When a player gets played

Ali Hassan is a decent, down to earth chap, but behind his easygoing demeanor is a masked character, of the addictive player. By colloquial definition, a player is a man, who perfects the art of wooing more than one woman at a time. Martin Murenzi knows that any woman or girl who spends a few minutes in the Ali’s vicinity is as good as ‘finished’ for no apparent fault of her own. Such are Ali’s wooing skills that Martin and many of his other friends secretly avoided bringing their girlfriends along, while in his company, however faithful these women had proven to be. Ali’s official girlfriend, Lynette is known to all his friends so much so that whenever she makes an announced appearance in his neighborhood, Ali gets tipped in time to ‘clean house’ if need be, before she shows up. One ill-fated day, Lynnette Mbabazi turned up unawares and found a girl under Ali’s bed sheets, clothes lay in a heap on the bedroom floor. She silently but calmly and systematically smashed all the electronics in Ali’s house, like an overdue assignment, before she collapsed. Weeks later, word reached Ali that Lynnette had been sighted in the cozy embrace of another man on the other side of town for the better part of one evening, drawing his fury, during which he made a subtle confession to his friend Martin. “These women are all s***s. One day, Nora is in your place, the next day she is in mine.” Nora was Martin’s latest catch with whom he thought something serious was developing after all, until that fateful evening when Ali blurted out his undercover engagements with her, in frustration. Martin was no angel either (only his game was at a lower level) but his and Ali’s reaction to being played reveals how men react to infidelity by the partners even when on their side, cheating is like a piece of cake. It is in man’s genetic make up to seek for many mates because biologically the worst thing that can happen to man is genetic death, dying with ‘all your genes’, with no offspring to continue their lineage. At the same time man wants to make children with the most desirable, most fertile female around because he wants his children to inherit her traits and desires the bragging rights to the most beautiful woman. This implies that as polygamous as the man may seem, when he has set his eyes on the prize, he will easily throw all caution to the wind in pursuit of the apple of his eye. Hence the woman in question, as part of the package, will naturally demand exclusive rights to him, thus monogamy. Surprisingly men react with a rage when they realize that their female partners have got one up on them because it usually implies that they are not man enough. To a man’s ego, that is like a nasty whack on the face. After the fainting episode, Ali got a cab and quickly rushed Lynnette to a clinic where she recovered and promptly started a cold war with him. It took some irate confrontations, a little pleading and some persistence to get her back. Ali never really abandoned his philandering ways, but learnt to be more discreet in his cheating. As Angelique, in her early twenties, players are the most jealous of men. “A player will leave you immediately he realises you are cheating on him.” She continues. “A player does not like to be on the receiving end of what he likes doing.” Players also from the experience of stealing other people’s partners from under their noses are also very suspicious of certain behavior in their partners and in their male friends because they interpret it as it were them assuming that their assumptions of their friends or mates intentions stand true from their own experiences. kelviod@yahoo.com