Do women pretend when looking for a husband material? Well, the truth is they do. Do men do the same? You bet. We are all in the game, unfortunately. We all seem to have pasts that are as long as from Lagos to Gombe and so there is so much to hide. And we all want to hide them. But if you ask me, men encourage the pretext and the lies. A man who has taken 10 maidenheads wants to marry a virgin. Why shouldn’t there be girls who will do a concoction of alum and other corrosives to make his passage and entry hard and tough? If he does not want a lie, nobody will tell him.

If the relationship is not likely to run into a ditch, all truths will be told. But what man wants to know that you have dated 10 men before him? If he doesn’t ask, why should you tell him? And if he asks, you must manage the truth. Even the Bible says we must apply wisdom in these things. What a man does not know will not hurt him, right?

Now, there are also girls who used to be bad but have now repented and changed their ways, should we not forgive them and allow them to live their new lives? Men are really romantics at heart though their ego and macho images won’t allow them to own up to it. We know and that is why we protect them from bad stories. Eh, did somebody say that it is still not right for a woman to not tell the truth about her past? Well, what truth, that she dated the Vice-Chancellor in her undergraduate days and her current boss to get the job? Tell me what good that will serve and I will tell you that there are a few dumb girls left in Nigeria.

It’s okay to tell the man you want to marry where you are coming from. In fact, I am all for telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but men tend to use these things against women in courts of disagreement later on. You tell a man you once had a brief relationship with your landlord to save your widowed mother and siblings the embarrassment of being thrown on the streets for unpaid rent and he accuses you of dating your boss five years later.

You tell a man that you lost your virginity at the age of 14 to a man who eventually ran away with your mother’s box of jewelries and he still suspects that you are seeing the man even when all you feel for the dupe is intense hatred that has taken you to many churches for several deliverance sessions. Is it not just safe and better for all concerned to apply wisdom?

Yes sometimes the best thing is full disclosure but it’s not always safe.

Yes, secrets mess up good relationships and the only way to avoid dangerous surprises is to tell each other ‘everything’ but does the reality of our culture support full disclosure? Men have immunity. Women don’t. For instance it is no big impediment for a man to have slept with 20 women before meeting his wife.

In fact, such stories are endorsements of his manhood. He is expected to have done terrible things in his hey days. Women are supposed to be chaste. But is it not women he was sleeping with all the time he was proving that his circumcision was done with NAFDAC-approved scalpel? What stories do you guys figure those women will have to tell? And can they tell their stories without being lynched?

Men break hearts but they don’t want damaged goods. Aren’t they full of themselves? Someone will marry the goods they damaged, so they must manage the ones that their fellow men have damaged. That is the beauty of everybody not doing full disclosure.I love that part.

Eh-en, have you noticed that women who have children outside wedlock, love children, most of the times have difficulties finding single young men to marry? Well, the men don’t want to marry ‘after-one’. If a woman decides to hide.her love child or tells her man that the child is her nephew or niece, she will be accused of hiding something. What is wrong with having a child? Nothing, if you ask me.

In fact, it should be an added advantage. In these days of declining fertility, a woman who has had a child should be hot cake.

She has proved that she is fertile. She needs no fertility test. She is not black market. But the men want what they think is ‘chassis’ but which is actually an engine that has been ringed or ‘dropped’ five times. Abortion no dey show for face, abi? But do our men want to know any of that? No, an after-one is a no-go area. That is how they end up with cars that have no engines.

Bottom line. If men want the truth, they will hear it. If they are allergic to it, we will tell them what they want to hear. It is a simple principle of demand and supply.

• Egbemode was managing director/editor-in-chief of New Telegraph Newspaper, president of the Nigerian Guild of Editors and commissioner for information in Osun State. Email: egbemode3@gmail.com