Dear Agatha,
My marriage is only a year old but my husband, who is almost 20 years older than I am doesn’t trust me. I’m in my late 40s while he is in his late 60s. I am a mother of three children while he has five from his late wife. He also has about five grandchildren.
I am divorced and was that way for a considerable length of time. From the moment I met my current husband, I felt something deep for him and irrespective of our age differences decided to spend the rest of my life with him when he offered me the opportunity to.
We got married last year but instead of the peace I envisaged, he has kept suspecting me of infidelity.
By every standard I am a very pretty woman and I know a lot of men have desires for me but I have made up my mind to stay with him despite our huge age difference.
I can’t say how all this started but I think it all started when he came home one day to meet my ex-husband, who is incidentally remarried, in our living room. Actually, my ex came to discuss our second child’s choice of career. He wanted her to read medicine while she preferred pharmacy.
When he showed up at my doorstep, I didn’t have the heart to turn him away hence invited him in so we could discuss. In the process of our discussion, I offered him entertainment and must have gotten carried away because my husband met us holding hands and laughing as we watched a movie.
Although he didn’t say anything but from that point I noticed a lot of things changed between us. Right in the presence of my ex, I explained his mission in our house, which he seemed satisfied with. He even sat with us for the remaining half hour it took for the film we were watching to finish
I expected him to voice out his feelings at the point if he had any reservation but he didn’t.
I have ever done everything humanly possible to make him trust me but nothing I say or do has been able to change his opinion of me.
Although he is caring and very attentive to the needs of my children, I want his trust. I am so confused and don’t know how to go about this issue.
Please help me.
Mariam.
Dear Mariam,
In his shoes how would you feel walking into your matrimonial home and meeting your husband with his ex holding hands, sharing a drink and watching a movie together? What does that scene convey to the onlooker? Complete sense of intimacy between the two of you.
Yes, couples that have gone their different ways and have children between them cannot totally avoid each other but then there should be limits.
Allowing him to come into the home of another man and going to the extent of entertaining him, sitting together and holding hands is more than enough to plant a seed of doubt into the mind of any man, particularly an old man taking the risk of marrying at the age he ought to be happy.
Coming home and meeting the two of you in the relaxed and compromising position is more than an old man can bear. If you expect him to clap and pat your back for being so unthinking and disrespectful, then you are wrong.
The moment you re-married, your ex became part of your past life, a life you need the permission of your new life to visit. Your ex had no right coming to your matrimonial home and you definitely were wrong to have invited him in without the express permission of your current husband.
If he doesn’t trust you anymore, it is because you gave him concrete reasons to doubt your sincerity to him. You are a married woman, no longer free to associate with any man in an intimate way. Besides, why would you allow any man to visit you at home when no one else was around to defend your honour? For all your current husband knows, both of you could have indulged in something unholy given the fact that nobody was around in the house.
Besides being former couples, you risked bringing back the memories of a time past. When it comes to the issue of sex, a lot of things can go wrong when caught on the side of things. Sexual feelings and rascality has nothing to do with age or ability to take charge of the situation, not when the situation seems right and actually support the act to happen. The fact that your ex stayed for another 30 minutes to finish watching the film that was on showed the contempt he held you and your marriage.
If you were more discerning you would have been able to read mischief into this visit. From his attitude, the whole process of his visit may have been timed to create problems for you in your marriage. A case of no man having what he doesn’t want.
There was no reason for him to have come into your house to discuss the issue he purportedly came to discuss. This could have been done on the phone. And if he must see you, why didn’t he invite you to his house as the man and father of the child in question? His home would have been a more suitable place to discuss any issue affecting the children you have together not the home of another man.
What do you think would have happened if it were the wife who chanced in on such a scene between you and her husband? You are lucky your husband didn’t react probably because he now has maturity on his side.
You have really wronged your husband and need to do everything humanly possible including going on your knees to beg for his forgiveness. Yes, you may not have done anything with your ex but what you did is enough to make any man doubt your loyalty and sense of propriety as a married woman.
Entertaining a man in your home without the consent or knowledge of your husband is wrong and very difficult to explain.
When he arrived unexpectedly and insisted on discussing the issue of his child, you should have taken time out to phone your husband on the development. Such consideration for his feelings would have prepared him for the scene he met in his living room.
What happened scattered the basis of his foundation for you. Besides, it must have made him recall things he had previously forgotten like the memory of his late wife. Silently, he would be blaming God for taking the woman he started out with, whose death is making him witness things he shouldn’t be seeing in his old age. Don’t blame him for this. Being 20 years older than you, he has more experience than you and has more open wound scenes like the one he saw open up afresh. Unlike you, his capacity to endure such pain is weakened by the sad memories we daily carry along.
Go to him, cry and beg him to forgive you, tell him you have realised your mistake and that it would never happen again. The difference between the old and the young is that when an old man falls in love, it is without reservations because he has seen it all.
Show your husband that you love him by inviting him out to a naughty time out away from him. Like a child, he needs to feel and be assured of the love of the woman in his life.
Good luck.
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