My husband cheated with a girl twice younger than me. Just when I found out and we were talking about it, he had a stroke and was admitted to the hospital. I was angry that we couldn’t get to the bottom of the issue before his sickness. I was angry that I had to go to the hospital every day to take care of a man I caught cheating on me. One day at his bedside, I told him, “You still haven’t explained why you cheated, and it makes me very angry.”

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I thought addressing it would make me feel better, but he frowned and then tried to turn away from me. That made me angrier. At first I thought I had caused his stroke because of how I handled the whole situation, but from the little I read about stroke, it doesn’t happen because a wife questioned a cheating husband, so I relaxed.

My husband was discharged from the hospital, but he was never the same person again. He found it hard to put two sentences together, and it was hard for him to walk. He was only fifty. Our children helped him around often, but I realized that each time I got closer to help him walk, I got angry. The cheating thing kept ringing in my ears. All I wanted was to leave and not see his face again.

I kept asking friends and relatives what they thought about me leaving my husband in his situation. They all told me to forgive him and move on. Some even suggested the stroke was his punishment for cheating, but I thought, “Well, I didn’t give it to him, so I don’t feel he’s been punished enough.”

I stayed with him trying to get over the cheating incident, but I never felt healed. I only stayed because I thought society would be harsh on me. One day I was talking to my grandma when she said, “Why are you asking everyone’s opinion about your marriage when you’re the one living the marriage?”

I went home, called his family, and told them I wanted out of the marriage. Of course they ranted and called me names. They said everything I feared I would hear and accused me of leaving my husband when the money was finished.

I still didn’t care. He himself tried to say something, but his words didn’t come out perfectly, so out of frustration he swallowed the rest. He could have used the few words he had to say, “I’m sorry. Don’t leave me this way.”

After the traditional divorce, he insisted I should move out. I told him I wasn’t going to move out from a place where I paid the rent. I was there when his family came with a car to take him away. I cried. It was tears from a very calm place. The kids were down too, but I knew it was my job to bring them back to normal.

It’s Not God’s Law For A Man To Apologize To A Woman

We were married for fifteen years. We couldn’t even complete the building project we were doing together, but he could cheat and sign cheques for women who did nothing but give him sex. I hope he’s happy the way he lived his life.

—Frema

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