How ‘docile’ wives turn into gold-digging monsters

ON MARCH 17, 2017


By Bunmi Sofola

A worrying trend is currently being taken to a dangerous proportion. To some people, the law of survival is: ‘Do unto others before they do you.’ In the last few decades, some calculating wives had schemed their husbands out of their matrimonial homes, a reversal of what is supposed to be the norm in the African society. The calculating way they went about this was chilling, to say the least.

Remember the era of the “photo’ wives? A man who’d put his nose to the grind, so to speak, realised he was now comfortable enough to look after a wife. None of the salad-eating foreign women would fit the bill, so he sent words to his relations at home to start hunting for a suitable village girl.

His ecstatic parents would then go round the village collecting photographs of women of marriageable quality, and send to their son. He made a choice and in time, a starry-eyed bride-to-be, who scarcely knew how to pull the toilet chain, was sent down. Some became baby machines and were rewarded with sandwich courses like needlework or domestic science just when the family was ready to come back home.

In the last few decades however, some of the wives had managed to talk their husbands into sending them to the universities to train as professionals. There, they mingled with other enlightened women and learnt a lot of things amongst which is the western law that stated that if a marriage broke, it was the wife that had the last laugh especially where kids were involved.

According to such laws, the children are owed a duty of care’ by their parents until they’re 16 at least. Their welfare came first—it still does—and the mother is recognised by law to be more competent than the father to provide this duty of care.

The husband is advised to pack his bags and move out of a home he’d built over the years into a dingy hotel, whilst the couple’s lawyers battle to get the most out of a bad situation. The wife would then stay in the family house with the kids and try to price as much maintenance money as she could from her estranged husband.

Naturally, the poor husband became murderous, but he couldn’t do anything or he would be clamped in jail. Now the worm has turned and the husbands are fighting back to protect what they’d sweat to amass before their gold-digger of a wife came on the scene. It is no longer strange to find a husband in the clutches of a scheming wife kill such wife, pleading it was a crime of passion or feigning temporary insanity. Again, the Western law

is a bit lenient on cases of murder that are not premeditated. It is called manslaughter instead. A crime of passion. The accused gets a jail term that is far from the life sentence reserved for murderers if he readily pleads guilty to manslaughter without wasting the court’s time or the state’s money on prosecution. He then serves half of say a ID-year term before he’s let off on good behaviour. He would then be free to pick up the pieces of his life from where he stopped—property and children restored!

“It is a sad development but what can one do,” sighed Dominic as we discussed the trend recently. A friend of his had just landed a jail term for killing his wife. “As soon as the wife finished at the university,” said Dominic, ‘she landed a mouth-watering job and her husband watched, alarmed as she changed from the obedient village wife he married to a sophisticated wife who warned her husband to pull up his socks and do as much house work as she did.

She went out to parties, expecting her husband to baby sit. They’d fight a few times and he’d beaten her up once or twice only for her to run to the police. The poor husband had even spent a few times in police cell for domestic violence.

“He was no longer in control of his home and was not ready to come back to Nigeria. So he planned for his wife to be caught ‘red handed’ having an affair, had a hot argument with her and strangled her. He then phoned for the police, sounding incoherent, his eyes wild as if he was possessed.

When he was finally tried, the number of times the police had intervened in the domestic violence in the family stood in his favour. He was a man going through a turbulent marriage. He got eight years for manslaughter. The authorities were relieved the kids would be properly looked after by me. My wife knew what was going on and was happy to help.

“Now that I’m back home, I’ve noticed another worrying trend—a lot of the women from my state are getting married to men outside the state. I was told that it’s because the inheritance law in our village is so stringent that widows are not only treated badly by their in-laws, by the time they came out of their long mourning period, after they lost their husbands, their family property would have been looted. The poor women are then left to fend for their children, no matter how many there are. Take my home-town for

instance, if the head of the house dies, the first son, no matter how incompetent he is, takes over as head of the family. His siblings have to tow his line or they get nothing. This leaves a lot of animosity amongst siblings especially where there are two or more wives.

“So do you blame the women for looking after themselves? Now we have strange family names creeping into the village with very few of them bothering to put down any roots. I guess it’s to each their own really. All I know is that the more enlightened the society, the more victims will look for ways to circumvent some of our societal greed…

What’s in a kiss?


According to scientists, a kiss is much more than just a way of saying you fancy someone. It’s an efficient means of working out if your potential partner is the one for you. In her book: The science of kissing, Sheril Kirshenbaum explains: “When we’re that close to another person, all our senses are engaged, allowing our bodies to assess compatibility and the potential for long-term relationship.” This behaviour, she says, evolved to help humans fulfil three basic needs—sex drive, romantic love and attachment.

She continues: In other words, kissing helps us find partners, commit to one person and keep couples together long enough to have a child. How does locking lips help us do all that? When you kiss, you can’t help smelling the other person.

And biologists have found that women are more turned on by the smell of men who have very different immune systems from their own. This may be because potential children would have a higher level of genetic diversity, making them healthier and more likely to survive. In this manner, kissing serves as nature’s ultimate litmus test to help us determine when to pursue a relationship.”

And once we find our perfect genetic mate, our bodies respond instinctively to his kiss by flooding our systems with feel-good hormones. A good romantic kiss quickens our pulse and dilates our pupils,” she says, “which is probably part of the reason so many of us close our eyes.

Our brains receive more oxygen than normal and breathing can become irregular and deepen. Our cheeks flush too but that’s only the beginning. There is an associated rise in the neurotransmitter dopamine, responsible for craving and desire. Oxytocin, popularly called the love hormone is involved in bonding,

fostering a sense attachment. This is the chemical likely responsible for maintaining a loving relationship over years and decades.”

More men than women said they preferred kissing their partners with open mouths, and using their tongues. There’s even a good reason for that. Male saliva contains testosterone so it could affect how attractive the kissers find each other.






Source:
http://www.vanguardngr.com/2017/03/docile-wives-turn-gold-digging-monsters/