Men Who Keep Girlfriends but Deny Wives Boyfriends Are Hypocrites, Says Pastor Sarah Omakwu

The remarks, shared on X by ChuksEricE on Friday, have resonated widely because they addressed a tension that sits unspoken at the centre of many Nigerian marriages. The expectation that women must remain strictly faithful while men enjoy a quiet tolerance for extramarital relationships is deeply embedded in social norms. Moreover, Pastor Omakwu’s willingness to call it out publicly, from a position of spiritual authority, has made her words land with unusual force.

You know men cannot stand adultery. It is easier for a woman to forgive a man. A man will never forgive a woman,

That observation is rooted in a reality many Nigerian women recognise immediately. The cultural script around infidelity has historically been written with different rules for husbands and wives. A man who strays is often quietly forgiven or excused by family and community members. A woman who does the same, however, faces a far harsher reckoning, including the possibility of losing her marriage, her standing in her community and even her children.

Pastor Omakwu did not minimise the pain that infidelity causes. She pointed directly to the moral inconsistency of a man who holds his wife to a standard he refuses to apply to himself. “But I want to tell you men that if you’re one of those keeping girlfriends but your wife cannot keep a boyfriend, you are a hypocrite. You are double standards,” she said.

The directness of that statement is striking. Furthermore, it comes from a woman who has spent decades ministering to married couples. She understands, from pastoral experience, the damage that precisely this kind of hypocrisy inflicts on families. She is not speaking theoretically. She is speaking from years of watching marriages fracture under the weight of expectations that only ever ran in one direction.

Pastor Omakwu grounded her argument in a principle that cuts across cultures and traditions. “What is good for the goose is good for the gander. If I can’t follow a man, you can’t follow a woman,” she said.

In that single sentence, she challenged one of the most persistent myths in Nigerian marriage culture. The idea that fidelity is a feminine virtue while male straying is a masculine inevitability has caused enormous harm. It has kept women in marriages where they are betrayed repeatedly, told to endure and to pray, while their husbands suffer no equivalent pressure to change. Additionally, it has produced a generation of children who have watched their fathers live by one standard and demand another of their mothers.

The argument for mutual accountability in marriage is not a modern import or a Western idea. It is embedded in the scriptures that Nigerian Christianity claims as its foundation. The Apostle Paul’s instructions in 1 Corinthians 7 are explicit that a husband’s body belongs to his wife and a wife’s body belongs to her husband. The obligation is symmetrical. Neither partner holds a right to themselves that they deny the other. Pastor Omakwu was not introducing a foreign concept. She was holding men accountable to a standard their own faith already requires of them.

Beyond the question of hypocrisy, Pastor Omakwu also spoke about what it actually means to choose a spouse. Her words moved from confrontation to instruction. She reminded all married people, men and women alike, of the depth of the commitment they made.

When you decide to choose one person to marry, it means that I have looked at all the men in the world and all the women and I decided you are the one,

That framing reframes marriage not as a social convention or a legal arrangement, but as a deliberate, eyes-open choice made in full awareness of all the alternatives. Indeed, the act of choosing one person to marry is implicitly a choice to set aside everyone else. It is not a choice made under duress or ignorance. It is a choice made with knowledge, and that knowledge makes any subsequent betrayal not just a personal failure but a violation of a specific, deliberate promise.

She concluded her remarks by affirming the unconditional nature of that commitment. “So come rain, come shine, we are together,” she said. Those words carry the full weight of what marriage is supposed to mean. It is not a conditional arrangement that holds as long as it is convenient. It is a partnership built to absorb difficulty and remain intact on the other side of it.

Pastor Sarah Omakwu leads Family Worship Centre and is widely regarded as one of Nigeria’s most influential women in ministry. Her voice on matters of faith, family and gender carries authority built over decades of pastoral work. When she speaks on marriage, she speaks as someone who has counselled hundreds of couples, watched some of their relationships collapse, and seen others find their way back from what seemed like irreversible damage.

In this instance, she chose to speak uncomfortable truth rather than comfortable counsel. The thousands of shares and reactions her words have generated online suggest that many Nigerians, men and women, were waiting for someone in her position to say exactly what she said. The conversation she has started is one the church, and the country, still needs to have.

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