WHEN YOUR PARTNER LEADS A DOUBLE LIFE

Walking down any street, you will see many men, most of them looking normal and respectable.

However, if you were to scratch beneath the surface of many of their lives, it would come as a shock to discover that some of these men, who happen to be people’s husbands and partners, have a very dark side to them.

Many women are living lives of quiet desperation, having realised that the man they have loved, lived with and borne children with are in reality, double – sided characters with a dark sides and mysterious side to them.

In a true story, one woman cannot still comprehend what she discovered about her husband of two years.

Cindy, 32, suspected that her husband was cheating on her. All the signs were there – he would linger in their car after work and claim to be listening to music while, in fact, he was busy making phone calls.

At times, he would go to the bathroom with his phone and make calls and talk in a hushed tones, as though trying to ensure that no one would overhear him.

At other times, his phone would ring, and he would appear startled and decline to take the call. Cindy noted these actions, and would scroll through his phone several times and make calls to all the numbers, missed calls and received calls, but no woman ever answered.

She also noted that her husband Leo had become extremely fastidious about his dressing and grooming habits. He had always been a nifty dresser, and that was one of the things she liked about him, but lately, he seemed to be going overboard.

He dared not miss his barber’s appointments, not to mention the new colognes he had taken to using. He even bought himself a new set of underwear.

One evening, in one of her spying missions, she found a packet of condoms in his gym bag, which he usually kept in the boot of the car.

When she confronted him, he vehemently denied that they were his, and said that his friend from the gym had asked him to keep them for him briefly, as he did not have a bag.

“I forgot to give them back to him,” was his rather lame explanation. Cindy was more convinced than ever that her man was up to no good. Later that week, she noticed that he had a bite on his neck. This caused quite a row between them, and her suspicions were raised even more.

At this juncture, she decided to do her homework and quietly hired a private investigator to follow him for a couple of weeks. The private investigator followed his clients brief to the letter, but yielded nothing to report after one month.

“Your husband is Mr. Clean, madam” was the feedback. She remained unconvinced and decided to continue snooping until she found out which woman it was that he was dating so earnestly. She got a different and more expensive private investigator.

Her patience and determination paid off, because as they say, if you want to trap a thief, take your time and be stealthy. One early evening at 6pm, as the private investigator sat in his obscure van near their home, Leo came home, changed into jogging gear and took off from their home.

When he got round the corner, he slowed down and walked across the road to some flats. The private investigator observed as he walked into a hidden bed-sit without knocking.

After about an hour he left the flat and jogged back home, showered and sat relaxing in the living room just in time to kiss his wife as she arrived home from work.

The private investigator thought he had finally cracked the puzzle, and decided to snoop around the flats, in order to find out who this woman was.

To his utter surprise, he was informed that no woman lived in the bed-sitter. He decided to observe the situation very keenly.

He took a hidden camera along. In keeping with his routine, Leo would leave his house to go for a jog, get round the corner and slip into the flat.

Using a long vision lens, The investigator noted to his astonishment that there was no “woman” but a young man in the flat.

According to Cindy, when she got the report the man simply said r that he had found her husband’s lover, and told her that it would be best to see for herself, so she took an afternoon off, and went and kept vigil up to 6pm.

True to form, Leo appeared and quickly walked into the house. After a few minutes, she went and knocked on the door, what she saw then is etched in her memory until today.

There on the sofa was he husband in bed. Her head spun and she slumped on the floor in a heap. She went home, packed, and moved out.

She is still trying to come to terms with the fact that her husband is bi-sexual, a fact she found out in the most dramatic of ways. She also found out that he was paying for the love nest near their home.

Many women have encountered other shocks from the men they live with, some of whom are dangerous and bizarre, while appearing normal and respectable to those who do not know them.

These women are often too scared to leave, while others have too much to lose by leaving, so they stay on to keep up appearances, despite knowing that their spouses have strange lifestyles. One woman summed it up thus: “My friends ask me, why I stay, why not walk away?

That’s what they all ask … they do not know how years of blows, bruises, tears and shockers give you not just fear in the present, but of the future too. Leave? For what? To where? With what? Moreover, who would care?

That’s why women like us accept our strange lives.” The following examples aptly describe some of the realities many women face, in the hands of partners with double lives.

•Husbands obsessed with foreign women:

One woman of Asian origin confesses that her husband is obsessed with white women and is always staring at them in magazines and in real life.

“Many Asian husbands cheat with white women and exotic Indian dancers known as Mujra girls, who are brought here to work in nightclubs.”

This man flew in a mistress from Poland, and bought her a house and a car. Of course, we never see him at home. I am married only in name.”

Another woman says that her husband cheats on her with African women. According to her, she and her family are considered social pariahs because of this habit of her husband’s because those in the community know about his escapades.

“This has a very negative effect on my children. We are the talk of the community and it’s awful,” she says.

•Secret society member:

Many women live in fear of the unknown because their husbands belong to secret occult societies. They do not know where he goes, or what he does, but they always have a deep sense of foreboding.

One wife noticed plenty of strange pictures and symbols in their house, and on looking them up on the internet, she realised they were occult symbols. She had previously thought they were just mere decorations.

“My husband wakes up at 5 am everyday and leaves the house. Whenever I ask him where he goes, he reckons he is going to a 24- hour gym at a five star hotel.

This I know is not true, because one day, I went and asked if he had been there, and they said no.” Living with a member of a secret society is very frightening for many women because of the mystery it entails and the scary stories going round all the time about people being sacrificed.

•Unknown sources of income:

Some women put up with their husbands’ strange ways of earning a living, some of which are unknown. Many women are shocked to discover that their husbands are wanted criminals sometimes of international magnitude.

Others are married to drug dealers, pimps, arms dealers, white-collar thieves, and confidence tricksters (conmen). It is interesting to note that these men look very normal and respectable otherwise. Some are regular churchgoers.

No one would guess that underneath this façade, the men are really underworld operatives, living double-lives.

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