The Polygamist: It Was Never About Polygamy - Part Two
Part Two of a Three-Part Human Development Reflection | Dilys Sillah
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Matipa. Matipa. Matipa. Oh, Matipa. Where do I even begin?
Of the three women in The Polygamist, Matipa is maybe the easiest to judge and, for that very reason, the hardest to understand. It is tempting to reduce her story to a simple conclusion. She knowingly pursued a married man. She crossed boundaries that many women would never contemplate crossing. She became the other woman. End of story. Except it isn't.
If there is one thing I have learned after more than thirty years of studying human development and communication, it is that behaviour almost always has a beginning. People rarely wake up one morning and become someone entirely different. Our choices are often the culmination of experiences, beliefs and unmet needs that have quietly shaped us over many years. That does not remove responsibility for our decisions, but it does help us understand why those decisions seemed reasonable to the person making them.
This article is not about excusing Matipa. Neither is it about condemning her. It is about asking a far more interesting question: what was Matipa really trying to win?
On the surface, the answer appears obvious. She wanted Jonasi. She believed he was unhappy in his marriage, and she set about making herself indispensable to him. She was ambitious, determined and utterly convinced that she knew exactly what she wanted. The irony, however, is that what she thought she wanted and what she was actually searching for were two very different things.
Matipa began as Jonasi's brother's girlfriend. That detail is important because it tells us something about the way she approached relationships. Moving from one brother to another was not an accident or a moment of confusion. It was a conscious decision made with full knowledge that Jonasi was married. She knew exactly where he belonged, yet she convinced herself that where he belonged was no longer where he wanted to be.
Like many women who find themselves in relationships with unavailable men, Matipa believed the affair itself was evidence that the marriage had already failed. After all, why would a happily married man seek comfort elsewhere? It is a question that has persuaded countless women to ignore what was right in front of them.
Men who are having affairs often become extraordinarily skilled at telling each woman precisely what she needs to hear. The wife is told she is overreacting. The mistress is told the marriage is over. One woman is reassured; the other is promised. Both believe they possess a version of the truth, while the man remains the only person holding the whole story.
Listening to Matipa's journey reminded me of a song that captures her psychological position better than any paragraph could. Find Just Be Good to Me by the SOS Band, listen to it, and you will understand exactly what I mean. There is a line in that song about preferring a piece of someone to having nothing at all. That is where Matipa eventually arrived. She did not begin by asking for pieces of Jonasi. She wanted all of him. Yet, little by little, she began negotiating against her own heart. She accepted delays, excuses and partial commitment, convincing herself that temporary compromise would eventually become permanent security.
How many women have done exactly the same thing? One compromise becomes two. Two become ten. Before long, what once felt unacceptable begins to feel normal because the alternative requires facing a truth that is simply too painful to confront. That truth is this: maybe he was never leaving.
Validation has a remarkable way of disguising itself as love.
When I wrote about Essie, I spoke about the relationship between a father and his daughter, and the profound influence it has on the way many women experience love in adulthood. In my book Predator or Prince, I describe what I call the Hero Father and the Villain Father. A father who is absent is rarely absent in the mind of a little girl. She either creates a hero who would have been there if only circumstances had allowed, or she creates a villain who rejected her. Both narratives shape future relationships in very different ways. Matipa's story echoes that same search for validation. When our earliest need to be seen, affirmed and chosen has not been fully met, we sometimes spend adulthood trying to recreate the very feeling we missed in childhood. We look for someone else's decision to confirm our value. Being chosen becomes evidence that we are enough.
There is something else happening here that is rarely spoken about openly. A man can seem unremarkable when he is single, but the moment he is married and his wife appears to be a woman of a certain calibre, other women become interested. They sense that there must be something worth having if a woman of that standard has chosen him. Somehow, pursuing what another woman possesses becomes a way of declaring that we are equally worthy of it. It is not really about the man at all. It is about what having him says about us.
There is something else that many women in Matipa's position tell themselves. They say they owe the wife nothing because they are not the ones who exchanged vows. The marriage, they argue, is an agreement between husband and wife. Even though I have inserted myself as a third party, I owe nobody any loyalty, consideration, or explanation. The only person with an obligation is the husband.
This is not a moral judgement. It is a human assessment. Character and integrity are not defined solely by legal obligations; they are revealed by the decisions we make when no obligation compels us. A woman who understands her own value rarely finds fulfilment in building her happiness upon another woman's heartbreak. She does not need another woman's husband to convince herself that she is worthy of being loved. Matipa, however, was not really pursuing a husband. She was pursuing validation. There is an enormous difference between the two.
