On my first day at the court, I met a man seated at the corner of the room with his legs crossed. He was wearing a white shirt and black trousers, looking like one of the guys who work at the court. I walked up to him and asked, “I’m looking for the room where the divorce hearing goes on. Someone told me at the entrance that it’s around here.” He lifted his head up and looked at me. He said, “You’re in the right place.” He pointed at a door in front of us and said, “Go to that room and mention your name. They’ll tell you what next to do.” I went to the room, mentioned my name and they asked me to go and sit next to the man while they get ready to attend to me.

The chair right next to the man was empty so I sat on it and started scrolling through my phone. That was 2015. I was finally fed up with my marriage and had filed for divorce. I was in court that day for the first hearing. Our marriage was two years old. We lived together for only a year and got separated. For a whole year, I was living with my parents while my husband lived in the house we both rented. I dated my husband for one and a half years before we got married. We never had sex. He was a staunch Anglican who wanted to become an Anglican priest but along the line dropped out. So when he spoke about ‘no shuperu before marriage,’ I thought he was acting on his faith and beliefs in God. We got married and right during our honeymoon, I came to the shocking realization that my husband can’t perform in bed. 

He told me, “It hasn’t always been like that. It started only a few months ago. I’ve started taking medication. Doctors have assured me that it would be well and up very soon. Let’s not rush anything. The dead bones shall rise again.” It was a new marriage. My heart was broken. I was scared but I was ready to give him the benefit of the doubt. He mentioned doctors. He mentioned medicine. He mentioned that he had been assured of future wellbeing so I hoped for good things at the end of the tunnel. We went home and started living together but I never saw this man taking any medicine or visiting the hospital. I asked questions. “Where is the medicine you said you’re on? We’ve been here for over four months. You’ve never visited the hospital and I haven’t seen any improvement. What’s happening?” 

He assured me that everything was well. He told me it wasn’t yet the time to visit the hospital. He told me his medicines are finished and he would get the next one when he visits the hospital. Six months later, everything was still the same. I told him, “We are in this together. Let’s go and see the doctors. Now that you’re married, he might find a role for me or there’s something I have to do to help.” My husband got angry. He said I was giving him pressure. He asked, “What’s sex that you can’t live without? Is marriage all about that? What about companionship? What about having a place you can call home? How about having a man by your side till the end of days? How about all these other factors? Should we always be talking about just one aspect of marriage?”

I drew the conclusion I should have drawn long ago. “My husband belongs to the dark side of life and he isn’t going to get lit again.” Even after drawing that conclusion, I still didn’t know what to do with it. I didn’t share the problem with anyone hoping I could resolve things by my own. To make matters worse, he turned abusive. If I went to work and I didn’t come home early, he accused me of sleeping with another man. If I got tired and didn’t cook, he accused me of being a lazy wife. One day he got on my last nerve so I told him, “You can’t use your inadequacy as a man as the basis to judge me wrongly? You can’t perform so you think I’m out there chasing after men who can perform? Take your mind out of the gutters and find a solution to your problem.”

He slapped me. I screamed, “You slapped me? What did I do for you to…” Then another slap landed. Our marriage was eleven months old. By the end of that night, it was clear to me that I had to leave the house. He went to work the following day, and I packed out. I went to my parents’ house and it was the first time I told my parents about my husband’s disability in bed. My dad found it funny so he laughed. Later he said, “It means he lied to you. He knew his problem but didn’t declare it. This is no marriage at all.” My mom: “Imagine a man whose third-hand doesn’t work but is ready to abuse you with the useless hand that works.”

He came home to beg. He asked me to go back and live with him but I knew he’ll beat me again because the root cause of our fight hadn’t been resolved. I told him, “I’ve forgiven but work on your deficiency first. Once you’re healed. Call me and I will come running.” He tried all he could but I didn’t go back. After a year of living with my parents and two years of fruitless marriage, I decided to bring everything down to a divorce and it was the reason I was in that room that day, seated next to a man in a white shirt with his leg crossed and scrolling through my phone. 

