JEDDAH: Sarah’s husband is so suspicious of her that he sleeps with the house key inside the pillowcase.
“He doesn’t even put the key under the pillow but inside the case, because he thinks that while he’s asleep I’ll pull the key from under the pillow,” she said.
What is her husband worried about?
“He thinks that I’m going to have an affair the moment he turns his back!” says Sarah.
In five years of marriage Sarah has tried countless times to convince her husband of her love for him, but he still continues to distrust her. The man is so obsessed and consumed by his suspicions that sometimes, she says, he dreams about her seeing another man and wakes up angry until he realizes it was just a dream. “I even gave up my mobile phone; I never answer the home telephone either. When I had a mobile, he used to listen to every call. It was very impersonal,” said Sarah.
Ghadeer broke off her engagement due to the jealousy of her fiancé.
“When he first asked for my hand, everything about him seemed fine and the engagement took place. But then one day I saw him outside the institute where I studied. Slowly my family realized that he was keeping watch on our house and following me around everywhere I went,” she said.
Not only did he watch her house, but when a cousin came to visit and stayed overnight, Ghadeer’s fiancé phoned her brother and asked him: “Why did a stranger sleep in your house and in which room did he sleep?”
Ghadeer was outraged and said, “He wanted to find out if our cousin slept in a room next to mine!” After that, she broke off the engagement.
Housewife Iman, who has been married for 15 years, is fed up with her jealous husband’s unjustifiable, unreasonable suspicions — despite the fact that in 15 years of marriage there has been nothing but solid proof that she is a decent and respectable woman.
“When I fight with him and tell him ‘I’ve had enough,’ he apologizes and says it’s his nature and that he can’t help it,” she said.
“And he doesn’t stop — at least once a week he tells me he’s going out with his friends and won’t be home till dawn and then he comes back secretly after half an hour or so and lurks around the compound of our house like a thief. Once, in fact, I thought there was a burglar and was about to call the police, but then I discovered the man was my husband. You’d think he’d stop after that, but no, he is still the same,” Iman added.
The causes for men not trusting their wives can be many, including mental disorders and drug addiction, according to social worker Suzan Al-Mashhadi at Al-Amal Drug Rehab Hospital.
“This problem begins with an education that fails to teach the importance of honesty and openness. Sometimes I find that women are afraid to tell their husbands about former engagements, because unfortunately, many men don’t understand that when a woman tells her husband of an old relationship it is a clear sign that she wants to start with a clean slate and not have any secrets between them,” Al-Mashhadi said, adding that even men keep past relationships from their wives thinking they too will harbor the same jealousy and doubt.
“As a result of this, a cycle begins in which the wife keeps constantly defending herself and the husband keeps accusing,” she said. “There are also cases in which the husband is constantly unfaithful to the woman and because of his own infidelity he thinks that his wife is the same.”
Al-Mashhadi says this kind of distrust is poisonous to a marriage and may require counseling. “The husband’s mental state should be examined, as there are some drugs that rouse suspicion in people’s minds,” she said.
Drugs like hashish cause dystopia, a temporary mental condition where the user becomes acutely paranoid during the period of the “high.”
Apart from the ill effects of drug abuse and alcoholism, some men are inherently suspicious of women. The solution, Al-Mashhadi says, is effective communication, understanding and trust. And when a spouse is willing to openly discuss previous relationships, this gesture should be rewarded to promote honesty rather than punished to encourage him or her to be secretive.