There is a saying that many women repeat with great confidence: a woman cannot take another woman's man if he truly belongs to her. I understand why people say it, but I believe it is both naïve and dangerous. Unless you are married to a Jonasi, that is, a man who will dive into anything with an orifice and a pulse, the only thing that is required is for a husband and wife to be going through some difficulty within their marriage. Whatever form that difficulty takes, it creates a chink in the armour, and it is through that opening that a woman who has set her sights on another woman's husband makes her play. That is her entry point. She does not burst through the front door announcing her intentions; she quietly comes in through the back door that vulnerability has left open.
Very few men wake up one morning and decide to have an affair. There is almost always a starting point. The woman who is playing the long game understands that her objective is not to become his lover overnight; it is to become someone he trusts. Friendship develops. Conversation becomes easier. Familiarity grows. She becomes the person who listens, who understands, who sympathises, who appears safe. The emotional attachment is established long before the physical relationship begins. By the time either of them recognises that a line has been crossed, the line has often been moving for months.
I deliberately withhold some of the finer details whenever I address this subject because my purpose is not to equip women to ensnare another woman's husband. My purpose is to explain why safeguards within a marriage matter. Nobody is superhuman. We all like to believe we are beyond temptation, yet when vulnerability inside a marriage meets someone who understands how to exploit it, people often find themselves in places they never imagined they would go.
Many years ago, I considered writing a course I would have called What They Didn't Tell You About Delilah. The story of Samson and Delilah has fascinated me for years, because contrary to popular imagination, Delilah did not overpower Samson through sexuality. I want you to think about that for a moment. Samson had his head in Delilah's lap. He was not on top of her. She was not on her knees. There was no physical intimacy happening in that moment at all. And yet it was in that quiet, in that position of apparent rest and trust, that Samson disclosed his most heavily guarded secret. The secret that would ultimately destroy him. Delilah understood something that many women have never been taught to recognise about themselves: the power that they carry. The question is simply whether that power is used wisely. She knew precisely which questions to ask, which silences to leave undisturbed, and how to make a man feel safe enough to surrender the very thing he should never have revealed. This is why when I hear women say that a man cannot be taken unless he wants to be, I always think: maybe the only reason he hasn’t been is that he hasn’t met a Delilah yet. If you want to protect your home, you need to be able to spot a Delilah coming. That is another story for another day.
Never underestimate the power of a woman. The tragedy is that many women underestimate their own power because they misunderstand where it truly lies. They assume it begins and ends with physical attraction, when in reality their greatest influence often resides in emotional intelligence, the capacity to listen, to reassure, to understand and to make another person feel seen. Power that is not understood rarely disappears; it simply becomes misplaced. Instead of building a life, it becomes invested in chasing one that already belongs to someone else.
As Matipa's emotions for Jonasi intensified, her capacity to rationalise her own behaviour diminished. She came to the house on more than one occasion, in full knowledge that Joyce was his wife and that this was their home. There was no consideration, no restraint and no acknowledgement that her behaviour was consuming not just her sense of reason but her own values in the process. She had allowed the desire to possess Jonasi to override everything else.
Matipa never believed she was settling. She believed she was waiting. She convinced herself that Jonasi remained with Joyce because of circumstance rather than choice, and that, given enough time, love would prevail. That is the lie many affairs survive on. If he could, he would already be with me. It is a comforting narrative because it transforms delay into hope. Hope built upon another person's indecision, however, has very weak foundations.
When the Lane Changed
Eventually, Jonasi did exactly what many married men do. He changed lanes. After everything Matipa believed they had built together, after all the promises she had chosen to believe and all the sacrifices she had already made, he returned to Joyce. All it took was for husband and wife to revisit the history they had built together, and what Matipa thought had disappeared suddenly re-emerged. The marriage she had convinced herself was over was not over at all. It was bruised, dysfunctional and deeply troubled, but it was still a marriage, and Jonasi chose his wife.
For many women, that should have been the moment to leave. It wasn't for Matipa. Jonasi then returned with a proposition, and he returned with that proposition because he already knew the answer before he asked the question. He understood Matipa well enough to know that she was unlikely to walk away. She could have said no. She could have said this is not the life I want. She could have chosen herself at that point. Instead, she accepted less than she had originally demanded because she still believed what so many women in her position believe: eventually he will choose me. He is only with his wife because of circumstance. If he had complete freedom, he would be with me.
How different is that from the little girl who convinces herself that her absent father would have been there if only circumstances had allowed? The psychology is remarkably similar. In both situations, reality is softened by hope because hope is easier to carry than grief.
Matipa remained. She had Jonasi's children, believing that motherhood would somehow strengthen the bond between them. Instead, it exposed the truth she had spent so long trying not to see. Jonasi still could not show up. When she had given birth and was at her most vulnerable, he was not offering security, partnership or support. He was demanding sex. That tells us everything we need to know about where his priorities lay.
