Dorcas Muga-Odumbe, Gender Editor at Nation Media Group Kenya, has shed light on the key reasons women choose to leave long-term marriages.
Speaking on Jasiri, a program on News Central TV, on Wednesday, she highlighted mistreatment, infidelity, abuse, and emotional detachment as some of the primary factors that drive women to end their marriages after years of commitment.
“When we talk about mistreatment, mistreatment, we can look at it from, I think, three different perspectives. One, there are people who talk about serial infidelity. I even had young women writing to me and telling me that they experienced that with their parents.
“So infidelity, the parents, the wife enduring while raising their children. So we find that many, especially the husbands, having maintained multiple relationships openly, sometimes even having children outside their marriages. So infidelity stood out very strongly.”
She shared devastating stories of physical, emotional, and financial abuse that had shocked them for decades.
“And then domestic violence. We had people who are sharing devastating stories of physical, emotional, and even financial abuse that shocked many of them for all these decades. One woman actually had 37 years of hiding braces while her husband, because the husband was a prominent person, so she just had to persevere because of the children.
“But now that the children are successful, they’re grown, they created a safe haven for her, and she therefore left. And emotional detachment, the absence of emotional attachment. You see, in many of these relationships, men have traditionally been brought up, and that’s the traditional, we’ll be so mad that they’re providers.”
She continued, “So to them, as long as they’re providing, their presence doesn’t really matter. And the presence is not just physical, it’s also emotional. So if he’s not there, then there’s not the emotional connection between him and his wife, and even the children lack.
“So the children grow knowing the mother, spending time with the mother. The father comes home in the evening when the kids are asleep, leaves very early in the morning, weekends he’s away. If he’s an unfaithful husband, then the weekend is a time to spend with his other women. So the wife never sees him.”
Watch the full interview below:
