“I didn’t buy love,” Bintu once said. “I bought what my marriage could no longer provide.” That statement may shock many people, but it opens the door to a conversation we rarely have: Women also pay for sex.
Noooo.
Yes o.
Why?
Because contrary to popular belief, women also have sexual needs, frustrations, and complicated emotional lives.
Bintu is 46, successful, elegant and married to a retired banker. If you see them at parties, they look like the perfect couple. They dance together. They coordinate their aso ebi. They smile for photographs like a toothpaste advert but behind the expensive lace is a bedroom that has been on life support for years.
Her husband suffers from erectile dysfunction. They have tried herbs from Ibadan, concoctions from Kano, pills from London, and prayers from every mountain between Lagos and Jerusalem.
Nothing has worked.
Bintu loved her husband. She still does and has no intention of leaving him, but she is also a healthy woman with healthy desires.
Eventually, through a trusted friend (whose husband was also having problems getting his JT to rise to even a monthly occasion), she met a discreet young man. There was an arrangement. No emotions. No promises. No Valentine’s Day drama. She paid him, he came when invited, and everybody went home happy; Bintu satisfied and the lover boy richer. Both parties were relieved and less tense.
There’s another group of women whose problems are different from Bintu’s. They are like Ireti.
She didn’t have a husband with erectile dysfunction.
Her own problem was worse, I think.
Her husband had enough energy, perhaps even too much energy, for everybody except his wife. The man was like a he-goat with an erection that can’t be pacified. He had a side piece everywhere.
Office girlfriend.
Gym girlfriend.
Church girlfriend.
WhatsApp girlfriend.
Even one widow on their street was rumoured to be a beneficiary of Ireti’s husband’s generosity.
By the time the man staggered home each night, he was too exhausted to remember he had a wife.
Ireti complained.
He apologised.
She forgave.
Less than three months later, there was another side chick on the scene, like a bad sequel. On and on the bad movie that Ireti’s life had become, went. Each side piece took a piece of her until her self-esteem was down to zero-zero.
Then, one day, after years of neglect, Ireti did something even she never thought she was capable of. She hired an escort! Yeah, you will be shocked by what is available in this country of yours if you know where to look. And no, Ireti didn’t want to destroy her marriage. She was not also trying to get back at her husband. She simply wanted to remember what it felt like to be desired, to be touched, to be ravaged deliciously with reckless abandon.
Go on, condemn her. I can even help you with a few moral and religious quotes. You and I know Ireti was aware she was crossing certain lines. But we also know she was tired and desperate. She should have waited a little longer, prayed a little more fervently, fasted a few more days. I agree, absolutely. Let us just , with our church mind, quietly ask and answer, “How exactly did we think a situation like that would end?”
Marriage cannot survive when one spouse continually feeds outsiders while starving the person at home.
Then there is the revenge-served-in-high-heels paid sex.
Tola’s husband believed sex was a weapon.
Whenever they quarrelled, he would declare a cold war in the house.