One of the greatest misconceptions that has done immeasurable damage to many women, particularly within African communities, is the belief that if you satisfy a man sexually, you have secured his heart. We have been taught, directly and indirectly, that exceptional sex is the currency that guarantees commitment. It is one of the greatest fallacies surrounding relationships, because a man can receive good sex from many different women. Sex may satisfy an appetite, but it does not necessarily produce commitment, loyalty or love.
Matipa almost certainly believed that what she was giving Jonasi was something unique. If he kept coming back, surely she must have been giving him what Joyce was not. Yet Jonasi was not faithful to Joyce, and neither was he faithful to Matipa. Sometimes, when you believe you are the other woman, you are simply the other, other, other, other woman. The only reason you do not know it is because your understanding of his life is limited to what he chooses to reveal. While you are doing backflips, somersaults and head spins like a dancehall queen, convincing yourself that your sexual performance has him eating out of the palm of your hand, he may simply be demonstrating an appetite that has very little to do with you.
Matipa realised too late that she was out of her league. She believed she understood the game because she believed she was grown. She believed she knew how to navigate a man like Jonasi. She didn't. She was dealing with someone who was older, more experienced and far more practised in deception than she was in being a mistress. There was a power imbalance that she failed to recognise because confidence and experience are not the same thing. She mistook confidence for competence, and by the time she realised the difference, she had already built a life around a man who had no intention of becoming the man she imagined him to be.
There is an old saying: be careful what you wish for because you just might get it. Matipa wished for Jonasi. Eventually, she got him. The tragedy is that her hands could not hold what she had fought so hard to have placed in them. The relationship she had imagined became a prison. The man she believed would finally validate her became violent. The future she thought she was securing became the very future from which she had to escape. The prize she believed she had won turned out to be the booby prize.
The Real Prize
Maybe the greatest lesson Matipa teaches us is that validation sought through another person will always leave us vulnerable to that person's choices. When our value depends upon being preferred, desired or fought for, we hand someone else the authority to determine how we feel about ourselves. That is an impossible burden for any relationship to carry.
For a while, Matipa believed she had won. Jonasi had left Joyce and come to her. The battle appeared to be over. What she had not yet realised was that she had won the battle but she hadn't won the war. The war was never about getting Jonasi. The real battle was always about preserving herself, her peace and her future, and that was the battle she was quietly losing.
There is a profound difference between winning someone and winning in life.
Sometimes the greatest defeat in our lives arrives disguised as victory. We fight for something, pray for something, sacrifice for something and eventually receive it, only to discover that what we have won has begun to diminish us. The question, therefore, is not whether you won. The question is whether what you won was ever worthy of you.
Matipa's story is not simply the story of a mistress. It is the story of a woman who believed she had won. She believed that if she could secure Jonasi, she would finally prove something to herself. What she discovered was that winning the competition and winning in life are not the same thing.
The irony is that Matipa spent so much of her life trying to win Jonasi that she forgot the one person she could never afford to lose: herself. Real victory was never going to be found in possessing another woman's husband. Real victory begins the moment we stop measuring our worth by what we can take, who we can keep or who desires us, and start measuring it by the person we become.
This is where the Glass Framework™ becomes important. I believe every human being enters the world whole. Life has a way of taking from us through disappointment, rejection, abandonment and experiences that slowly diminish our capacity to see ourselves clearly. The answer is not to spend our lives searching for someone else to restore what life has taken. The answer is to begin the work of restoration ourselves.
Matipa fought hard for something she ultimately had to escape from. That alone should tell us something about the difference between winning and being free.
It is worth reflecting on how we are raised as women, because many of us are raised in a system that quietly teaches us to compete against each other for the affections of men. To demonstrate that we are more desirable, more worthy of being chosen over another woman. Some women will tell you with pride that they have no female friends, not realising that in saying so they reveal far more about their own limitations than about other women. When that competitiveness, that drive to outdo other women for a man's attention, becomes the norm that creates the foundation for the romantic relationships you enter into, the result is rarely what you imagined it would be. And then we tell ourselves that all is fair in love and war.
But is it?
Because if winning at love requires another woman to lose, and if the woman who ends up losing the most turns out to be ourselves, then we were never really playing the right game to begin with.
If any of that has resonated with where you are, you may find that When Letting Go Means Choosing You speaks to what comes next.
If this reflection has raised questions about your own relationships or the beliefs that have shaped them, you may wish to explore my books, the Glass Framework™, or the other reflections available on my website. For those who would prefer to explore these themes more personally, I also work with individuals through private consultations.
Dilys Sillah
Human Development Practitioner
Creator of The Glass Framework™
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If this reflection resonated with you, you may also wish to explore these ideas further.
Predator or Prince — How to find the man of your dreams, not your nightmares
When Love Feels One-Sided— Understanding one-sided love and finding your way back to yourself
When Letting Go Means Choosing You — The emotional reality of choosing yourself after loss
The Glass Framework™— An original human development methodology