanation and Justification do not mean the same thing. Explanation says WHY. Justification says the behaviour is VALID. Don't muddle the waters.