When your married friends break up

By Billy Muiruri

For the 12 years they have been married, Priscilla Nyokabi (name changed to protect identity) and her husband have weathered many storms.

Like any other couple, they have had financial woes, hospital bills to foot, school fees to think about and bad economic times that almost saw them close their supermarket.

Within their marriage, they had “internal problems”, but not so serious that she could contemplate, leave alone threaten to walk out of the marriage.

But early this year, Nyokabi, a mother of two, gave her husband an ultimatum to choose between her and his male buddy otherwise, she would take “a drastic measure” as long as “that man” remained his friend. She did not specify what action she would take.

We dug in to find out the origin of all the wrath. “A close friend of ours broke up with his wife some time back. The wife run away with their two children accusing him of being unfaithful,” Nyokabi says.

The deserted man has been a close friend of Nyokabi’s husband since they were in high school. Both got jobs at a beverages company when they graduated from the university in 1997.

Nyokabi was married in 1998. Three years later, the husband’s friend also got married.

Nyokabi’s husband introduced the younger couple to her and soon the two women were great friends. In fact, her husband influenced them to relocate from their house along Jogoo road to their estate along Thika Road as it was more convenient for the two men to go to work together seeing as they worked on the same company.

“We got along well and after each family had two children, we started to invest together. We started a big salon in Ngara,” says Nyokabi.

But in 2008, cracks started to emerge in the younger marriage. After some in-house courses, the man was promoted and allocated a company car.

“But as good tidings came his way, his morals started to vanish. We started hearing stories of his infidelity,” says Nyokabi.

“The man’s wife kept investigating his philandering stories even through my husband but obviously he could not tell her the truth,” she says.

Nyokabi also kept asking him about his friend’s errant ways, but he brushed the issue aside.

The man did not go far. Last year, he was caught red-handed in one of the local bar maid’s houses in the same estate after a fellow patron’s tip off, on a day the man was supposed to be working at night.

After a gruelling domestic case, the wife let matters rest. “But the man was soon at it again. Two weeks after the incident, he was allegedly caught in the act with the house girl,” Nyokabi reveals.

All this time, Nyokabi had told her husband why she no longer wanted the man around their house. Apparently, the man’s wife had shared all heartache with her.

“She shared with me all that was happening in their life and the man’s extra marital affairs. Soon our business started to suffer as we were always sorting their domestic quarrels, of course, away from the premises,” she confides.

Matters did not stop there. After the house girl saga, the woman decided to leave with the children. This was last year.

A day before she gave up and took off, the woman had been battered so badly that she was later admitted to hospital for three days. Before the man ran berserk with blows, he even dared her not to touch his “potential second wife”, the hapless teenage house help.

For eight months now, it is the continued friendship between her husband and the deserted man that is threatening Nyokabi’s own marriage.

“I have blacklisted the man from visiting my house. In fact, I have told my husband to either choose me or him,” says Nyokabi.

According to Nyokabi, the family has begun to feel the man’s influence on her husband.

“They are still friends and they now drink late into the night. He even drops him to his empty house. I have a problem with that,” admits Nyokabi.

Her main beef with her husband is where he is when his friend goes on his rounds.

“I always wonder how they get along with a man who can hardly keep his zip up. I do not like this friendship at all,” she says with finality.

Although Nyokabi’s husband is yet to be involved (or caught out) in a compromising situation or in a misdemeanour, his drinking habits have become nocturnal.

“I tell him his friend has no family waiting for him at the end of the day but he rubbishes it off,” she says.

Nyokabi has engaged her husband in several bitter disagreements over the friendship.

“I try to discourage him but he says they have known each other for many years and he’s not about to break the friendshiop because his friend has not wronged him in any way. He says he cannot understand why I’m fussing because the man nolongre comes to our house,” she says.

Nyokabi is one of the many statistics of married people who find themselves in an awkward position when their married friends break up.

The reason for such a break up comes to the fore to determine the direction  of the close family ties that existed before the break up.

Depending on where most responsibility for the separation is seen to lie, it becomes quite difficult for the stable couple to continue relating to the former friends in their individual capacities “as if nothing has happened”.

“A partner may be tempted to protect his/her spouse from the bad influence of the rogue friend. That is why spouses raise the red flag,” says Rev Philip Kitoto, a marriage counsellor.

Both genders experience this challenge. In fact, enquiries by Saturday Magazine among several married people indicated that men are more sensitive about who their wives relate to.

Many of them would not be happy if their wives continued to be friends with a woman who, for whatever reason, was no longer married regardless of who instigated the break-up.

Take the case of Makau (he insists we use only one name). His marriage almost hit the rocks in 2008 after his wife’s friend “fleeced off” her husband, who was his friend before she moved out. The storyline? 14 years ago, Makau’s steady girlfriend (now his wife) introduced her female friend to Makau’s workmate.

The two hit it off in the same year and actually got married before the Makaus.Before long, they set up a thriving clothes business. With every year that passed, the business seemed to grow in leaps and bounds, until Makau’s friend got another woman on the side.

So incensed was the wife when she found out that he had been having an affair for years that she started to secretly plot for an exit from the marriage. All these years, the couples visited each other’s home and the children attended the same school.

“We used to have joint family outings. As the children played, the four of us took drinks as we talked about life and investments,” he says.

Then in 2007, the friends started to have problems in their marriage. “He had started to have an affair and we tried to sort it out to no avail,” Makau recollects.

By the time the two went their separate ways the following year, Makau’s friend was left a dejected man.

“The wife had sought two bank loans and gave their properties as collateral. She used the loan to secretly invest in shares, bought a piece of land and boosted her chama deposits.

Three months later, the bank sold the family’s house in Buru Buru, the clothes shop, their car and several movables in the house.

Makau’s problem was that his wife continued to be friends with the runaway friend. “She would pick my wife from home and they would go out together. Though she always talked about chamas on coming back, I was uncomfortable with the situation,” says Makau.

The other woman started offering financial favours to Makau’s wife. “I remember when w couldn’t raise school fees for second term after a delay with my bank and she bailed her out giving her Sh45,000.

My car was then grounded then and the two women would take the children to school in the friend’s car. This whole scenario disturbed me a lot,” says Makau.

According to Makau, he was uncomfortable that his wife and her friend were enjoying his workmate and friend’s money as he languished in debt.

“I hated it when my friend’s ex-wife came visiting several times with her children. One day, my daughter asked her why Baba Janet no longer comes along with the rest of the family,” says Makau.

I was keen to hear what she would say and was surprised to hear her lie to the child that he had gone on along safari. The girl prodded. “When will he come back?” The lady was dumbfounded and shrugged off the question.

Matters came to a head when Makau openly told the other woman that she was no longer welcome in their home as long as “her marriage was not in order”.

“I pointed out that her husband was still my friend and colleague and that I would not want him to think we are on her side or that I am spying on him on her behalf,” says Makau.

So angry was Makau’s wife that she did not speak to him for four days. “She almost left the house and insisted that I would not choose her friends for her,” he remembers.

If anything, Makau’s wife said, it is “that man” who had driven her friend to do whatever she did. Makau was alarmed. The situation was only salvaged when the woman won a green card lottery and left the country with her children.

Situations like these can wreck a family, especially if some partners knew each other before the marriages came into being.

According to Rev Kitoto, this situation usually has a spill over effect that can be one of the major external factors to destabilise a family if not handled carefully.

This scenario can degenerate into a second break-up, especially if  the spouses tend to defend either of the affected parties.

It also leaves couples lost on how to break the news of the break-up to their children who are used to the other family and are probably good friends with the children.

bmuiruri@nation.co.ke

-Daily Nation