My boyfriend was living in the home of his girlfriend when we started talking. He was a friend to me by then. And when we’d text, he’d complain about her to me.

“Today, I even had to wash bowls after her. How? How can I be washing bowls after a woman? Am I not a man anymore, or because I don’t have money anymore?”

The way he painted the picture, it made it look like she was the terrible person. There was always something to complain about, and every day, I listened and encouraged him. “You have a beautiful future ahead of you. Don’t let her destroy it. Otherwise, you’d regret it.”

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I’d become his unpaid therapist. I wondered how a woman could be so wicked and callous to a man she loved. After many complaints and nagging, they broke things off, and that’s when I came in as his girlfriend.

He didn’t have a job when he moved in. The first thing I did was to get a shop and fill it with clothes of all sizes and kinds. By the end of the month, there were no proceeds from it. Business was slow until he ran everything down.

He was back home again doing nothing. When I left for work, he’d be at home all day texting girls, playing games, walking about. The devil finds work for idle hands, so again, I paid for a shop, paid for all the tools and items needed to start and keep a barbershop going. I handed him the keys and made him promise he was going to be diligent with this one. He was there in the shop every day, but it ended up not standing on its feet. He didn’t have any reason whatsoever.

I even invested in a gold business for him, but when gains from those investments came, he’d use part of the money to book hotels and sleep with every woman jumping in a skirt. As long as he liked what he was seeing, he’d make sure he went after it.

Then I got pregnant, and I hoped and prayed that this would be the turnaround I’d been praying for. They say when a man sees he is about to be a father, he gets his life straight. From the day I informed him that he was going to be a father, I watched with keen eyes to see if he would turn a new leaf.

Maybe once in a while, he’d be a responsible man. The whole nine-month journey and even at the end of it, I catered for myself. I was the one who paid for my C-section, my baby’s dresses, everything. The naming ceremony, I paid for everything at the event. I paid for his outfit and the baby’s.

But motherhood changed something in me. I started to fall out of love with him.

When I wanted to leave, family and friends came in. They said he was going to change, so I should just relax. Change comes, but it is slow.

Even after I sacrificed so much for us, he’d be visiting family and friends, telling them that I turned into a baby sister while I was roaming about the town. I was working, in fact, overworking myself. I had bills to pay. I had to work hard to ensure the roof over our heads stayed there, otherwise, we’d have nowhere to run to.

He didn’t see it like that. If I left our baby for him to cater for, he’d leave her and wander about anywhere. And if he was walking and saw a lady he liked, he’d take her number and take it from there.

I got him a car so he would use it for Uber. That car didn’t serve its purpose. All he did was pick up and drop off ladies that suited his taste.

My boyfriend had plans to travel outside of the country and didn’t tell me. When I got to know about it and questioned him, he said, “I got a job offer that requires me to relocate for it.”

He didn’t tell me about anything again until he was going to purchase a plane ticket, which he bought by selling the car I gave him. Only to be returned three days later at the port of entry.

He came and apologised. I accepted and helped raise money to start a business again, and he still wasted it. It was like everything his hands touched turned into curses.

On the outside, he was a good man who lived a very luxurious life. That’s how he was jumping from one married woman to another.

I was even able to catch one of his conversations with another woman, telling her he was a single father while the mother of his child was in Canada.

I phoned her, and she insulted the living hell out of me. She asked me why I was calling her when I needed to pay attention to my boyfriend. She said if I was serious about him, then my baby daddy wouldn’t be ashamed of me and hide me.

I finally got rid of him when the house rent was due. He didn’t know and wasn’t sure what my next step would be, so one day when I returned home from work, he packed his bags and left.

He vanished from the surface of the earth until he slowly resurfaced again. He is still here, jumping from one married woman to another.

He is managing a boutique for one of them, after managing to destroy the one I built from the ground up for him. He lives in her house too. The woman, I hear, is abroad.

He takes married women to the house. I have heard he tells them it is his house, how he managed to purchase it and how life has been for him.

He is still going around spreading lies, tarnishing my image to people, especially to women, who know nothing about what I went through. And I imagine they pity him and call me names, when in reality, he was the opportunist who benefited from everything I built.

What they don’t know is that I have been the one taking care of our child. Paying school fees, buying books, handling everything.

Sometimes, he sends a little token. If he does, the whole world hears of it. He takes screenshots, posts them on his status, talks about being a responsible father.

The most painful part is that he is the father of my child. I even wished and prayed that a DNA test would prove me wrong, that he wasn’t.

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

But he is. And that alone drains half of my sanity. I feel ashamed to even call him my child’s father. I regret ever having a child with him because he has shown no sense of responsibility or fatherhood.

But through it all, I thank God I endured. I worked on myself. And I finally walked away from the emotional torture. I lost my brand, my career, my vision, and even my self-esteem. But I will never lose myself again. I will make sure of that.

— Efe

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