Being cheated on, at any time, is hard enough, but being cheated on while pregnant is pure hell.
Linda is a good friend and workmate of mine. Her ordeal in the past few months has been one that not so many humans can pull through. She is a mother of one daughter and would have been a mother of a son too had it not been for her prematurely born baby boy who succumbed to the premature body organs that were unable to develop outside the womb.
Linda’s theory was and still is; there has to be a relation between the passing away of her son and the cheating habits of her husband. This threw spanners in my amygdala, the hippocampus, the cerebellum, and the prefrontal cortex. I couldn’t see the co-relation regardless of the angles and permutations I approached the whole issue with. Linda founded her argument on traditional beliefs.
I did a mini-research on the issue.
It is a myth that there is a mysterious link between premature births or the death of unborn babies and the infidelity of the husband at the tenure of pregnancy. However, in case the father of the unborn baby commits adultery and acquires infections, the same may be transmitted to the mother and consequently to the unborn baby who may be adversely affected.
Chlamydia infection, for instance, is associated with an increased risk of preterm birth and its complications. If the infection is present and untreated at the time of delivery, it can lead to eye infection or pneumonia in the infant.
Cytomegalovirus is a common virus that may be sexually transmitted to an expectant mother by an infidel husband. The mother then passes congenital cytomegalovirus infection to her fetus and this often leads to conditions such as hearing or vision loss, seizures and intellectual disabilities that are usually apparent at birth and develop later during infancy or childhood.
Other infections that may arise from infidel husbands are among human parvovirus, gonorrhea that is mostly linked to miscarriages, pre-term birth and low birth weight, genital herpes among numerous sexually transmitted infections.
Linda has on several occasions busted her husband cheating. And like most ladies, she always takes apologies and profuse promises of a non-recurrent situation as that from the husband. When she was seven months pregnant, she experienced pre-labor pains that were so intense that she had to make an impromptu visit to hospital. Normal delivery was impossible due to the underdeveloped fetus and so a caesarian section was performed. The baby was immediately incubated to ensure continual development until nine months elapsed.
Sad enough, the baby died just a day after being in the incubator.
“I am convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that my husband is the cause of all these. From where we come from, it is not normal to miscarry or lose a baby prematurely. There is always a cause, and this time, this man I live with is. What should I do bro?” Linda painfully said and asked as I visited her in the hospital just a day after she lost her son.
I told her all the comforting statements I had learned over time and they did not seem to have any positive impact. I wished she would unlearn the belief she so cherished held in her heart of cheating husbands.
‘Every man cheats’, is a statement I distaste with my all. It pierces to the core every time I hear ladies refer to all men as cheats. It is however not their fault because indeed cheating is an evil that has been normalized over the years. In modern times, it is unfortunate that couples are more concerned about loyalty than love.
“Cheating in a relationship is a sign of self-regulation failure. When it happens once, it is a mistake. When it happens twice, it is unfortunate. But when it happens thrice or more, it is a pattern indicating primitive, uncivilized inhuman behavior. ”A Treatise on Monogamy (Humanism Series).
Loyalty is the glue that holds relationships together. All couples, whether married or not, need to be awake to that fact and strive to ensure they uphold that. Nothing tests loyalty like time. Patience will show you if the bond is real or not. It’s only so long you can ‘hold it down’ for somebody that consistently lets you down. Failure to heed to ensuring loyalty would be a failure to secure happiness in this life and in the life to come. It is the burden of my heart that people would listen and effect.
“If you cheat on someone willing to do anything for you, you cheated yourself out of true loyalty.”