I chased her for months. I made her see the intentions of my heart. I needed someone to be my wife and not just a girlfriend. She kept telling me she wasn’t marriage material, so I should look elsewhere. My heart was already committed to her, so I wasn’t ready to listen to her dismissive response to my proposal.

What I liked about her was her receptiveness. Though she said no to a relationship, anytime I needed her, she made herself available. We went on dates, I visited her home, and she treated me like I was her boyfriend. She would cook and serve me and talk about the future with me as though I was in it.

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I asked her to be truthful with me and tell me why she didn’t want a relationship with me. She said I wanted marriage, but she didn’t see herself as ready. “I can wait. Where am I going? I can stay and wait for you until you’re ready. No rush.”

A lot changed that day. She allowed a kiss in her room. I asked if the kiss meant anything, and she said no. “It’s just a kiss, nothing more.” Then she smiled mischievously. I told her she was my girlfriend whether she liked it or not.

The days ahead were happy ones. She called often, more than she normally would, and then she said she was in love with me, but her stubborn mind wouldn’t allow her to say yes. That’s how our relationship started. She didn’t give a definite yes, but in our minds, we were a couple. She spent a weekend with me not long afterwards, and we did everything only people in committed relationships would do.

I didn’t ask what that meant. To me, our love story had begun. When I’m in love, I let it show. I’m not the kind to keep the woman I’m dating in the dark, so I started posting her on my status with endearing captions. She liked it, but when I asked her to do the same, she told me she would wait for a while because, according to her, our relationship hadn’t matured yet.

No offence. It didn’t change anything until one day, after intimacy, she told me, “I want to be honest with you. I’m not doing it with only you. So it’s better you use protection.”

I was shocked. If she had said it before we did it, I might have gone flaccid immediately, but this was right after I thought we’d had a great time together. I asked her to explain. She said she couldn’t go any further than she had already said. She was only telling me to protect myself, but if I wouldn’t do it, that was also fine with her.

I used the rest of our time together to probe that statement. I wanted to know who the other man was. She eventually told me he was an older man she had been seeing long before I came into the picture. The older man was the reason she kept rejecting my proposal.

I felt let down, actually, especially when she told me she was seeing him because of money. The man provided for her. He paid her rent and also gave her allowances. She couldn’t expect those things from me because I’m not at that financial level.

For the first time in our relationship that day, she used love in a sentence. “I’m with you because I’ve come to love you. He knows I don’t love him, but he doesn’t care. He even knows about you.”

I wasn’t angry but felt disappointed that I wasn’t the only one in her life. I felt very small that I couldn’t do all that the man was doing for her. I accepted my limitation but asked how long she was going to be with him. She said she was going to leave soon because she had learned she couldn’t have everything in life.

I gave her the benefit of the doubt and waited patiently for the day she would tell me that the older man was no longer in her life. Months later, she told me she was pregnant. I was waiting for her to add, “But you’re not responsible.” That didn’t come, so I asked her. She answered, “Who else? Who else has been sleeping with me without protection?”

“Do you want to tell me that man has been using protection all the time?”

“No, he doesn’t, but he had a vasectomy eight years before he met me. He can’t get me pregnant.”

I started shaking, but I didn’t mince words when I told her we needed to get rid of it. She asked why. “You said you were going to marry me, so what changed?” I screamed, “How do I marry you when you were sleeping with another man?”

She told me the pregnancy was an opportunity for her to let the man go and become focused on what we had built. I told her it was the wrong place to start. We needed to start from a place of trust first before anything else. And then she dropped the bomb, “We will wait. Come when you trust me.”

“You and who will wait?”

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“Me and the baby. You can take all the time in the world. We’ll wait.”

The pregnancy is growing each day, but she’s not the kind of woman I want to raise my kids with. I don’t think my child will forgive me if I give them a mother like this. I’ve said everything in this world, but she says no, she will have it. If I still don’t trust her, I can have a DNA test.

I can’t sleep. I don’t know what to do anymore. It strikes me that I’m going to be a father, and I wake up from sleep. I will stay awake all night thinking about how I got this one wrong. Hmmm.

—Emma

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