My girlfriend is expecting a child, should I tell my wife?

Hi Kitoto

First of all, I want to thank you for the good job you're doing. I have been reading your articles every week and they are of great help. I am in deep trouble. I am married with two children, eight and one and half years old. Both are boys.

Things changed after we had our second child. She no longer loved me as much as she used to. Any time I used my phone texting or calling while I was in the house, she would get annoyed and accuse me of cheating. Whenever I showed her the texts, she would accuse me of deleting the ones that would have implicated me. Her paranoia made me switch off the phone each time I went back home to avoid arguments.

But this didn’t help as she continued accusing me, saying that I was switching my phone off to avoid conversing with ‘my girls’.

I got annoyed and told her never to ask me about my phone again. We live as strangers nowadays. This situation led me to find a girl to lower my stress levels. This girl is now four months pregnant for me.

She still lives with her parents and wants me to go and inform them that I impregnated her . Am I supposed to do that? I don't know how my wife will take this news when she gets to know. Should I tell her, or wait until she discovers it on her own? I can't hold this anymore. I hate love!

Hi,

Love has never been bad or evil. It involves decisions we make either to commit or not to another.

It involves sacrifice, trust and a desire to give of oneself to the other. You can be attracted to as many ladies as you meet. However, attraction in itself may not be driven by love. Lust and love are miles apart. The decision to commit to someone must be consciously done. It must come out of a heart that has counted the cost of love.

What happened in as far as you are concerned is allowing yourself to be driven by lust. You were drawn to this woman and made her pregnant out of personal frustration that you were going through. You made a conscious choice to be intimate with someone to fulfil your short term fleshly desires. What you failed to realise is the consequences of sleeping together.

The pregnancy the came may appear a mistake, but it has at its core, a wilful desire to be unfaithful. I believe that confronting this issue soberly will be key for you and your future. The child is yours and deserves his or her father. On the other hand, the parents of the girl may want to know who made their daughter pregnant. It's prudent for you to take responsibility and deal with the consequences.

On the other hand, your wife, is justified to feel that you were cheating on her all along. I really don’t think she would be wrong to think that way.

After all, you have made a woman pregnant. As a result, you need to be honest with yourself, face her and have an honest discussion about your relationship. Now that there is a child involved in this stray relationship, what will you do? How will this affect your marriage?

Disclosing now and leaving for her to discover by herself is still going to hurt. Persons who have made earlier disclosure have shown a willingness to embrace change. God’s word tells us how knowing the truth will set us free. I encourage you to walk in the light, share your heart, take responsibility, seek healing, and find a counsellor to help you build new habits.

Could I have sacrificed love because of a mere phone call?

Dear Kitoto,

Thank you so much for your great advice. I am a great fan of your page. I'm am Joyce Ndegwa, 24 years old. Currently, I work for a big insurance firm so financially, I'm doing well.

Early this year, I met Peter who became my friend and later, we started dating. He has all the qualities that I have ever desired in a man. After one month of dating, someone one called me claiming to be Peter’s wife and that I should leave him alone. I went ahead and approached Peter to explain to me who this lady was or is to him since he had not told me anything about her. But he was not ready to open up to me. He would even end up getting mad at me whenever I demanded for an explanation.

Since he was not willing to be honest with me, I ended up concluding that he is married, but when I went to visit him in his home, I didn't see any signs of a marriage. He has been calling me severally such that there is a day he called me 11 times but I had decided never to pick his calls. I truly loved him and up to know, I am still healing . Did I make the right decision? And recently, I have only been attracting married men. Please help me.

Hi

I definitely sense your apprehension and lack of desire to move on with enthusiasm in this relationship. The fact that another woman got your number and called you and possibly had a few more details is not enough to make one scared. Relationships are about total trust and commitment. Such a call from a stranger has a way of bursting the bubble.

There is no easy answer here. I can see that you visited the gentleman’s home and found no wife of his there. The lingering doubt in you has to do with the fact that, there could still be truth in that phone call. Could he have made sure that she was not home? I can’t tell, but you have every ability to check the trustworthiness of his character.

Your biggest dilemma is if the woman was a stalker and not a real wife. However, remaining steadfast will tell you if is she an imposter or liar. Someone once said, patience pays. I suggest the you maintain a spirit of wisdom that will help you know when danger is coming.

Are there timelines for dating and marriage?

Hallo Kitoto,

Mine is really short. I would like to know how much time it takes for a couple to date before the actual marriage process.

Thanks

 Hallo,

Let me give you some pointers instead of giving you the number of years:

Know you partner well by going past attraction based on lust to love.

Look for to ideals and values that make up a great character.

Be great friends of each other and

allow the challenges you face grow and mature your love relationship.

Finally, seek someone to walk with you,

like a mentor or marriage counsellor.

***

Here are some top well researched reasons why affairs keep lingering in relationships

Affairs might be ‘sexy’ but they are rarely purely about sex. More often than not, an affair can be an unconscious attempt to solve a problem in the original relationship. It’s clearly a signal that something is wrong, but how do we know what that is?

1. Conflict-phobic affair. This is when one or both partners won’t argue, and skirt around their differences rather than work through them. The problem with this is that they’re not sharing all of themselves, and so levels of intimacy drop. The relationship becomes routine, rather than being kept alive by fresh dialogue. Inevitably, each partner begins to feel lonely. But airing their troubles and risking confrontation feels too frightening, so paradoxically, to save their marriage, they seek intimacy elsewhere.

2. Vulnerability-phobic affair. The opposite of the conflict phobic affair. These couples are often good at arguing — almost too good. For them, conflict is a way to maintain contact with each other. But this isn’t healthy debate — both sides are too frightened of opening up and showing their vulnerabilities. Instead, there is a strong need to be right and to prove the other wrong. This leads to role play rather than more intimate, authentic sharing, which can escalate the belief that their partner does not care about them, thus increasing their fear of being vulnerable, which then leads to loneliness — and then to infidelities.

3. Incapacity for intimacy affair. This is another version of the vulnerability-phobic affair. The straying partner finds the messiness of a longer-term relationship, after the novelty and idealisation stage, too complicated. A new partner seems so much more straightforward, until they get to know them and the whole cycle starts again. They go through this cycle several times before they can realise that it might be their own incapacity for intimacy that’s leading to their affairs and subsequent break-ups.

4. The divided self-affair. The wandering partner loves the idea of their perfect family and a perfect spouse. But they also love their lover. They never intended to have an affair, and see it as something that ‘just happened’. Their self-image as a good spouse and parent is important to them, but what they probably didn’t do is accurately assess the depth of their feelings for their ‘perfect’ partner at the start. Their partner is someone they think they ought to love, rather than someone they actually love. After quite a few years of trying to keep this up, they will be knocked off their feet by an infatuation. The trouble is, they are still wedded to the idea of themselves as part of the perfect family.

5. The sex addict affair. If one partner is a sex addict, this stems more from their individual issues than from any problems with their relationship or partner, and consequently the ways of working through it are more limited. The prospect of change is small. Being addicted to sex is not unlike other addictions, such as alcohol or gambling. The addict feels empty and uses the addiction to feel temporarily full, but it never lasts and the addiction can continue indefinitely unless the addict is prepared to work hard in therapy and at changing their behaviour.

6. The exit affair. The purpose of an exit affair is to try to force the non-straying partner into ending the relationship. Alternatively, it might have started as a distraction from the pain of separation. The affair says, ‘It’s over’, when honest communication has not been happening for a long time. Such an affair could be seen as the cause of the split, but it’s usually a way out after the straying partner has made a decision to end the relationship.

Source:www.psychologies.co.uk