By David Maillu
Published September 18, 2023
Is One Wife Enough for a Man? sounds like a stupid question to married women. Every married woman lives with the strength of belief with which she can brag to her husband, “I have got everything you need.” When fighting the infidelity of her husband she can easily scream at him, “What has that woman got which I don’t have?” Of course, she is thinking about the package she has for sex. But she says so in the company of many women who don’t know that, to a man, a lot depends on the shape and delivery of that package. All women have got it. However, how it is build and how the owner presents it takes the day to man. With that knowledge, the average woman would say, “Wait a minute, what is the quality of my thing and how should I present it?”
Common sense has it that nobody steals food if his stomach is full.
Basically speaking, if the husband is fully satisfied by having sex with
his wife, he will not think of another woman. That is where the complication starts. Most husbands’ unfaithfulness have a cause in their wives. There is a woman who, in order to summit to her husband sexually, she confronts him with difficult conditions. She can frustrate his seductive mood by presenting the list of the things he hadn’t done. “You promised me this and that, which you didn’t do… Why do you come home late?… Why does your mother do this to me?… Why do you discredit everything I do?…” Of course, different wives present different demands. Some present minimal but others present maximum… The sex story is very complex. It is a forest that harbours monsters too.
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The question regarding whether one wife is enough is, therefore, can only be answered conditionally. The meaning of sex between woman and man is different. That is where many men and women misunderstand one another.
A wife can be fully equipped with every aspect of beauty as a woman, but she can be emotionally and logically very expensive to her husband. If he knows his wife demands a pound of flesh from him before she submits to him, her expense sells him to other women outside who can offer the same service almost free of charge. This is why prostitutes are precious to men, where the business gets done and shops close without consequences. No wife can understand why her husband should sleep with a prostitute or another woman. That’s a crime to her.
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Primarily, what makes a man begin to think of getting another wife is caused by his first wife whose deficiency gets solved by the second wife. African philosophy has it that it is nobility to solve the problem of the first wife by marrying a second wife, instead of divorcing her. However, in spite of the big talks about polygamy, it is the monogamous marriage which has always dominated in traditional society. The reason is because nature did not produce enough women for every man to be a polygamist.
They say the first wife is a matter of necessity; the second wife is a matter of convenience. But any sensible man knows how emotionally expensive it is to have two wives.
The philosophy of polygamy is highly challenged by the culture of materialism in which we live, powered by the imported western monogamous cultural storm. The monogamous culture demands that, in whatever consequences, the husband must have only one wife and if he is dissatisfied with her, he should divorce her and create room for marrying another one. On the social ground, dropping monogamy devalues the social status of woman. It creates many single and divorced women who, in turn, become monster challengers to married women. The competition to get a man becomes higher and the value of woman goes down.
