She was going through a divorce when we met. She was broken. She said she married a man she didn’t have any business marrying. Some days she cried in my arms. Other times, she would call me in the evening and ask me to meet her somewhere because she needed a place to cool off her head. One day, we kissed in her car, and it became a relationship.

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What was not working in her marriage?

She said her husband didn’t contribute financially in the house because he thought she had money. She was earning more than her husband, but she didn’t think all the financial burden should be on her. So they fought about almost everything, all because the man wouldn’t support her financially.

That aside, she was the one doing all the domestic chores while her husband sat on the couch and farted. So she stopped giving him sex and sought that from me. She stopped cooking and bought food from outside and ate alone. They had a daughter. She was the only one she cared about.

When we met, she talked about divorce but hadn’t initiated it. We were a couple of months into our relationship when she told me she had initiated the divorce and they were going through it. I asked why the man was still living with her, because she had told me the house belonged to her. She answered, “We are not enemies, so he can stay there until he gets his own place.”

The divorce dragged on for over a year. We were still together, building a relationship that would last. I had come to love her so deeply that I started getting jealous because her ex was still there. She told me, “He’s the father of my daughter. I can’t push him into the street. Let him take all the time he wants, but one day he will leave.”

Then she got pregnant. I thought the pregnancy was for me because she had told me she hadn’t been intimate with her husband for ages. I asked what she was going to do, and she told me point blank, “I can’t have it.” I thought it was because the divorce wasn’t finalized, but when I asked why, she said, “Because I don’t know if it’s yours or his.”

I screamed, “So you lied when you said you were not doing it with him?”
She answered, “I didn’t lie entirely. One of those days, he sneaked up on me. I didn’t want him to get violent, so I gave it to him. And remember, he’s not the one leaving me. I’m the one forcing my way out of the marriage because he wouldn’t raise a finger financially.”

I was very hurt and decided to leave the relationship. I didn’t tell her, but I was leaving. I stopped calling. When she said we should meet somewhere so she could cool her head, I gave her excuses. I was sick and tired of being used for cruise. She got the message and decided to talk about it. She apologized and told me she took me seriously, but life happens, so I should forgive her.

A couple of months after getting rid of the pregnancy, she got the divorce she wanted. By then, the man had gotten a new place and was moving, though I thought the way he was moving out was too slow. Eventually, he left. Naturally, I was supposed to take his place. Anytime I wanted to visit her, she used her daughter as a shield: “She’s too young. She shouldn’t see her father replaced this way.”

We kept meeting outside, or she would come to my place. I asked about the way forward for us, and she assured me it was just a matter of time and then we would get married. I was hopeful. I placed all my plans aside, waiting for my time to love a woman I had loved in the dark in the light.

Then she traveled to South Africa once and spent three weeks there. We talked every day on the phone and made plans, but her attitude toward me changed when she came back to Ghana. She wouldn’t call unless I called. She would cancel little plans about our happiness. She said it was about work and motherhood. I even said I would move in with her so I could help with her daughter. She said no.

She traveled to South Africa again and sent me a message that she was getting married. I thought my eyes were not seeing well. “Getting married to who? How about me? Like how?” All she said was sorry and later talked about my age as the reason she couldn’t think of marrying me. She is only four years older than me, but I’m taller and bigger, so you wouldn’t know.

Just last December, she got married in South Africa to a South African white man and hasn’t returned since. I have been nursing this heartbreak and pain, but the more I apply balm to numb the pain, the more it grows out of the soil as if the balm is water. I want to move on, but it’s not easy. I didn’t see Christmas. I stayed indoors throughout. Nothing made sense. I feel used. I feel pain in all my joints, as if those were the places love emanates from. I throw up even when I haven’t eaten anything.

Thriving In A Relationship When The Man Doesn’t Have Money

Some days, I want to do something to hurt her so she feels the pain I’m going through. I wrote a long message and called our relationship an abuse of my emotions and a blatant waste of my love and time. I wanted to send it to her on her wedding day. I couldn’t. I saved it in my drafts, and it’s still there. Where do people like me go for healing? I think of dark things these days, but I’m a man. I ought to be stronger, right?

—Jackson

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