Dear gentle reader, will you be my mistress?

Why are you startled? It is only a question. Ah. I see it now, the discomfort. The slight tightening in the chest. The instinctive recoil. Very well. My apologies. But why does the word disturb you?

No one really asks you that in real life. No one hands you the mistress title at the beginning. You do not knowingly audition for second place. You slide into it. You are caught in a whirlwind of affection first and reality later. Because truly, if someone names the role upfront, you must decide consciously. And conscious decisions carry accountability. Emotional drift does not.

That is why, like much of the world glued to Bridgerton, I found Benedict Bridgerton’s question so jarring.

“Will you be my mistress?” 

I mean, who asks that? Where was “Will you be my girlfriend?” Where was “Will you marry me?” We are accustomed to romance being dressed in upward mobility. Girlfriend leads to fiancée. Fiancée leads to wife. Each title ascends to signal elevation. But mistress? Mistress signals placement. A boundary. A ceiling. It is not an invitation to build a life. It is an invitation to occupy a compartment. And perhaps that is why the moment unsettled so many of us. Not because it was historically inaccurate, aristocratic societies were full of such arrangements, but because it was brutally clear. It stripped romance of its euphemisms. In real life, the role is rarely offered so plainly. Instead, it begins with tenderness, with attention, with someone saying you are different, that you understand them in ways their partner does not. It begins in private, where everything feels expansive. The limitations appear later in cancelled holidays, hidden phone calls, and carefully managed weekends. By the time you recognise the architecture of the relationship, you are already inside it.

Which raises a quieter, more uncomfortable question: if we were asked as directly as Sophie was, would we still say yes?

The marriage ecosystem

In theory, marriage is meant to be complete; two people choosing each other publicly and exclusively in a partnership of stability and shared life. But human relationships are rarely that tidy. Across cultures and centuries, the figure of the mistress has persisted. Sometimes hidden, sometimes tolerated, and sometimes quietly institutionalised.

The saying that nearly every high society gentleman has a mistress sounds scandalous, but historically, it was not always treated as one. In many elite circles, marriage was about lineage, inheritance and alliances. Love and emotional intimacy were sometimes expected to exist elsewhere. The wife represented legitimacy while the mistress represented passion.

Today, we rarely use the word mistress. It feels theatrical, almost antique, very Victorian. Instead, we soften it to monikers like situationships, side-chic, side-dish, gacungwa, ndogo ndogo, sugar baby, you get the gist. Sometimes the language of allure includes phrases like:

“It’s complicated.”
“He’s separated.”
“You wouldn’t understand our connection.”

While the vocabulary has evolved, the architecture has remained the same.

Within the modern relationship ecosystem, the wife frequently represents stability: the home, the children, the shared public life. The mistress, or whatever contemporary label we choose, often occupies another role entirely: affirmation, novelty, emotional intensity, sometimes even escape.

Psychologists who study infidelity often point to a mixture of forces that pull people into such arrangements: novelty-seeking, ego validation, unmet emotional needs, and what behavioural scientists call compartmentalisation–the ability to maintain two emotional worlds without confronting the contradiction between them. The married partner may genuinely feel affection for both relationships. The mistress may genuinely believe she has found something unique. The wife may or may not know that the ecosystem has expanded beyond two people.

Human beings are remarkably skilled at sustaining contradictions when desire is involved.

The economics of desire

But let us speak plainly about something rarely acknowledged in polite conversations: the material dimension.

I know a woman today who could be called a mistress, a mpango wa kando, as many Kenyans would like to call them whose life has completely transformed in under a year. A car, land, a house, you name it! I also know of a woman who lived the opposite story. She was also a mistress, but, and allow me to call her a mumu, she was there for love. She believed in the emotional connection, the intimacy, the whispered sweet promises that perhaps one day he would choose her. In the spirit of women collecting reparations from patriarchy, she has nothing to show for it. No house, no land, no car, no bicycle or even the sweatshirts that women would steal when visiting their boyfriends. Nothing! Just years spent hoping and pining over the aspirations that one day she might be upgraded from hidden to chosen.

And here is where the conversation becomes uncomfortable.

A mistress who enters the arrangement hoping to become Mrs. often places herself in the most precarious emotional position possible. Because the role of mistress, by design, is not structured to transition upward. It is structured to remain exactly where it is – on the side. But hey, a special shoutout to the Queen Consort of the United Kingdom! When love becomes the primary currency in that space, the arrangement can easily become emotional torture. You wait, you hope and interpret every gesture as a sign of a future that may never come. Meanwhile, the structure remains intact.

Some women, however, enter the arrangement with clearer expectations. They understand the limitations. They negotiate what the arrangement offers: travel, houses, financial security, a lifestyle upgrade. In that version of the relationship, the dynamic becomes transactional rather than aspirational. Willing buyer, willing seller. And perhaps the most ironic twist is that society often condemns these women more harshly than it condemns the men sustaining the arrangement.

The class dimension

There is another uncomfortable truth we rarely say aloud: historically, keeping a mistress was tied to power and wealth. Kings had mistresses. Aristocrats had mistresses. Industrialists had mistresses. The arrangement required resources; the ability to sustain two emotional worlds without destabilising the first. A mistress, in that context, was not just a romantic complication but a part of a display of status. But modern life has distorted this dynamic.

Increasingly, men with very limited resources attempt to replicate the same structure – wives, girlfriends, mistresses – without the economic capacity to sustain even one stable household. The result is not luxury but chaos, emotional strain, financial instability and multiple women “coming to each other as women” on texts and phone calls to fight over scarcity. If historically a mistress relationship at least offered material advantage to the woman involved, what happens when the man has nothing to offer but sweet nothings and midnight booty calls on the weekend when he can leave the confines of his home to go to the club or hang with “the boys”?

At that point, the arrangement stops being strategic and becomes something far more precarious: a situation where everyone is losing but no one wants to admit it.

When secrecy collapses

The mistress ecosystem also reveals itself most dramatically when secrecy fails. Public life is full of examples of powerful men whose ambitions collapsed under the weight of sexual scandal. In the United States, Bill Clinton endured global humiliation during the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal. In Kenya, former Cabinet minister Mukhisa Kituyi, who had positioned himself for a potential presidential bid in 2022, saw his ambitions fade after a 2021 scandal dragged his private life into public scrutiny. The paradox is striking: society often tolerates discreet infidelity but reacts violently when it becomes visible. Which raises an uncomfortable thought… perhaps the true danger is not the mistress, but the lie.

If some men were honest about their desire to maintain multiple relationships, would the betrayal wound feel less deeply when discovered? Or would such honesty simply expose how fragile many marriages already are?

But then there is an even more complicated question beneath that one.

Who are the women who choose to remain in marriages where respect has clearly eroded? Is it love? Shared history? Children? Economic reality? Social expectation? Or is the title of Mrs. so powerful that many would rather remain married than confront the humiliation of walking away?

The final question

Mistresses are often treated as villains in the story of marriage. But perhaps they are less the cause of the fracture and more the symptom. They appear where desire escapes structure. Where emotional needs go unmet. Where power, secrecy, and opportunity intersect.

And yet the most uncomfortable truth might be this: the mistress arrangement only survives because somewhere, someone believes the illusion will eventually turn into legitimacy. That one day the hidden relationship will step into the light.

But what if the system was never designed to allow that transformation in the first place?

And if someone asked you, with complete honesty, no illusions, no promises, no upward mobility, “Will you be my mistress?”

Would you still say yes?

Tracy Ochieng is a staff writer with Books in Africa. Email: tracy.ochieng@ekitabu.com

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