The digital bother: Cheating has never been easier
Handling modern communication technologies has become a challenging affair to most marriages, says Jane Mwangi, who has been married for the last seven years.
The laboratory researcher says that, three years into her marriage, e-mail communication brought a rift that shook the young marriage. She and her husband had met in college, and, soon, a relationship ensued that led to marriage.
Her husband, Dominic Mwangi, explains that a man whom he knew as a good schoolmate in college, and who very well knew of his marriage to Jane, kept sending her some ‘suggestive’ e-mails.
“It is not that I doubted her, but I just wondered why it was happening when she well very knew that I had a password to her e-mail account. She was not communicating to this man, but he kept on sending her these messages,” he explains.
This affected their relationship. And when the Mwangi’s realised that they were not doing any better, they sought the services of a marital counsellor from their church.
“But it was not easy, we had to make some sacrifices. Since we shared our email passwords, I had to stop imagining so much. I had to build trust in her and I decided not to snoop into her emails anymore,” says the 31-year-old engineer.
Jane, 30, had to confront the admirer and tell him to keep his distance since she was someone’s wife.
“I had to save our three year-old marriage, and that’s when we decided that we had to be open in the usage of our mobile phones too. From then on, it has been a wonderful time for us since we love and trust each other.”
Given the nature of his work, Dominic travels a lot and is more often than not on the phone or researching on the Internet. He says he owns five different mobile lines, two for communication and three for ease in Internet access.
“Whenever I travel, I move with my office as I always have to carry my modem and laptop with me. This is to enable me research when a challenge comes up in my line of work, and to check mails so that I can keep tabs on assignments,” he says.
Sometimes he is on transit across the East African region for almost a whole week. During this time, he does not make calls back home to spy on his wife.
“If I want to talk to my son Joe (five years) and daughter Shee (one and a half years) I call them through the house-help’s phone. This is because Jane is out of the house most of the times,” Dominic says. “I only call her when I want to talk to her, but not to spy on her.”
Similarly, Jane has two lines, which, she explains, are for convenience, and two email accounts. “One is for official use, while the other is for my private communication (this is the one that tore a rift between them).”
Interestingly, its shared password has never been changed, and Dominic cannot remember when he lastly checked the inbox.
Why? He says he has learnt how to trust.
“I had to make a deliberate choice to think positively about Jane, and this helped develop confidence in her. I have come to learn that when one makes a deliberate choice to trust, they reap trust; but if they decide to look out for mistakes in the other person, they will definitely get them,” Dominic says.
Jane admits that she used to go through her husband’s text messages, looking out for the usual warning signs of an affair.
“I would wait until he was in the shower, then rummage through his phone. If I got any fishy message, I would forward it to my phone. When I realised that this was a waste of time and it was of no help to our marriage, I made a choice to stop,” she says, adding that she did not doubt him, but she was just curious.
To keep off her husband’s phone took effort, but it has born fruits.
“I am never bothered with his phone. Even if it rings and he is not near, I am not, in the least, bothered. And we have got used to that,” she says.
The couple doesn’t use security locks on their phones.
“There is nothing to hide,” Dominic says. “It is only when a partner is keeping some secret information that they hide their SMSs.”
The couple is on Facebook, but Dominic is more of a dormant user. Jane, on the other hand, has more friends and enjoys the entertainment that the social networking site offers.
As such, she is on the site whenever she has some time to spare. Dominic says he does not approve of the flirting on Facebook, which, he adds, can easily break a marriage.
But technology is not all doom; if carefully used and treated, it can bring a couple closer than ever before.
For example, Dominic says whenever he is away and senses some loneliness creeping in, he chats with his wife on end at MySpace.
However, these gains have been eroded by the perceived privacy that users hold dear, thus eroding the mutual trust. Experts say the digital age has brought with it more harm than good to our families.
“Most of the family chaos nowadays are fanned by SMSs and emails,” says Loice Noo, a family counsellor at Amani Counselling and Training Institute in Nairobi.
Noo says most of her clients have confessed to falling to the huge temptation to rummage through their spouses’ phones for dialled numbers and saved contacts.
“Some even hack each other’s passwords, or to even call and quarrel ‘suspicious’ people in their spouses’ phonebooks,” Noo says.
Many attribute this to a sense of insecurity, especially in the digital age, when the doors to the world are at the palm. This, she says, has affected trust and communication at home.
“A lot of people have lost trust in each other because they have seen some damaging information on email or on phone about their partner,” she says.
When this happens, only a few are able to speak openly about the ‘disputed information’ to their partner.
“Most people, especially women, just bury the information within themselves, and agonise over it days on end. Men, on the other side, take little time to confront their wives over any perceived infidelity.”
The mass media has also played a huge role in ‘educating’ spouses on how to catch their straying partners. But, even though this is beneficial, it has caused numerous rifts in marriages as couples snoop for the so-called telltale signs.
There are a number of reasons why most spouses snoop at each other’s mobile phone or even hack their email accounts.
“In most of the cases that I have handled in the course of my work, HIV/Aids is a big issue. There is that curiosity to make sure that a partner is faithful or infidelity-proof,” Loice says.
Philip Kitoto resumes next week.
