By Bunmi Sofola

Wedding guests were treated to a breathtaking ceremony as Anita said “I do” to her boyfriend of two years.  They both lived in the U.S. and travelled specially to the country so both couple’s relatives can share in their joy.  A few weeks after the wedding, they went back to base, purportedly to wedded bliss.

Sadly, Anita’s husband is one of the men who believe they have a right to beat up their wives to shape as soon as they misbehave.  Within months, Anita’s husband had so much beaten and battered her that the poor woman had to take cover in a refuge of all places.  Refuges any where in the world are no where you want to be.  But desperate battered wives run to them in civilized countries because they are the only places they are assured safety from their violent partners bent on still stalking them.

“I came back to meet my children and wife gone and half of the house empty.  When I finally tracked her down to her new flat, her new man sat protectively by the side of my gloating wife, giving me a contemptuous look.”

I don’t know what really hurt him more – her deceit and betrayal or the indecent haste with which she jumped into someone else’s arms.

Another prospective husband, a twenty-seven-year-old who used to plan his wedding with his fiancée late into the night, had tears of humiliation and anger in his eyes as he recounted the hurt of losing a loved one.  He should have seen it coming, he said sadly, looking for all the world as if he was going to pieces.

According to him, “For some time now, my fiancée had been a bit distant and easily irritable but I assumed that she was concerned about the coming wedding.  Whenever I visited her house, she was always playing haunting music and I never suspected that when she listened to the music, she was thinking besottedly of another man – the married man she finally left me for because he was richer.

The few women I discussed those two incidents with laughed jubilantly.  According to them, it was about time some men got their come uppance.  If a man had behaved like that, the tendency is for everybody to act as if it was the expected thing to do.  This time, the women told me with relish, men should take some of the medicine they were always so eager to dole out.

Someone once wrote that the easiest person to deceive is the person closest to you because he or she trusts you.  But these days, it seems almost everybody has forgotten what trust is.  Even as a man is contritely calling off a love affair, the supposed victims is secretly laughing her head off because she had never taken the affair as serious as to be really broken hearted.  Pretence, simply put, seems to have been the latest modus operandi in a supposed love affair, where you can only win when you love with two eyes wide open.

In other words, Anita had to leave the plush surroundings of her matrimonial home to stay in a refuge where she had to share facilities with other battered wives and their children.  A very desperate and humiliating experience.  Yet, her shameless husband had the nerve to grant interviews and confirm the fact that his wife was now in a safe place where he could never lay his paws on her because the security at the average refuge is tighter than that of a prison – and it has the backing of the law.  Any husband who goes near such a refuge to cause problems would have the police and the hostile inmates to contend with and would certainly regret his rash decision.

Domestic violence is a cankerworm that continues to eat into various matrimonial homes in the country.  Unfortunately, battered wives here have no refuges to run to.  Battered wives refuse to believe that the men who had vowed to love and cherish them have a mental problem. It doesn’t matter whether you’re rich or poor, beautiful or ugly, if your spouse is violent, you will always be at the receiving end of his neurosis.  Anything could trigger it off – and before you know it, you’ve become a nervous wreck, constantly looking over your back for fear you might be attacked.

Ruth has been married for well over 20 years to a man who has constantly beaten and abused her but she stuck with the marriage because her husband according to her, is “a big wig” who is always over-generous to his family.  “Recently, he really surpassed himself, in his irrational behaviour,” she said sadly.  “We had been invited to dinner by one of his company’s overseas partners.  The considerate man made sure everything was arranged for our comfort.  A reputable five-star hotel in the city of London, a limousine and a uniformed chauffeur were some of the perks.  One our first night, our host and his wife came to take us to dinner and we invited them up to our suit for pre-dinner drinks.  The way my husband, Biodun, was knocking backs the drinks instantly put me on my guard.  The more I tried to warn him to slow down, the more aggressive he became.

“When we were ready to leave, he suddenly felt his pockets and announced he couldn’t find his wallet”.  “Nobody should go anywhere until I find it,” he bellowed.  “The four of us started searching frantically for the wallet and couldn’t find it.  In the end, we decided to go for dinner anyway.  But he’d completely fouled up the atmosphere.  Our hosts couldn’t get away fast enough after dinner.  As the car took us to our hotel, he rounded on me.  Poking me in the ribs whilst the driver glanced back anxiously at us.  He said I was virtually kissing the feet of our hosts trying to pacify them.  Was I naive enough to believe a white man couldn’t be a thief?  That his wallet was stuffed with f50 pound notes.  If he didn’t find the wallet, he was going to report it stolen to the police.

