Sometimes, men with erectile dysfunction try having sex with someone other than their regular partner just to test their vitality when they start having erection problems. In many cases, such men are in denial. They refuse to believe that things could be faltering, that their sex lives could be ending.
They wonder whether it is their regular partner who is somehow causing the erections to fail. Some, the more superstitious ones, even suspect the woman has bewitched them, which is why they occasionally turn hostile towards her.
"I did not know what was happening to me," Japheth says. "I tried being intimate with another woman just to be sure it was not something about my wife causing the erections to fail."
Japheth, a teacher in his late 40s, was married to Tecla, a fellow teacher aged 42. They had been married for 13 years and had three children.
"It started as occasional failure midstream," he told me at the Sexology Clinic, "then stimulation became difficult, so much so that I could not get an erection at all to initiate sex. That's when I decided to try it with another woman. Call it a test drive, no strings attached."
As fate would have it, Japheth managed to get an erection with the other woman, albeit with some difficulty. He went on to have relations with her three times over the course of two weeks.
"I had reached my own diagnosis," he explained. "Getting an erection was a struggle no matter who the woman was."
When I first saw him, he did not mention that he had strayed. I examined him, ran tests, and brought his wife into the therapy process. It turned out he had a thyroid hormone problem affecting his sexual function. He had also developed performance anxiety, the fear of sex that so often follows a failure.
His wife, confused by the whole situation, had at times lashed out at him for not being "man enough."
Just as Japheth and Tecla were working through the problem, the bombshell hit: the woman Japheth had the affair with was pregnant.
"She had been trying to reach me," Japheth explained, "but I ignored her and even blocked her number."
He admitted that, in his eagerness to test his sexual function, he had not used a condom.
"What I did not know," Japheth lamented, "was that this woman was trying to trap me into a long-term relationship."
The woman eventually walked into the Principal's office at Japheth's school and reported him, loudly and dramatically. The Principal could not calm her down. Teachers and students crowded around to watch the scene unfold. Japheth was suspended for bringing the profession into disrepute.
Word of the incident reached Tecla. She could not believe what her husband had done. Still, she tried to be reasonable and understand the situation, and asked that they both take an HIV test. Both results came back positive.
"I have always tested for HIV as part of my pregnancy care, and it has always been negative," Tecla said. "I have no explanation for these results other than Japheth's actions."
At first, Japheth was profusely apologetic. Then he withdrew into silence as the full weight of his situation set in: no job, a woman demanding money for her pregnancy, an HIV diagnosis, and public shame. He spent most days sleeping and barely ate.
Two weeks ago, Tecla called me. The other woman's pregnancy had reached eight months. The landlord had evicted the family over unpaid rent, and a fellow teacher had taken them in while they figured out their next steps.
But that was not why Tecla was calling. She was calling to tell me that Japheth had been found dead in their bedroom. He had left a suicide note apologizing to everyone he had wronged, writing that he could not bear to see the other woman's child born.
Had he made the hospital his first stop instead of his last resort, this tragedy might never have happened.
