When we first got married, I had a good job and a stable financial foundation. Money was not a problem. She would ask me, and I would do it for her, down to everything in the house. We have known each other for 16 years and have been married for 5 years. You think you know someone until you begin to live with them, and then it dawns on you the kind of person they are.

Three times in the five years, we separated because she would shower me with insults, shout at me as if I were a child, and manipulate me anyhow. The second one was because of how careless she was with our children. She was a different kind of mother to our children, and it was very disturbing. The third was her constant drinking of alcohol. Before bed, she would come home reeking of alcohol. I could not breathe, so I would turn the other way until she fell asleep. On days she wasn’t reeking of alcohol, she started punishing me by refusing to sleep with me. We could go months without doing it.

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Not as if I were any better a husband, but one thing about me was that I agreed to be a better man, a better husband. Let’s talk about it. Tell me where I am going wrong and what I can do to make it better. Truly, we would sit to talk about it, and never for once did she accept that she was wrong or even apologise for speaking to me like a child in front of the kids and our neighbours. She would not apologise for a lot of things. She would twist and turn things until I began thinking I was the problem. For her, every argument was a war she had to win.

She added coming home very late to the list of problems we were dealing with. I would stand at the gate waiting for her to come home, afraid for her safety. When she came and I asked her, she would tell me, “A broke man doesn’t deserve to be answered,” shove me in the shoulders and walk past me into the house.

My wife was never accountable for her actions or for the ways she hurt me, her husband. Even physically, she was very toxic. She threw her hands at me and the children. Anywhere it landed, it landed.

About a month ago, with the little I had, I packed all my belongings into a bag, took my kids and left the house early in the morning. We are back in the village. This was where I was before I moved to the city, and life was good to me. Here I am again, unsure of how it will turn out, but I am sure God, who feeds the birds in the sky, will feed us too.

She is there, and there is a new boyfriend now too. I called her, and she thanked me for giving her the way out that she had been waiting for a long time to be free from me. “You are a controlling, nagging man.”

Ask me how I feel today. I feel like a bird that was removed from its cage. No longer will I have to sit and hear her friends and gang come to the house to threaten to beat me up, talk less of disrespecting me.

The job she is using to brag to me about – I got her that job. It came with a car. I made sure I taught her how to drive like a mad man on our kind of roads with my own car. But when things got tough for me, she would drive past me, pretending she didn’t see her husband. On days that I was using the same route to get to a job interview or run an errand, she would never give me a ride if I asked for one, so I stopped asking.

I need to heal and detach with time. I regret these 16 years daily. I regret my mistake of marrying her. I regret wasting my money on her in school. Yeeeey… please help. Say something nice to me. Talk to me. Tell me it will be fine, because my heart is raging, it is on fire, and it feels like it wants to burst out of my chest.

Is There A Man Out There Who Doesn’t Cheat?

I talk to God. Not only that, I fast too, but I feel He has been very quiet. He has been so quiet in my life, guys. For now, nothing is happening. All the things happening too are not happening anymore.

I believe it’s alignment, but I’m failing to cope. Tell me, I will be fine.

–Kgosi

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