“As I walked into our suite, he pushed me so hard that I almost landed on my face.  Then the blows started raining.  When he stopped to go to the toilet, I frantically searched round the sofa he sat on before we left for dinner.  When I lifted the cushions, I was relieved to find the wallet wedged in between two of them. I placed the wallet in the middle of the bed, rushed into the bathroom, threw down some towelling robes the hotel provided on the floor, and tried to get some sleep.  After hammering on the door for a while, he gave up and must have gone to sleep because I didn’t hear anything coming from the bedroom.  I decided to sleep on the floor of the bathroom anyway, to be on the safe side.

“The next day, he carried on as if nothing had happened.  He phoned his hosts to tell them where the wallet was found and apologize profusely for getting so upset.  He then peeled off a chunk of the money in the wallet and asked me to go hit the shops.”

Reports have even shown that some men’s violence become more aggravating when their wives become pregnant.  “The shocking truth is that many babies are being killed,” say the reports, and their mother’s lives threatened, by the very men meant to protect them  –  their dads.  There was the case of a woman whose husband started abusing when she was three months pregnant.

“He punched her in the stomach, kicked her in the groin and threw plates at her.  He deliberately targeted her at the most vulnerable time of her life.  As a result, her baby was born prematurely, with fractured limbs and will bear the consequences of its father’s brutality for the rest of its life.  Another pregnant woman’s privates were damaged by her husband who assaulted her with a broken bottle.  She was taken to hospital where her vaginal walls were repaired.  The baby, surprisingly survived.  Some women are even forced to have sex soon after a birth, continues the report.  Domestic violence relates to power control and includes various types of power.  Having a baby makes the man last in line.  

Fear of losing their power, some men resort to beatings”.

bedroom window, fearing the worst, I cowered near the door, ready to bolt when I heard a friend’s husband begging to be let in.  It was almost 11 p.m. and as I cautiously opened the door, he charged in, bolted it and shushed me up.  Minutes later, his wife showed up brandishing a cutlass and looking deranged.  In the end, I learnt she’d found a love letter in her husband’s briefcase and he couldn’t explain how the letter got there, or who the writer was to him.

Interestingly, there are couples whose relationship thrive on violence.  After the heated protest and steaming anger, a woman once confessed, the making up was always so marvellously fantastic that I never even let it cross my mind that a man who was capable of slapping a woman on a mere suspicion could be one to be extremely careful of.  Things, however, came to a head the day I questioned something he had done.  He got me by the throat and lifted me up.  My three-year-old son started crying and I thought: I can’t put my son through this.  That was when I decided to leave him.  A violent man has a typical Jekyll and Hyde personality – you can either stay to absorb the blows or flee.  I left.  I am a human being, not a punching bag.”

Can What You Wear Be Bad For Your Health!

More often than not, we cram feet more used to trainers into triangular-toed shoes and we put aside our comfy pant to dorn the thong.  Next time you want to paint the town red, you are advised to made sure that your knock ‘em dead outfit isn’t going to knock your health.

Problem – spiky stilettos:  They may make you feel like a movie star, but the result can be damaging.  High heels can strain the knees and increase your risk of arthritis.  Squeezing into pointing shoes puts pressure on the foot’s soft tissue, which can become inflamed.  The friction can cause blisters and a building of hard skin.  And pressure encourages corns and bunions – not very sexy.

Solution:  Prepare to party with foot exercise.  Strengthen feet and toes by straightening your toes, then wiggling them around.  According to a chiropodist, ‘If you must wear heels, prepare your feet properly and only wear them for limited periods of time.  Think taxi, not trudge.  You shouldn’t walk more than two miles at a time in heels.  And ideally, you should keep the heel height of under two inches.

Problem – busting out:  If you’ve put on weight, you might be squeezing into your bra, rather than sliding into it – bra makers warn.  “Incorrectly fitted bras can be responsible for problems with the skin and posture, as well as causing aching breasts.

Solution:   It may be better to wear no bra at all than one which doesn’t fit.  Remeasure yourself every time you go shopping for a bra – don’t assume you’re the same size.

Problem – The wrong thong:  You won’t have a visible pant line when you wear one. But your thong could make its presence known in other unpleasant ways.