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The title should have been a big clue as to what I was about to witness, since it was  entitled “Cheaters vote-off”. Yet I watched on. The first guest was the one whom I inevitably wanted to slap. She had flame colored hair,  a feisty attitude to match and proudly proclaimed on entrance that she was “no boo boo the fool”. She then proceeded to tell her story.

Supposedly she has been with her man for the past 2 years, and more recently he had become unreliable. He had taken to going off for days on end without so much as a phone-call, and on return favored the excuse of “being with the boys”. She told of her birthday when after returning home from work and getting all dressed up to go out, she was left manless, when her love failed to turn up. The gifts he left on her bed the next day whilst she was at work were no compensation for his absence, and so in her sadness she decides that the man she loves must be cheating on her.

She continues to say that she knows for a fact that he’s cheating on her since their love life has deteriorated about as much as his reliability, and since he isn’t giving ‘it’ to her he MUST  be giving it to someone else.

It is at this point, between when she declares that she has proof and Ricki Lake announces that a lie detector test had been administered to the accused that I wanted to reach into the television screen and slap the words out of the guest's mouth.  I imagined doing this while shouting to her simultaneously: “If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and it’s name is either Donald, Daisy or Daffy, then dammit woman its a Duck!!”

By the time the accused other half has come out, we all can guess the outcome. His lie detector comes back and he is proven to have lied about cheating. By this stage I doubt anyone even cares, including the guest who is now jumping up and down screaming “I told you, I told you, you were cheating!” Yes honey, WE ALL knew.

It makes me think, why is it that when faced with facts, we still search for more proof, before we are willing to take action. What is it about a dying relationship that can send even the most sensible of us into a stage of denial? The guest on the show claimed she was convinced and had proof that her man was cheating on her. That alone should have made her leave the pain, but more subtle than that is the fact that if you’re in a relationship with that much distrust and dishonesty in the first place then does that not make you a sitting duck?

Onyx Knight