“Leon, I want to tell you something. Dad just called to say he’s bringing his girlfriend home for a sleepover this weekend. He found that girl on TikTok last month. She’s 22 years old! What should I do?”
It was my 20-year-old friend Genevieve Wanjiru on the phone. She was livid and struggling to process the fact that her father was dating someone almost as young as her. She is the last born in her family.
What made it harder on Genevieve was that this was happening barely two years after her dad parted ways with her mother due to “irreconcilable differences”.
“I feel like I’m competing for my father’s attention with a TikToker who is as young as me. It’s disgusting.”
I wanted to be of help to my friend in her moment of distress, but her predicament left me speechless. But, I was not surprised because I had seen this before.
What is it with middle-aged married men who, after 30 or so years of marriage, decide to risk everything, including shattering the family unit, by sending away the wives whom they swore to stick with for better or for worse?
It is almost akin to trading an Isuzu D-max that has forever been, stable, reliable, and has weathered all storms, for a Bugatti Veyron you came across on social media.
Is it because a Bugatti accelerates like a missile? Perhaps the Bugatti is unrivalled when it comes to performance?
Sure, it may be incredibly fast and dynamic as well as more comfortable, but does that mean you belittle the Isuzu D-Max whose double cabins have been serving you well for years?
Back to Genevieve. She felt her dad’s choice of a ‘pretty young thing’ was lowly, irresponsible and…tacky.
“It is pretty ugly. He settles on low-lives who drink too much chrome vodka and smoke sheesha almost daily along Thika Road.”
When I probed her about it, Genevieve admitted she had daddy issues.
“I would love to date someone who looks, walks and talks like my dad but now that he is going for girls as young as myself, I don’t know how to take it,” she lamented, adding that despite being wealthy, her dad would quickly dump the young women the moment they start asking him for money.
“Once they start making such demands he simply ghosts them before going back to TikTok to find another young girl. The one he’s bringing home is the 10th in the last two years.”
“I am jealous because I don’t get much time with my dad anymore and I can’t stand to see him sleeping in his room with a girl my age,” she says, adding that she gets triggered whenever any of her age mates asks whether her dad is single.
“I love my parent, I want his attention for me and my sister, not for other people!" she stressed before hanging up.
Genevieve reminded me of Maria Atieno (26), a microbiology student who last December poured her heart out to me after I put up a tweet about why I wasn’t going home for Christmas. The tweet went viral.
“My dad has sent away my mother after 35 years of marriage then brought home my high school desk mate and friend. My family is broken because of this,” she said.
Maria explained that because of her dad’s actions, Christmas has ceased being a period of happy reunions for her family.
“It hit me hard when I found out that my trusted friend, who would come to my home so that we do homework together, had been sleeping in my parents’ matrimonial bed behind my back. She is now my stepmother and there’s nothing I can do about it,” she told me over a cup of coffee as tears raced down her cheeks.
What made it worse was that her new ‘stepmother’ had witnessed Maria’s father being mean and physically abusive to Maria’s mum whenever she visited to do ‘homework’.
“The other day I saw a family photo of our earlier happier days and cried so much. Those days are long gone.”
Five years ago, Maria made a decision she had never thought of before this happened – to get married early and start her own family to fill the void a broken family had left in her heart.
Maria had found a way out, but her brothers turned rebellious.
“One of my brothers was particularly angry with my dad and we are still praying for him. Our firstborn took off and has never returned home. Since then, no one has ever heard from him.”
Maria further disclosed that even though her father is now dead, she remains split over whether to honour his memory or forget him altogether.
“He took us to hell and back all my life. I sometimes wonder whether by remaining silent, I condoned his mistakes. But then again, my father is my God on earth. And God expects me to honour him, regardless."
“When he was hospitalised, the little girl vanished into thin air. I had to go and take care of him and I hated it. I took him to the best hospitals and cared for him till his last breath,” Maria said.
For Brian Wanyonyi (35), who was born in a family of three boys and four girls in Bungoma County, a call from the village by one of his little sisters four years ago changed his life forever.
