What cheating men (don’t) say
Maybe you don’t know it, but your husband is “separated at home”. It is the most frequent excuse that busy men give to their lover, so that the latter can let go without hesitation. Or at least that’s what the statistics say on the “Bugie Uomo” page, an Instagram profile with over one hundred thousand followers, which functions as a collector of all the nonsense that unfaithful men are capable of giving birth to. A gateway to a space previously unexplored, that is, the gray area of pathetic mystification in which certain men have always moved nimbly, cowardly. And in which from today you too can move around astonished, as long as you have a heightened sense of the ridiculous.
A few months ago, perhaps in conjunction with the Sangiuliano case, the journalist Guia Soncini wrote that the men of 2024 have not yet understood the physiological danger inherent in the modern act of taking a screenshot. And not even the hundreds of traitors who ended up on the profile founded by Emanuele, a 39-year-old from Ancona, who every day finds himself inundated with over seventy stories bordering on jokes sent by as many women, as well as the related screens to testify to their truthfulness, must have understood this. . In fact, anyone who thought that the page had been founded by an angry young lady looking for revenge was wrong. The birth of the account is karmic. Emanuele explains: “I have been in a relationship for twenty years, I have a son, and I am amazed every day at how terrifying one can be to get into someone’s pants. Our approach is to treat the topic with the necessary irony to make it accessible, our goal is to help women recognize the so-called ‘red flags’, i.e. the signals to pay attention to. Most of the women who write to us are between 25 and 35 years old”.
A real handbook to defend oneself from the “banality of evil” of the traitor, in short. A series of excuses that are often repeated the same as themselves and which offend the intelligence of those who pronounce them, before that of those who receive them. There are those who, for example, have gone so far as to type: “Sorry if I didn’t write to you this weekend, but I dropped my phone in a puddle.” Her response? “Ok, this ends up in Men’s Lies.”
Google Images, the trusted ally of treacherous (and stupid) men
Yes, the weekend: a great theme of clandestine relationships. It is precisely here that what Emanuele and his staff have nicknamed the “Ken Saturday Night Fever” gives his best, that is, the man who, finding himself having to spend Saturday and Sunday with his family after a week in the office (notoriously a frank), has to invent something to justify his sudden unavailability. In fact, he didn’t tell his lover who has a family at home. And here the two great early torments of the cheater come into play, the first alarm bells: the slight fever and the slight rear-end collision.
In fact, it happens that on Friday evening our hero collapses scientifically, or “develops a sudden pathological drowsiness, accompanied by a mild fever that makes it impossible for him to move from the house”. To accompany the communication, which takes place in the silence of a WhatsApp chat, the feverish Ken also sends a photo of the thermometer, to make everything more credible. Too bad that (spoiler!) it is regularly taken by Google Images. “What strikes me,” says Emanuele, “is that everyone says they have a fever of 37.3, no more. In short, something moderate, such as to then justify the rapid recovery that will take place promptly on Monday.” Not even a stretch of the imagination, basically. Equally moderate, then, must be the unexpected rear-end collision that on Friday night forces our champion to suddenly be confined at home over the weekend (also in this case, obviously, the photo of the crashed car is made in Google).
Finally there are the merciless, the serial traitors. The ones who disappear every evening when returning from the office, without dignity: “Sorry dear, but my neighbor has a bedroom right behind mine. I can’t talk.”
Dear wives, this is how they mislead you
The “neighbor” is obviously the wife who sleeps next to him. But, in this regard, how to divert the spouse’s suspicions? The Ken trained at the “Mylord Magic School” – as he was nicknamed by Emanuele&co – implements various strategies to disperse the clandestine relationship between the countless apps on the phone, until its total dematerialization. There are those who save their lover’s number as “suspected spam”, so that their call is diverted at the right time. There are still those who download the same game as their lover and talk to it in chat, so as not to pollute the most common apps. And, finally, there are those who go so far as to declare: “Sorry, dear, I won’t ask you to be a friend on Facebook. I want you to remain special and not just anyone.”
The neutralization of the lover, once the relationship has reached an advanced stage, occurs through various tactics. Which, as expected, have to do with the debasement of the victim, through dynamics that draw heavily on the more traditional sexism. The great classic to leverage is always him, the timeless sense of guilt: “I had to stay with my partner because she has an illness, if you don’t know what you’re talking about, shut up and be ashamed” up to the overused “You’re crazy” . Then there are the various “brat”, “bitch” and related terms of endearment, which are used with a clumsy attempt to add an affectionate transgression to the conversation, but which in reality have the deeper objective of reducing the unfortunate person to size, of putting her back in her place , or in the condition of “prey”.
There’s no such thing as impossible loves, stop watching Ozpetek
But the objective of this editorial is certainly not the classic polarization of “males against females”. In fact, in the face of so much despondency, there are two fronts of desolation that open up. On the one hand there is the male, who to define as “toxic” is far too ennobling because it means attributing to him a concept, therefore a three-dimensionality that does not belong to him, as he is spineless, devoid of vertebrae, emptied of his own ability to interface with the truth . But equally indefensible are those women who sit there and hear that “don’t worry, I’ll sleep with her but after all I’m yours”, “after Christmas I’ll talk to the lawyer”. “Nothing spices up married life like extramarital life”, wrote Guia Soncini in 2013, in his book “The husbands of others”. To those who wrote to her “We are made for each other but we cannot live with each other, because he is married”, the journalist Laura Campiglio instead replied, in her column ‘In place of the heart’: “Those made for each other ‘Other you recognize them immediately: they are together.’ In short, impossible loves don’t exist, stop watching Ferzan Ozpetek’s films.
And this is how Ken’s sad Odyssey sooner or later comes to an end. Which, obviously, always coincides with the more traditional victimization of convenience. Also in this case fake, artificial to the last: “I hope you find someone better than me”.
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