BACHELOR’S DIARY: Why we are ashamed of exes

Dear Diary,

For a long time, I used to wonder why it’s so hard for people to remain friends once a relationship was over. I mean, if you were dating or married to your ‘best friend’, how come it’s suddenly impossible to see them as such simply because your personal relationship broke down?

Most people say it’s because of the bad blood that develops once the relationship is over; that the other person reminds you of all that is bad about them.

I beg to differ. I don’t think the antagonism has much to do with people hating each other after a break-up. If it did, people who broke up amicably would all stay friends. I think the real reason people who know each other intimately avoid one another is because of shame.

That’s it. Simple. How, you ask? If a woman has seen me naked and then she moves on to someone else, when I see her, all I think is that she’s discussing me with that other chap. I see them, in my mind, lying in bed, heads on their pillows, and the woman describing the birthmark on my thigh.

“He says it’s shaped like Somalia,” I see her saying with a smile. “You ask me, it looks like cow poop that someone stepped into.”

“Oh, that’s nothing,” says her man after they’ve laughed at my expense. “Do you know my ex left me because she said we didn’t make love often enough? Thing is, every time she took off her make-up and came to bed, I wanted to run. It was like sleeping with a complete stranger.”

“I know,” my ex would agree wholeheartedly. “It’s like walking into the bedroom with Beyonce. She walks into the bathroom and Queen Camilla walks out.”

Then they would laugh the obnoxious self-aware laugh of people new in love. The same laugh you ‘looove’ the first time you meet your significant other. The same laugh that makes you cringe when you break up.

“Have you heard her laugh?” a friend of mine once asked of his ex. “I swear she sounds like her vocal cords are performing acrobatics in her throat while being force-fed alcohol and cocaine.”

I couldn’t even visualise what he was saying, but I could tell he’d thought about the issue for some time.

When I date now, sometimes I catch myself wondering what the woman will say about me afterwards. There are nights I don’t fall asleep for fear I might snore and she’d tell her friends I sounded like an old Leyland lorry going up the hill at Kinungi. She might even go ahead and describe exactly what she thought that lorry was ferrying. Some people are detail-oriented like that.

But no other fear cripples a man like being bad in bed and having his ex broadcast this to the entire world. Inside every man’s head — it doesn’t matter if he’s a 50-year veteran or a 20-something newbie — lives a proper honest-to-God Casanova; a Don Juan who can not only woo any woman, he can drive her nuts in bed.

But reality has taught us different, right ladies? I don’t believe there’s a man on God’s earth who truly knows what a woman wants, and that’s mostly because most women don’t know what they want. A man can spend 10 years in a marriage, giving it his best, and when asked, his wife will describe her nights in bed in one word: Meh.

I’ve said before that breaking up is one of the reasons why I’ll be a bachelor for life, and now you know why.