Aside from working as a nurse and running a business on the side, I am married with two little ones: a 3-month-old baby and an 18-month-old toddler.

My marriage is full of problems, and I am contemplating ending it all before it steals everything from me and leaves me too empty to pour into my children.

First of all, I was wrong to tell my husband about my ex, a man I once loved until I loved him no more. It was my biggest mistake, because now he brings my ex into every fight. If we are having an issue, the next thing out of his mouth is, “If it was your ex, you would have done it for him.”

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After the day of comparison is over, he will casually ask me questions about my ex, only to use my answers against me in a later fight. It took me a while to catch on to that pattern. My ex and I are not on talking terms, nor are we even cordial, and I have never knowingly or unknowingly brought him up in conversation, yet my husband always does. My husband does not have an ex, so I do not even have a way to turn the tables on him.

In the early days of our marriage, my husband was unemployed, and that was fine by me because I trusted he would bounce back. What he could not give in cash, he gave in house chores. Before I got home from work, food was on the table, the kitchen was sparkling, and the living room smelled amazing. During that time, I became the husband and paid for literally everything in the house.

Because of his unemployment, we live in the family house with his mother and brother, and I am expected to cook and share the food with everyone. It was going well until his mother started interfering in our marriage. She told me, “You came into my son’s life and he has stopped taking care of us. You are the only one spending his money.” I was packing my bags to leave that house, but of course he pleaded with me and said I should ignore his mother. I asked him to start looking for an apartment so we could rent and move out, but it became one of those things he forgot to do.

I think my husband sees me as just a roommate because he does not care for me, and one situation made me decide so. During my first maternity leave, I could not visit my shop as often, so I left it in the hands of the shop attendant, and in just a few months the shop ran into a debt of over GH₵7,000. I came home and lamented to my husband, but he did not shrug or ask how we were going to handle it.

To this day, he does not know if I have recovered from that shock. When I brought it up, he said it was my own business and he did not want to be an intruder.

My husband has a job now, by God’s grace, and he earns a good salary, but he still refuses to take the wheel and lead us as a husband. What he gives me is not enough, because he believes in giving chop money and nothing more, and anything outside of chop money is my business. He gives me 50 cedis a day, which comes to GH₵1,500 a month, and sometimes I get 500 cedis extra if I run out of pampers.

On top of that, he takes money from my bag, calls it a loan, and never pays it back. We are two young people building a family and a future together, but it feels like one person is cheating the other. He even tells his family that he pays for everything in the house, so they see me as the devil squandering his money.

I am thinking of opting out of this marriage because I feel history is repeating itself. My parents’ marriage suffered from similar issues, and they still carry scars from a marriage they do not really talk about.

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What hurts me most is that he takes the credit for taking care of the family when I am the one doing all of it, and I have never been appreciated. All in all, I believe he is jealous of my progress. I have a thriving business and a plot of land I bought before we married, and I think he wants to chip away at my confidence little by little so he can have it for himself. I cannot sit back and let that happen.

So I have to ask: do I have enough reason to leave my three-year marriage?

— Steph

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