When your relationship takes the Snowden-US-China-Russia plot . . .

From within, they are just infamous. Across the fence, though, they are hailed as right thinking persons, the champions of inalienable human rights. But no one in their right minds would love to live under the same roof with a partner whose skills at spying, let along revealing inside story to outsiders, is as bad as what Nollywood portrays in those annoying Nigerian movies.From ‘Deep Throat’ (FBI agent W. Mark Felt) who leaked the Watergate scandal that saw President Richard Nixon’s ignominious resignation in 1974, Christopher Boyce, jailed for 40 years for espionage in 1977 after selling US secrets to the Soviet Union (now Russia), Bradley Manning, facing prosecution for selling the most damning of the CIA files to WikiLeaks, down to Edward Snowden of the Prism scandal, no one wants a partner who will come in the shape of these guys.A Snowden in your bedroom is just bad news. Now, you will excuse me for feminising our character Snowden, but ideally, gender should not mean much here.When you marry a Snowden, she is going to open a Facebook account in a strange name. She will use that to spy on you after sending you a friend request. With her second Facebook account, she can flirt with you as a virtual friend just to goad and gorge your cheating genes—all she will be interested in is knowing if the man she shares a bed with has the propensity to fall for another woman. You can’t leave your iPad for five minutes as you take a shower and she just tends to a brewing coffee; she will choose to browse your messages, sent or received, check the recycle bin of your gadgets and check for call history.You must never encrypt your gadgets with a password, lest she whines and nags endlessly about your keeping secrets from her. If you say your gadgets contain sensitive workplace information, she will remind you that you have been sharing the most secretive and sensitive parts of your bodies, so there should be nothing worth hiding.But not all Snowdens are the same. While some nag their way into your secrets, others are just intuitive and professional. They move and leave no sound like a cat. Their deeds have no trace. You can only get to know after they have leaked the most sensitive of your information to outsiders. By then, she will have fled to Hong Kong where she knows her relatives will back her and turn on you for trying to stuff their daughter’s human rights into a bottle like a grasshopper.You will be left pondering all sorts of means to get Snowden back and punish her right from the bedroom to the bathroom, but your in-laws will behave like they first want you to go and prostrate before them, give up all sorts of dignity in the name of getting Snowden.The Russian in-law will liken your desperation and threats to a pig, telling you that you only squeal like a pig yet you can’t even give them wool. It would then be more humiliating if your Snowden finds sanctuary at an Ecuadorian embassy, where, like Assange, she can even address the media from the balcony of the embassy, call you all sorts of names, vow to continue exposing your secret deeds to all and sundry. The sad part is that even the cops you will have stationed around the embassy on horses will be too powerless to even ask this Snowden to shut up.As man, strive not to run your household like the way the Pentagon operates with its CIA, FBI, NSA and all those mouthful security organs. You need to subject the character of any potential Snowden to the kind of litmus test that can make a butterfly’s flaps look thunderous and guilty. And after all these, you need a performance appraisal, every six months, to know how your Snowden is operating.

Lifestyle

When your relationship takes the Snowden-US-China-Russia plot . . .