Kevin was their younger brother, and he was holding an axe to his father after beating and overpowering him. Brian says he will never forget how helpless his sister sounded in that call. He was in Nairobi at the time, and couldn’t do much.
“I immediately booked a flight to Kisumu, and arrived in Bungoma five hours later,” he says.
By the time he landed, police had intervened and arrested his brother for attempted murder. The brother had been beaten senseless by an angry mob, and his father was in theatre, fighting for his life.
He says his heart stopped beating for a moment when he saw his father, who had sustained deep cuts to the head.
“I went to the police station to see my 24-year-old brother to try and understand why he wanted to kill his own father. When I looked into his eyes, he seemed lost and distant,” Brian said.
His brother was still seething in anger and when Brian probed him, he did not mince his words.
“I have had enough of that man. I learnt that he has been picking up Natalie (his 23-year-old girlfriend) from campus on weekends and has been sleeping with her. Yesterday I checked Natalie’s phone and found he had sent her Sh20,000 yet last week I had fee arrears which he refused to pay,” Kevin said, and revealed that their father, who follows him on Facebook, had found Natalie on his son's posts and then pursued her.
The man knew from the start his son was dating Natalie, but still went after her.
Brian admits that although he knows his father has an appetite for young girls, he never imagined that it would drive him to this extent.
“When your father is interested in a woman you are interested in, once you discover, you take off and leave her for him, that’s called respect,” the 61-year-old man said unapologetically. “Your brother is disrespectful and considering what he has done to me, he is no longer my child.”
The incident threw their mother in an impossible position. As per Bukusu traditions, Kevin was now an outcast forever for spilling his father’s blood, which is an abomination.
This means that none of the family members can eat or associate with him, including his mother.
“She was warned by the elders that if she dared to help her son, it would attract curses on the family. She found herself having to choose between her husband and her son."
"My brother developed mental problems shortly after the incident, and because most people in my village don't understand mental illness, they concluded that he was possessed by evil spirits. My mother has been distant and sad ever since. Who does this to a wife who has been with him for 30 years? Brian wondered.
Despite warnings from the elders, his mother stood by her son throughout the legal process, pulling strings to settle the matter amicably out of court. But the family unit was broken forever.
Five months after Kevin's acquittal, his father married another woman in a colourful wedding. She was 24 years old.
"My mother received a text message telling her never to return to her marital home because she had saved my brother from going to jail. So she was replaced by a younger woman," says Brian.
His father sold their 30-acre family home, where his mother had worked tirelessly for three decades, and left to start a new life in a new town with his young lover.
Brian has nothing but compassion and pity, mixed with endless love and respect for his mother.
"How do you start a new life at 59 after a tragedy that was not of your making? I think my mum saw it coming. She had secretly bought land in Kitale and even built another house. As a married man, that incident taught me never to put my wife or children through that kind of ordeal just because I loved a younger woman.
Since all this happened, Brian says his family has never met face to face, not even to talk about the incident.
"My family is broken beyond repair. I don't think we can even begin to talk about forgiveness and healing," he says.
I asked my 10 friends this question and their response, interestingly, was simple. Do nothing.
Mercy Musisi, a psychologist at The Retreat Centre in Limuru, explains that older married men hang out with younger women intentionally.
“There are a number of reasons men keep the company of younger women. They include midlife crisis and admiration for the carefree nature of Gen Zs which helps them feel like they are reclaiming their younger years.”
She adds that in psychology, they refer to these types of relationships as age disparity relationships.
According to the expert, older men see younger women as energetic and carefree because marriage puts them in a box for years, often to a point where they feel they just need a breather or a new adventure.
“Society nowadays glorifies older men who date younger girls. These days, no one frowns upon an older man dating a very young girl. Gen Zs have normalised and completely obliterated the rules. If your father does this, the most you can do is raise your concerns with him in a non-confrontational way and then draw boundaries. For instance, you can tell him not to show up with the younger woman at family functions,” she advises.
She also encourages children caught in such situations to take care of their mental health and seek professional help where necessary.
“Try to understand that your father is exploiting the younger woman just as much as she is exploiting him. There is often nothing you can do to change the situation except adapting to the new reality,” Ms Musisi says.
