I met him when I was young and in my prime. He chased me everywhere. Every place I turned, there he was, smiling, promising forever, speaking the sweet language men speak when they want to be loved. He said he was in it for the long haul. He said I was different. He said all the right things.

For a whole year, I studied him carefully before agreeing to date him. I watched the way he treated people. I listened to the things he said. Everything about him felt like proof of love to a nineteen-year-old girl who still believed love alone could carry a marriage. He was thirty years old. We dated for three years and then got married.

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On our wedding night, we were both tired from all the dancing and the screaming and the celebration. The moment we got into our hotel room, we slumped onto the bed, not even caring about each other. I laughed about it then. I thought we had forever ahead of us.

The next day, nothing happened. The day after that, something close to sex happened. I was the one who initiated it, but it did not even last. It ended almost before it began.

When you are young and marrying a man like my husband, who is eleven years older than you, you have high hopes. You think he knows what he is doing. You think he knows how to do it. Other women had the right stories. I got a different script.

Since we got married, he has never once asked me for intimacy. The three children we have, I conceived because of my resilence. I tracked my ovulation dates like a Grade A student preparing for an exam. I climbed on top of my own husband and pleaded with him to perform his marital duty.

Even then, he handled me without tenderness, without hunger, without affection. He would position me on the bed with the cold concentration of a mason aligning blocks for a building. Before I could even settle into the moment, it would already be over. A few hurried thrusts, a heavy grunt, and then silence.

He would roll to the other side of the bed. Moments later, he would be snoring.

Ten years of marriage, yet you would not believe me if I told you this man has not made love to me more than seven times. The last time I begged him for intimacy was in 2020. Since then, we have lived like flatmates forced together by circumstance.

Our conversations have become interviews.

“Have the children eaten?”

“Yes.”

“Did you pay the fees?”

“No.”

“When are you coming back?”

“Tomorrow.”

That is all.

I sleep in the children’s room now while he sleeps alone in his own room. Sometimes we pass each other in the hallway like strangers renting different parts of the same house.

For years, I was devastated about how to bring it up to his family. How do you tell a family, “Please, the man you people brought cannot function”? How do you say it without looking like a sex addict in a society like ours? But I mustered courage and I did it. I complained, not once, definitely not twice. I complained endlessly to his family. Their response to me was, “Get yourself a boyfriend and settle yourself if he is not good enough for you.” I found it absurd and dirty to even think about, let alone to do. I was still living in my matrimonial home, and I do not have the kind of heart that goes behind a husband’s back.

Instead, in the year 2023, I moved back to my parents’ house. At least there, the fear of God would not let my mind wander too far about sex and its gratification. But when he came home to beg me, promising he would give me what I was looking for, I packed my bags and followed him again, like a woman starved of hunger.

Unfortunately, nothing is here. It is still the same old story. I am getting more lonely than I used to be, feeling neglected, unloved, sinking into depression. I want to leave, but my family is against it.

They are encouraging me to stay because of the economy. It is his family, most of whom are abroad, paying the children’s school fees and sometimes helping with feeding. He is not doing anything, and I do not have much.

I have been able to save a couple of million naira, but in a country like Nigeria, you know it is not enough to rent a decent house, pay school fees, cover feeding and clothing. My family keeps telling me it is not enough. And they are not wrong.

Besides that, he has already poisoned his family’s mind against me. Once I leave, they would withdraw their support. I feel like I am stuck in a bottomless pit with no help.

I am thirty-four years old. This all started when I was twenty-four. How long will I continue to endure because of my children? Will I ever find love again? Will I ever live my life again? Will I ever have a companion to share my life with, when people think I am married but inside the marriage I am single?

His parents filed papers for him to move to the United States back in 2018. Part of me once hoped he would leave so we could peacefully co-parent from a distance. But now, even that future feels uncertain.

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So I remain here. I am losing my mind. Should I leave my children behind and go elsewhere? My soul will not let me. How long will I continue to live in a sexless marriage?

—Chi

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