How to catch a cheating husband

Marriage is about men struggling in vain to hide dirty little secrets from their wives, writes David Odongo and Ted Malanda

Because women are smarter than men, it’s nearly impossible to tell when they are cheating in a relationship.

Laundry remains washed and pressed, the house is organised, tots healthy and the food as sumptuous as ever. They can keep the charade going for years, as men blissfully raise children that aren’t theirs.

But a cheating man, just like a clumsy rhino, will always leave a long trail of evidence — from cheap perfume, lipstick marks on shirts, love bites and scratches in suggestive places, and pub and lodging receipts in his trouser pockets.

Many times though, evidence of cheating is subtler. Take the man who comes home at midnight and walks straight to the shower, something he ordinarily never does. Or another who enjoys his tipple but sneaks into the house at midnight as sober as a judge.  For such men, when their wives ask, “Unatoka wapi (where are you from)?” even the lies that follow are cliché: It is the boss. I was with friends. My friend had an accident. I was arrested…

Outings

• .

  Keep Reading

• 
  Mudavadi losing grip? Ex-ANC boss faces tough times as clout wanes
• 
  Till death do us part: Man battles divorce, defends religious vows
• 
  Period poverty, child marriage still plague Kenyan girls in 2025
• 
  NGEC demands exhumation of teen killed over forced marriage

Wives react in two ways. The smart ones give the man a suggestive look and keep mum, fuelling his guilt to the point where the next morning, he offers outings, dinners or money for shopping. But by so doing, he lets the cat out of the bag even further.

Says Nduku, a journalist: “When your man comes home at eleven and is uncharacteristically good, bearing gifts, suggesting next day outings to Ole Polos and showering you with warm hugs and kisses, he is up to no good, especially if he is normally distant and tight-fisted.”

Women who start wild quarrels end up apologising to husbands who are extremely guilty because their ‘noise’ allows the guilty man to play victim, get angry, sulk and storm out in self-righteous rage.

“What is wrong if I smell of perfume, huh? Now I can’t even share an evening with my own sister without being accused and grilled like a thief?” a guilty man will rant without batting an eyelid.

But even when men try to stay ahead of the game, women still sniff their philandering ways out. One man confesses that whenever he left his girlfriend’s house, he would always rush to his local pub and get quickly drunk before going home to account for the hours he had been away.

Scent

 “I would drink vodka quickly and spill some on my shirt. I would even blow cigarette smoke on my clothes in a desperate attempt to musk the other woman’s scent,” he reveals. “But I had to find a new trick when my wife asked me one day why my chest was always reeking of cigarette smoke and liquor whenever I came home late on Friday nights!”

Previously, he used to bathe in his girlfriend’s house, using soap similar to the one at home. But that stopped when his wife ‘innocently’ wondered why he had started coming home smelling fresh at midnight of late.

When his best friend advised him to instead bathe with a washing detergent at his girlfriend’s house, he thought he had it all sewn up. But he was busted when his wife wondered why his shirt smelt of Omo whereas she washed clothes with Toss.

He will, however, never forget the day he slept away from home only to wake up and find that his girlfriend had washed his shirt and underwear. Unfortunately, while the shirt was dry, his underwear wasn’t. In what he thought was a spurt of brilliance, he tucked his wet underwear in the microwave to warm it. To his horror, the darn thing burnt! Of course his wife noticed that his underwear was missing a day after he ‘slept in police cells’. He had to dig up a story about a sudden and embarrassing running stomach caused by fear of “a policeman who threatened to shoot me”.

Love heart

Another man who wasn’t too lucky staggered home after a tryst with a woman he met in a bar. But unbeknown to him, as he drunkenly fumbled for his clothes in the darkness, he inadvertently put on the woman’s knickers. It is only when his wife began hurling insults at him that it dawned on him that he was clad in some cheap frilly thing with a red love heart emblazoned on the crotch.

For most men, however, failure to meet their wives conjugal rights is what gives them away. In their youthful days, guilty men try and sleep with the wife every time they come home from their mistresses. Unfortunately, as the years go by and age catches up, the physical demands become impossible.

Such men, therefore, feign illnesses the moment they step through the door at home. If not that, they contort their faces into a mask of depression, stress or silent fury to dampen any romantic ideas that their wives might have. Those who are disingenuous start non-existent quarrels and fly into violent fits of rage — anything to trigger a ‘cold war’ that ends with their backs turned on their wives in bed.

Car radio

If not that, they sit watching TV till the wee hours of the morning while begging the old ‘batteries’ to recharge quickly in case madam demands her due.

Still, women are so smart they catch men in the most amazing of ways.

“Men always listen to the same radio station. So if, on more than three occasions, the radio in your husband’s car is tuned to a radio station that he never listens to, just know somebody has been in that car. And who would be so at ease with him to change a radio station in his car if not a girlfriend?” poses Polly.

Also, women will always try to change their man, she adds. A married man who is cheating will suddenly start wearing sweaters while all along, he has been a suits guy. It is even worse if he isn’t a fashion conscious guy and yet he starts spending on new, trendy clothes.

“This simply means that the other woman, probably younger, bought him a sweater as a present, saying he would look good in sweaters. To impress her, he starts wearing ‘younger clothes’.  Men don’t just change their style for no reason,” reveals Polly.

Not all men are sissies though. In the villages, some men simply vanish for days on end from home and reappear asking for food and water for bathing like nothing is amiss.

Over time, word filters out that they have a kept woman at the shopping centre. When absences become too much, enraged wives sarcastically tell them to “build a house for that harlot you are keeping at the market”. And the men oblige.

Then there are those who are so sly that they play the game for years without getting caught. A story goes of a man who had a heart problem and his chances of survival were slim. Just before his surgery (he survived); he invited his family round his hospital bed and threw a bombshell: He had had a parallel family for the past 28 years!

He then called in the other family, who also weren’t aware that another family existed. The children were nearly all the same age, although they all went to different schools and lived in different neighbourhoods. The last born in both families were in high school.

Secretly keeping parallel families for 28 years? That old man can run this country with one hand tied behind his back!