Nine years ago, we got married. It took us three years to be able to have a child. A boy. I named him after my dad, but my wife called him Sun. She didn’t explain the name. I figured it came from the song she sang to him, “You’re my sunshine. My only sunshine.” And I also figured she called him Sun because of the sunshine he brought to our lives after going through three years of darkness before he came. I was wrong on both counts, and it took me this long to find out.

I met my wife when she was in nursing school. Very beautiful and had the ears of God. The one thing that got me attracted to her. There were only two places she went, church and school. We started talking, and a few weeks later, I made my intentions known to her. She told me she was going to pray about it because the last time she didn’t pray about a relationship and followed her own heart, it ended badly.

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Days went by. Weeks crawled through. And then a month smiled on my proposal. I kept asking if she’d heard the voice of God or if I should put a call through to God so we could hear Him quickly. It took a month and a few days for her to finally say yes to my proposal. I was committed right from the word go.

My mom already knew her in church. My dad didn’t go to the same church, but the day I took her home to see my parents, they all nodded in affirmation. My dad even warned that I shouldn’t take a peaceful woman and bring chaos into her life. We dated for seventeen months and got married. After marriage, we relocated, hoping and working to get her posted where we’d relocated to.

We thought we were only going to sneeze to have a baby, but every day proved that getting a woman pregnant sometimes was harder than a horse going through the eye of the needle. We prayed. We got frustrated. We heeded unsolicited advice from people. It was hard, but three years later, we had a baby boy.

Me and my wife didn’t have any serious fights since marriage. We didn’t fight and threaten divorce. I didn’t go to work and get scared of coming home because of her. We were largely happy, and you would look at our marriage and call it peaceful.

Until I went through my wife’s phone. I didn’t do that out of any suspicion. It was out of curiosity instead because I saw her talking at length with someone. Anytime I got close to her, she moved a little bit away from me and continued talking. I wanted to know who she was talking to. I thought it was even her mom because she was the one who stayed the longest on the phone with her.

The number was saved as Pastor Eric, with a prayer emoji. “My wife is talking to a pastor and doesn’t want me to hear the conversation? What were they talking about?” It was that question that carried me to her WhatsApp, and Pastor Eric’s chat was the first I saw. Their last chat was a few hours old. I took my time and read everything. There were even voice notes and a lot of traces of view-once messages.

My wife said, “You know you’re the only man I’ve truly loved. I got married just to hurt you back.”

Several scrolls later, she said, “I didn’t move on, but when you got married, I knew there was no way I was going to have you again, so I decided to also marry.”

Scrolls later, she said, “Do you know I call my son Sun? That’s the short form of Sunny.”

Sunny is his nickname. Now I was wondering if indeed he was a pastor. I went through their media exchanges. My wife had sent him a photo of a flier she saw of him on social media and said, “Am I invited to this crusade?” He responded, “If you come, we’ll do special counselling in my corner, agreed?”

And they both exchanged laughing emojis. My wife sent a view-once message. He responded, “Wow.”

I quickly went to Facebook to check his profile and guess what, everything he had posted on his wall, my wife had reacted to, including commenting under his praying videos.

At first, I didn’t want to talk about it but instead watch her carefully to see if there was more to it, but my heart couldn’t carry a load I had no intention of offloading anytime soon, so I grew moody and quick-tempered. Even when she breathed, it got me so annoyed I wanted to tell her my mind. She kept asking me what the issue was. When I didn’t tell her, she said, “No problem. I will pray about it. God has the solution.”

I retorted, “Have you prayed about your affair with Pastor Eric? The pastor you’ve been sending view-once messages to, have you prayed about him? Did God tell you it’s a good thing for a married woman to be sending view-once messages to her ex, who is also a man of God?”

She said, “So you’ve been reading my messages. What else did you see? Did you see me cheating with him? For God’s sake, he’s a man of God.”

I started reciting every message I read on her phone like a singing canary. “You married me to spite him? You never loved me, so what are you doing here? The next time I hear you call my son Sun, you’re dead, I swear.”

At this moment, I was shaking. I’d been overtaken by anger, jealousy and disappointment. She walked away from the scene, but I followed her. “He’s the one you love. Pack your things and go to him so you can do special counselling in his corner. What are you doing here?”

My son was watching something on his tablet, but he saw the tension and quickly ran to ask what was happening. We both shut up and went our separate ways. I calmed down, but I was still shaking. All the voices in my head said, “Divorce her. She didn’t respect you and your marriage. She has been sleeping with the pastor. Do a DNA test and divorce her.”

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I called her parents and told them everything. They were very shocked. They thought I was talking about someone else. They called us and talked to us extensively. She swore it was just talk and nothing followed. I asked about the view-once messages, and she said they were random photos or TikTok videos they didn’t want to keep in their chat.

We went for counselling for five good months. Every good person I know tells me I shouldn’t divorce because of this. I think they are right, but it doesn’t make me feel any better that the woman I loved right from the start used me to get away from a heartache.

Maybe sharing this story will help the healing process. I’ve been meaning to share it with friends, but I don’t know how they’ll perceive my marriage afterwards. So this is the only safe place I can share. I hope it helps me heal and make the right decision going forward.

—Jordan     

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