After thirty minutes later, no one had attended to me. I turned to the man and asked, “Why is no one talking to me. It’s been thirty minutes already.” All this while, I thought he was a worker of the court.” He turned to me and asked, “What are you here for?” I answered timidly, “Divorce hearing.” He said, “It’s the same reason I’m here. They were on break when I came so maybe when they resume, they’ll attend to us.”

He’ll steal a glance at me and I will catch him. It turned into a conversation. His first question was, “How long have you been married?” When I answered he was shocked. He asked, ”But yours is new so why are you running away.” There was this calm about him that broke into my defenses. I wouldn’t have shared my marital issues with a stranger on a normal day but that day wasn’t normal plus he was in the same soup as me so I went all out and told him my story. He said, “Why are people becoming more deceptive these days? They even try to hide something they themselves know that they can’t hide it forever.” As the conversation matures I asked him the same question he asked me; “How many years have you been married for and why are you going through a divorce?”

“We have two kids. The first one is mine but the second one isn’t.”

Just when he was about to go into details, a man came to call him and they both went inside. When they finished what they were doing inside there, he came to me and said, “Give me your number. I owe you a full story. You’ve told m yours so I can’t hold mine from you.”       

I’ve forgotten how long it took him to call but it took some days before he finally called. His story broke my heart. It was worse than I thought. Once he finished telling me his story he said, “People are very deceptive these days but the hurt goes deep when the one you’ve spent all your life trusting and believing stabs you in the back with deception.” I had little to say because his story took away the words in my mouth. I refused to think about it to even have words to say. We became friends. Friends in the same boat. Friends connected with the same story of someone who deceived us. He would call and ask how the process was going for me. I would tell him mine and he would tell me his too. They had properties together so his’ was a little bit more complicated than mine.  

While we were going through the worse days of our lives, we had time to build a friendship on the side. The next time we met again was in his office. We planned the meeting. For several weeks we kept postponing it because the times were not perfect. He said, “Just pass by the office when you can. We can have lunch at the nearby restaurant.” After the office meeting, we met in some other places too. We talked about our divorce until we decided to talk about things that made us happy. That made us smile. That made us who we are. 

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One day he said, “Thank you.” I asked, “For what?” He answered, “For being a perfect distraction for me. It was hard while going through the divorce. Finding out that a child you’ve known for four years isn’t yours is enough to break the strongest of wills and hearts. You can’t even tell your story to anyone because it’s embarrassing. You gave me the safest place to share and to lighten up the burden. And you know what? I fell in love with you along the line and that simple act shifted my focus off the divorce. It was like the sore was there but it didn’t hurt any longer. That’s why I’m thanking you.”

It had been over two years since we first met at the court. The day he said that was the day his divorce was finally settled. He got what he wanted and he was very happy about it. My divorce had been granted months ago and I had even started building my life from scratch. I was happy to see him happy. I said, “I’m glad you got what you wanted. You’ve suffered for long. Time to be happy.”

In the evening he called. He said, “It looks like you didn’t hear what I said this afternoon. Or you heard it and decided to brush it off.” I asked, ”What did you say?” He repeated, “Along the way, I fell in love with you but it didn’t feel right to say it looking at what we were both going through. It’s over now. Knowing what we know about each other, can we start something of our own? Two broken ships on a sail. You help drain the water that seeps through my cracks and I do the same. Once we get to the shore, we’ll find the right repairs and be whole again.”

On the 17th of June 2017, we got married. We dated for only three months. We have two kids of our own. His first child lives with us so we are a family of five. There has not been a single day that I haven’t been happy. I don’t wake up in the morning and ask how the day is going to be like. It’s like I already know how the day is going to end. The sun will set on a happy family and we’ll go to bed with nothing but content in our hearts, knowing very well that the sun will rise the next day and we would wake up with a grateful heart. This man right here is my anchor. I don’t know why I had to go through dead bones before finding him but I know in his time, he makes all things beautiful and this beauty I see around me, is his doing and nothing else.

–Veronica  

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