Full disclosure: I am going to be saying a few things that will make it look like I was not brought up in a Christian home.
I wasn’t. But if you ask around, I won’t ever be crucified for my deceit, which is rare, unless I am gaslighting my editor that I sent the article kitambo and it’s just their server that needs upgrading and she swears she hasn’t seen it and I ask her, umejaribu kurefresh computer?
Speaking of, you don’t need to know this but you probably should: Your partner, that corporate baddie, has a corporate bad boy and they are doing things even David never did to Bathsheba.
Wallahi. This is not information that adds anything to the GDP of our country, but I can tell you (for free) that your wife/girlfriend/both has an office husband. Take this to the bank and tell them I sent you.
You see, your girl’s office boyfriend is probably (definitely) better than you in the boardroom (and bedroom). Your woman guffaws and hahahas and tihihis at all his jokes because our national philosopher, Mejja, said a rich man’s jokes are always funny.
And you know what? He (the office boyfriend, not Mejja) is the only man who has ever understood your woman—which is that she doesn’t want to be understood. Girls just wanna have fun. So, you see, the odds are stacked against you.
And while she sees you as Baba Junior, the devil sweetens the deal for your msaidizi in the office: He gets to deal with her wild styles; he knows your mamaa has a butterfly tattoo under her left bosom. Yeah. She does. Kwani hujui? I am not a believer in polyamory but if two are better than one, it follows then that three are much better than two.
While you deal with her emotional side, her mood swings and that “Seng’eng’e ni Ng’ombe” Tshirt that she wears to bed—an apt metaphor for the (suffer)ring in your marriage—she leaves the best parts to her office boyfriend.
She shows up as her best self for him, he is the first guy she calls when her computer has crashed and needs rebooting, he is the guy she freaks out to after hitting the “Reply All” on a particularly humiliating email, that bloke who gets that extra spoon she carries for lunch…and the guy who spoons her when they go for team building in Naivasha.
One of the central joys of the work marriage is the reckless abandon it comes with. It’s la la land, el Paraiso without kids, getting to live out your fantasies.
You see, while your house has become a PTA meeting where you only discuss school fees, rent dues and who is sorting the plumber, the spark long doused by a lack of intimacy, romance being replaced by routine, settling into the cliché of roommateness, on this other side, it is fireworks daily.
When she thinks of you, she sees responsibilities, fisticuffs, and fist cuffs—isn’t that why marriage is called pingu za maisha? When she thinks of him, she sees adventure and excitement. Don’t girls just want to have fun?
See, the office boyfriend is good bacteria, he keeps the pH level of your relationship balanced. Otherwise, your relationship will disintegrate into acidity.
He is the release valve that maintains the pressure, the oil that keeps the relationship cogs turning, the number two that does all the work so the number one—you—can shine. I hear you sneer, but has your woman argued with you over the last two years? No? And you think she doesn’t want to frolic over you leaving your socks in the microwave oven—or what the feminists called weaponised incompetence? Hmm? Exactly. Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence.
Of course, the office husband will never actually translate into IRL (in real life) husband because they both know they are play-acting. It’s a game. The office boyfriend is the equivalent of putting a monkey on a piano and hoping for Beethoven…maybe I am being harsh on the monkey.
Maybe he is a serial cheater outside the office, or perhaps to borrow today’s buzzword, even a narcissist. Maybe she is volatile, or in modern parlance, has generational trauma.
The best part of their day is during lunch hour when they can engage in some funch. The “–unch” is for lunch, the “fun–” is fun which because this is a family paper, I can only say it rhymes with duck. Office boyfriends are eating good in this city.
It’s a proper love affair—you don’t hunger for it till it’s out of reach, and when you’ve had your fill, you need to separate. But to give the devil his due, it is also an affair of great and seductive beauty.
The jeopardy and sadness, the excitement and illicitness—this is what fans the flame of desire. Because affairs are full of half-truths, varying truths. “He’s just a friend.” “Don’t worry about him.” “Why are you so insecure? Si I married you, not him.” Because you are on one side, until you are on the other. But however authentic the feelings of love, the dalliance was only ever meant to be a beautiful fiction.
The affair lives in the shadow of the marriage but the marriage also lives in the centre of the affair. Without its delicious illegitimacy, can the relationship with the lover remain enticing? I don’t mean to be the doomsday prophet but it is more likely to be raining in Kisii right now because it is always raining in Kisii.
Similarly, your partner will more than likely cheat on you. Isn’t that the unwritten manifesto of the sexual revolution? You must walk your relationship/s with reasonable doubt. Nairobi may be a big bedroom but the office is the six-by-six bed—with white bedsheets. If he has not chewed your wife, trust me, maybe he is observing Ramadhan. Eventually, he will.
“It meant nothing,” your woman will say. But is it not our elders who counselled us and said, “When a hyena wants to eat its kids, he starts blaming them for smelling like a goat?”
I knew a man once who said, death smiles at us all. The best a man can do is smile back. Rather than worry whether your betrothed has an office boyfriend, use that time to find a hobby. You can no more control an adult than you can convince a monkey that Amapiano is not the same as piano. Love is a despot who spares no one.
Not sure who said it—it was either Confucious or one of the office interns, “Happy work wife, happy work life.” Let that be thy guiding light.
