Again, two of my friends are divorcing.

It is always difficult for everyone when friends decide to go their separate ways. These are people who have hosted me several times. These are people in whose homes I have eaten scrumptious egusi soup with pounded yam.

It is particularly hard because I admire this couple. I have known them as a couple who found God. I somehow assumed that they also found orgasm. In a self-centered society like America , finding orgasm is as important as finding God.

Unlike other cases before, it is the man that is opening up to me. The woman is yet to do so. And I think it is because she knows I have no real influence on the man. So, for the first time, I find myself looking at marital grief from the perspective of the man.

He started by saying, “I want to be the one to tell you this before you hear it from other sources. But I don’t want you to think I am seeking your opinion. I am no longer living my life through a referendum of my family or friends.”

The issues weren’t just the usual – finances, respect, domestic roles and infidelity. This is a case of a man who has decided to revolt from Africa ’s restrictive societal expectations for a life of personal fulfillment that he could not find in his relationship. “I want to be free as a bird,” he said. “I make six figures, yet I live in penury. I worked very hard to get to where I am. I should be happy but I am not.”

For those who do not know, there are primarily two kinds of men – those who are deprived and those who are privileged. It is the interaction of the deprived and the privileged that is at the center of all the conflicts of this world.

Remove men who have large penis and those who have small penis and life will be calm, no nuclear weapons, no star wars and, as a matter of fact, no Iraq war. No one will be doing things to compensate for what is not there. And no one will be doing things out of an exaggerated sense of importance.

When a man decides that life is too short to be going around grumbling, hardly smiling and constantly sacrificing the self for some utopian expectations of society, such a man is on the verge of an eruption. When a man decides that 99.9 % of people who leave their home country for life abroad end up marrying the wrong people, some due to limitations of time and resources, and some due to desperation, that man is about to explode.

When a man feels that he has been taken advantage of because he is humble, gentle, and loyal; when he feels that the treatment meted out to him would not have been so had he been a philanderer, bar hopper, wife beater, that man is on his way out. When a man says that even God has told him he has tried, that man’s relationship is so yesterday.

One common trend that is seen in disintegrating relationships is that stories of people you thought you knew begin to sound strange. You hear stories and find yourself questioning whether the man or woman is capable of such thoughts, words and actions. For sure, something about failing marriages bring out the beast in us. Again, I heard that in the voice of my friend who under normal circumstances would have been rational and philosophical.

In the words of another divorcing friend, “Men are not complex. They want simple things, yet women spend their lifetime trying to figure men out. Men want nothing but to be valued, loved, and respected or as Chris Rock puts it, “feed me, f…k me and shut the f...k up.” Some women do feed men. Some do f…k men. But the world has not yet been blessed with a woman who is capable of shutting the f…k up.

“To men, ‘shutting the f…k up’ should have been the easiest part. But lo and behold, it is the most difficult for women. Why? Because women want conversation more than they want sex. ‘You don’t talk. You don’t share your emotion. You bottle things up.’

“Men will easily give up food and sex if that will make women ‘shut the f…k up,’” he concluded.

Sigmund Freud was once quoted as saying, “The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is “What does a woman want?”

In the light of my friends’ impending divorce, I have been forced to ask myself, what do men want? I guess we don’t know because nobody has ever asked.

If you ask me, I think the domestication of men has come to an end. Across the channel, the cycle is restarting. Men want to be left alone to be animals again. Surely there is nothing wrong with that. Or is there?

Thank God nobody asked me that question: What do men want?