I found Akua in her third year at the university. When we started dating, my dream was simple and solid. I wanted to marry her right after her national service. I told her so. I am a man who works with time and tide, and I meant every word. She said she wanted to work first, earn her own money, find her footing before marriage. I agreed, though reluctantly. It felt like a delay, but love waits.

That day, we drew a chart for how our lives would turn out. We mapped everything. The years. The goals. The children. It was beautiful.

Since we started dating, I had been playing my part.I worked and went to school at the same time. Eventually, I quit my job to properly have time for my postgraduate studies. The salary was good, but the course was a necessary step to climb higher steps. I had investments tucked somewhere under my sleeves, and that made it easy for me to take good care of her and myself. I give her 2000 Ghana cedis as an allowance every month. Aside from this, whenever she needed money, I was the one who catered for it. It gave me joy to provide. It made me feel like a man who was building something real.

Now, hold this piece of information close, because it is important to where the problem begins.

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Someone I did not know started blackmailing her with nude pictures and videos. She said the only person she had ever sent those videos to was her ex boyfriend, the one she claimed was the only person she had ever been intimate with before me. While she gave me access to her WhatsApp so we could figure out what was happening together, I went through her other chats. That was when the ground opened up.

She was happily texting all sorts of men. Sad Married men. Happily married men who wanted a taste of something else. And my girlfriend, my Akua, was giving it to them.

She was cheating on me. She said all the sorry in the world. She wept. She knelt. She held my knees the way a child holds a father who is about to travel and never return. I spent several days thinking about it. I did not just up and forgive. I turned it over and over in my chest until my heart was sore. Then I accepted her back on only one condition: she would take an STI test. If it was negative, we were good to go. If not, there was nothing left to piece together.

That was how we started dating again. There were a lot of new rules this time. I told her that because of what happened, I had lost a bit of trust for her. She understood me, or so she said, and promised she would earn it back. She looked me in the eye and swore she would become a woman I would never have to doubt again.

Some few months after the incident, I noticed something was off. There were times I would call her and she would not answer. And consistently, between 10 p.m. and 10:30 p.m., her line would be busy. When I checked her messages again, I found nothing. But my suspicion antenna was already up, humming like a live wire, so I started visiting her on brief notice. Sometimes I would tell her I was coming over when I was just ten or fifteen minutes away. I wanted to catch the truth before it had time to dress itself up.

On one of these visits, I called to inform her that I was coming, and she told me she had stepped out and I should give her about an hour. Twenty minutes later, a car came to drop her off. It was one of the supposed ex boyfriends, a man she knows I know from the past.

I was in my car waiting for her when the car parked beside me. When my girlfriend got out, she did not come to me right away. She walked inside the house and only came back out after the car had left. It was as though I was the side piece waiting for clearance, and in that moment, something in me cracked.

I asked her where she went, and she told me she had gone to the man’s house. For about thirty minutes, I could not say a word. My tongue felt like a stone in my mouth. I asked to leave. When I got home, she called me. She said this with a shaking voice. “I do not like cheating on you when you know I am cheating on you. If it were my brother, I would have dealt badly with the said girl. I am so guilty.”

Then she said, “I like him. He gives me more attention than you do, and he is also providing financial support and capital for a business I have started. I cannot leave the man, at least not for now.”

She suggested that she date me alongside him. She wanted me to wait. She said she loved me so much that she would not want to lose me, but I should bear with her for a couple of years, by which time her business would be thriving and she would leave the man for us to marry.

I sat there, phone pressed to my ear, and I asked myself, what does this girl take me for?

I felt grossly disrespected. The words she spoke settled on me like dust from a collapsed building. I wanted to allow her to live her life with the man and quietly remove myself from a story where I was becoming a footnote.

But the truth is complicated. I really love this girl inexplicably. And I know she loves me too, because a man knows when a woman is in love with him. There is a light in her eyes when she sees me. There is a tremor in her voice when she says my name. That is what makes this unbearable.

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This proposal she has tabled before me is giving me a migraine. My thoughts spin in circles. I am not a child, for Christ’s sake. How would she even suggest this? Is it because she is a Gen Z? Or what? I am not too old either. I know what is up. But the idea of being in an open relationship scares me. It terrifies me. It makes me feel small and chosen only by half, like a coat someone wears on certain days but hangs back in the wardrobe when something shinier comes along.

What will my mother even say if she ever hears of this? What will I tell my own heart when I look in the mirror?

—Agye

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