His dreams made me fall in love with him but six months down the line, I’ve realized my mistake. You don’t fall for a guy who has dreams. You fall for a guy who’s working on his dreams. The two are different but I didn’t know better. 

I was alone for four years. My friends thought it wasn’t healthy. I live with my parents. They also think I’m too much in my head that I needed to get out. We are three girls. I’m the oldest. The two before me had gotten married and are raising a family. My parents look at me and think I’m a disappointment, the black sheep of the family. If only I could get hold of a man and marry him, my parents would have had that bragging right over their peers; “We have three girls and by the grace of God, all of them are married.” They want to be able to tell their friends that but unfortunately, I’m the reason they have fallen short of the grace of God.

I met this one on Facebook and decided to give him a chance and see. He’s older and displayed a lot of intelligence in the Facebook group I was in. When we had the opportunity to become friends, I grabbed it. When I realized he wanted more than friendship, I decided to study him critically and see the tides he brings. Our first outing was awesome. He asked what I was doing and I walked him through my life. I asked what he was doing and he told me; “I own a shop in Adum. One of the biggest when it comes to the things I sell. I want to expand it. I want to own the same shop in all of the regions in Ghana. I’ve started the central region one. Soon it would be done so I move on to the next.”

I’m a project kind of a woman so immediately he laid down his dreams, I saw the pictures of how I was going to help him achieve that in my head. So I said yes to a relationship hoping to build with him so that in the end, I would be the woman who helped him through thick and thin.

He would call me in the morning and I’ll ask about his plans and all he would tell me is, “I’m home. Maybe in the afternoon I will pass by the shop and see what’s happening there.” In the afternoon I would call him, hoping to hear something like, “I’m in the shop,” but he’ll tell me something like, “I’m home. The sun is too high I don’t think I can go to the shop.” Not once. Not twice. It happened almost every day. I’m in the corporate world so life looks busy to me but this guy will have the whole day on his hands texting me nonsense and wishing for romance when I’m busily working.

I told him one day, “Your dreams won’t work themselves out. You need to go out there and make it happen. How can you build shops in all the regions When all you do is sleep every day? Those in the shop, who supervises them? How do you know if they are sending you the right accounts? Do you think they are making the right sales? How do you measure their performance to see that they’re giving off their best?” He didn’t have answers so I decided to help him. He took me to the shop one day and a few minutes later he asked us to leave. I told him, “We are spending the day here.” He wanted us to go home so he can get naughty while there was a business to run. 

That day, we were there until evening when the guys closed the shop. I asked him on the way; “You like what you saw?” He answered, “Yeah, they bring in the sales in the end so there’s nothing to worry about.” I answered, “There’s everything to worry about. You have three guys in a shop like this. They are too many. If I were you, I’ll sack two of them and join the other one and work things out. You see how relaxed they were even in front of customers? You’re making losses. Start owning the shop. Even the richest people in Ghana still go to work.”

He didn’t agree with me. He told me that’s what he had been doing all the years to get a profit. “These guys you’re talking about have been with me since the start. They are good people.” 

I realized the two of us don’t agree on business so I decided to coil in my shells when it comes to his business. I only gave my opinion when he asked for it. 

My parents like him because they have an agenda. He comes home and they treat him like a king. My dad calls him son. My mom calls him on phone and they talk behind my back. All my other siblings have heard that I’m in a relationship. They told them I have a husband now but I don’t see a husband material in him. He’s too dull. Life looks too simple for him and he believes everything he’s told without investigating them. 

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He’s the boss of a shop that’s well-situated to make a lot of money but all he does is sleep every day. I could spend the weekend with him and his itinerary would look like this; 

Wake up at 10am, eat what I’d cooked, sleep again and wake up around 1pm. Eat again, and play games on the TV until around 4pm when the premiership would be on TV. He’ll watch all the matches and eat again around 7pm. Continues watching TV until around 12am. He’ll drink something, brush his teeth and bathe and come and ask for sex. A thirty-six-year-old man living his life this way all because he owns a shop that brings home something.

We were having a conversation recently when he told me; “Ghana is too hard I don’t want to live here again. I want to travel abroad.” I asked him, “What happens to the shop and your dreams of expanding?” He answered, “Forget about the shop. These days, people don’t buy because there’s no money in the system. When I travel abroad, I can bring enough money home for something bigger.”

That’s where the relationship lost its taste in my mouth. He looks like the man but he’s clearly not the man for me. In the end, I will marry a man but I can’t settle for less than I dream of. For some time now, I’ve been drifting away and he doesn’t even see it. He calls and I answer but I don’t call him. He comes home to see me but I don’t visit him. When it comes to shuperu too, I’ve stopped giving it to him. I rather give him excuses. I told my mom I was walking away and she said, “No, not this one. There would be no man left for you if you let this one go. Why can’t you be a woman and allow him to be a man? Come down. Lower your expectations and let a man carry you from here. Two captains can’t man one ship. Why can’t you understand this?”

I’m the reason they had fallen short of the grace of God so she’ll say and do everything for me not to leave. My issue is, I know how to leave. It’s not difficult for me to tell him I’m out of love. What’s difficult now is how to make my parents understand me. They are too invested in this one. My last relationship before this one was also like that. They nearly married a man for me when all I wanted was to be free. When I left, it broke them to pieces. They didn’t talk to me for days. I believe they hated me. 

His Wife Found Out About Us | Beads Media

I live with them. I’ve tried on several occasions to rent my own place so they wouldn’t know how I live my life and wouldn’t come close to the men I date. But They won’t allow me to leave. According to them, a woman is taken from the house of her parents so I have to live with them until a man carries me away. Definitely, that man won’t be this one, I’m sure of that but how do I leave him without breaking my parents’ hearts again? 

–Dufie

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