It Is Hell Living Under The Same Roof With A Thieving Spouse

We shall call them the enemies from within or those that facilitate an inside job. There is nothing more frustrating than living with a thieving partner. If social media accounts and confessions are anything to go by, people have been suffering silently for being conned and robbed by their beloved spouses. The worst thing is that there is nothing much you can do because of the strings that attach you to that spouse. 

"But it drains your soul," says Rachael wa Njiru. The mother of one could not believe her eyes as she replayed footage from her secret nanny cam.

"I felt sad. I could not believe it. I just wept." When asked if she confronted him about the incident, she shrugs her shoulders and says, "I waited for a week, and when it occurred to me that I would not get any explanation, I just asked him, and when he denied, I sent him the footage."

"The betrayal finally led to the end of our narrow road, and we parted ways."

For Joseph N., a born-again pastor, the mother of his children had been pinching his cash for more than a decade. He found out the culprit "accidentally" when he forgot his coat in the house one Sunday. Apparently, his wife had been left in the house applying makeup while her husband kept the vehicle warming up.

On returning, Joseph found his wife emptying his safe and stashing money in a small undergarment purse he had never seen before. He just stood there zombified and shocked until his wife turned and saw him.

"She just broke down and confessed that she had been pinching my cash for about ten years. The funny thing with our mind is that whenever we encounter discrepancies, it tries to compensate for that discord with doubts. I had been getting wrong balances in my safe, but I couldn't imagine my soulmate could be the one pinching it."

"But the bible says that you are one. One man, one money, I guess," I jest.

"No, no, no! Spouses should coexist with mutual respect for one another's belongings, including cash. If they have an arrangement of joint ownership of monetary resources in their home, then that's another story. However, most of the time, each partner controls his/her own financial resources, especially the petty ones."

"It was very embarrassing," says Jane Doe*. "When I checked our business's bank account and found some cash missing, I went ballistic in the banking hall."

"After a few minutes of drama, the branch manager presented to me an encashed cheque that bore my signature and my husband, who is my co-director, as the drawee. Apparently, he had faked my signature and ridden on my trust."

"I felt stupid as I apologized. Now, here was my husband sabotaging our very own business venture."

On his part, Mr. Nzioka felt like he was being double-charged his dowry payment when he bumped into an M-Pesa statement that bore his wife's name but had a phone number that he had never seen before. Interestingly, it was the rats that drew him to the statement when they nested inside the pockets of an old coat he had not been wearing for a while. As he was flashing them out, a document fell out from an inner pocket.

On scrutinising the document, he realised that all their capital for their grocery business was being sent in instalments to his mother-in-law by his wife.

"I had resuscitated that business for about three times and I was not very sure why the shop was making massive losses.''

With the statement at hand, he candidly told his wife that he would never fund that business again if it collapsed.

"And that was the end of the thievery.''

But what makes spouses have sticky fingers in the first place?

“It is greed,” says Jeremiah, a trained counsellor. “When one spouse has no qualms pinching his partner’s cash, it becomes such a complicated issue to even remedy.”

“And it is more of shooting your foot. How do you just wake up one day and decide to throw away all the trust to the wind?,” He wonders. 

Misappropriation of family funds can be dangerous at times. A content creator based at Kirinyaga County had to intervene in an incident when a drunkard was being hacked by his estranged wife. Apparently, the family head had sold their only cow and engaged in a drinking spree before going back home broke. 

And when he could not point his finger elsewhere, James Ngandu found himself disciplining his young children for missing notes here and there. The most shocking thing was that even though his wife was witnessing the sagas, she always reprimanded them openly too.

On suspicions that the children were playing foul, James set a trap and left a few notes at the sofa while he hid behind the sitting room window.To his utter shock, he witnessed his wife pocketing the money before she disappeared in the bedroom. He left the scene and went ahead to attend to his errands.

"What killed my heart was the fact that when I asked about the money when I returned, my wife Grace looked at our children with red eyes and commanded them to confess who had taken the money. I couldn't believe my eyes. I dismissed the case and felt sorry for my innocent children."