"I wish he would cheat" – one woman's woes on marrying Mr Perfect

While most  women would walk from shrine to shrine, attend marriage counseling, fast and pray for days, sacrifice a limb in the hopes of dragging their husbands out of their philandering ways, this one woman wishes her husband would cheat.

Claire O’Reilly, a writer in Plymouth, is bothered by so many things, and one of them is that her husband just won’t cheat.

“Don’t get me wrong, I love him and this year we celebrated 17 years together — 13 of them married — but I wish he’d lie, cheat, defame or slander just once, so that I could feel better about my own less-than-perfect character.”

Wife, husband material

When choosing a life partner, most people aim for the stars; strive for perfection. Kenyans have developed a moniker to sum up the standards they need in spouses, that is, ‘wife material’ or ‘husband material’.

Claire married Mr Perfect, only to realize she had shot herself in the foot. She first had a taste of her husband’s ridiculously upright ways early in their dating, when he won’t ditch work for her.

“I should have got an inkling of my husband’s perfect moral fibre when we were dating back in 2002. I called in sick to work, planning to surprise him as he worked from home.

However, when I turned up with thoughts of a long, lazy, romantic lunch, he refused to ditch his responsibilities even though we were supposed to be in the first throes of love.”

ALSO READ: Why being cheated on hurts

Bored with perfection

Years into their marriage, Mr O’Reilly still refuses to do wrong like other normal human beings. He just won’t slip; lie, cheat, defame or do something that will identify him as human. There are perks with living with a pseudo-angel, but Mrs O’Reilly is both tired and bored with her husband’s perfect ways. Living with such a perfect person makes her very much aware of her own shortcomings and it is getting hard to keep up.

“But it is not just his general decency that’s hard to stomach. He is a better spouse than I am. If I told him on Friday I was spending Saturday chilling at a spa, he’d probably drop me there so I didn’t have to drive, then take the kids to their clubs before making sure the house was tidy,” says the writer.

That is why she wishes he would do something wrong so she would feel better and less alone in her wrongdoing. Sharing a house with a ‘paragon of virtue’ is exhausting because the values he lives by are unattainable. Read her whole account here.