We married quite young. My wife was twenty-four, and I was twenty-nine. Five years after our marriage, we had three children. I could see the toll it had taken on my wife, someone I had married when she was a flower. She had let herself go in service to the kids. I loved her dedication to the children, but I also wanted her to look good the way she did when we were young.

We talked about it. I even had to approve her choice of dressing before she left the house. Most often, we fought because what she wanted to wear wasn’t what I wanted her to wear. She would tell me there was no one to impress and walk out the door.

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Even in the house, she could wear anything, even dresses that looked like rags. At night, I would try to remind her of how we used to be. We would talk about our dating days and laugh, but in my mind, I was trying to awaken something in her. She didn’t catch on.

When our last-born was fully weaned and could do basic things on his own, I decided to stop complaining and instead give my wife a reason to dress well.

I started by buying her new wigs. Sometimes I would go with her to choose them, and sometimes I would buy them as a surprise. She started spending time in front of the mirror and began dreaming of beauty again. She would tell me, “This hair paa, if I match it with a nice suit paa, don’t you see it would look perfect?”

She was talking to me in proverbs, and as a thoughtful man, I understood what she was trying to tell me. When I got the money, I bought her the dress she had been dreaming about. Slowly, she was blooming again. Once she had what to wear, she started complaining about her body and how fat she had become.

I told her I didn’t have a problem with that because, as humans, we were created to grow in different directions. But if she wasn’t comfortable with the way she looked, then she should work on it.

So she started eating once a day. She carried water everywhere she went so she could drink more of it. She added exercise to her routine and even dreamed of joining a gym, but the subscription fee put her off.

I was enjoying the new spark in her and how seriously she took herself. She would come to bed wearing perfume, something she used to do when we were dating. I never forgot to compliment her every step of the way. When she dressed up and spent forever in front of the mirror, I would shout, “Leave the mirror alone. You’re looking awesome. Take it from me.”

All that while, I believed my wife was doing all that because of me. I thought she was trying to impress me because I had made it possible for her to look her best again.

No, she wasn’t.

She was doing it to impress Tony, a man I don’t know where he sprang from.

She was always home early from work to care for the kids, so nothing clicked in my mind that she was seeing another man until one afternoon. An errand took me near her office, and I decided to pay her a surprise visit. I called to ask if she was busy, and she said she wasn’t but was doing the usual work. I told myself, “Then I can see her.”

I went to her office and was told she had been on leave for the past three days, so she hadn’t been coming to work.

I was like, “How? Someone who wakes up every morning, dresses for work, and leaves the house doesn’t actually go to work?”

I came back home after work, and she was already home, in the kitchen cooking for the kids. I went into our room and searched her bag. I searched everywhere I could for evidence, but there was none. Her phone was the only place I could get the information I was looking for.

The next morning, when she was leaving for “work,” I intentionally said I would come to her office to see her. She told me, “Call me before you do because I’ll have some errands to run.”

When she returned from work that day, I went through her phone, but the password had changed.

The next day, she didn’t go to work because, according to her, she had been tired and had taken a few days off. When I came back from work, she was on her laptop doing something. Then I remembered she had logged into WhatsApp on her laptop.

That night, I connected the laptop to my hotspot and read every message I could find between her and everyone on her WhatsApp. That was when I came across the messages between her and Tony.

The kind of things they talked about would break my heart if I repeated them. They even had a name for me: “Abusuapanyin.”

This guy would drive to my wife’s office and pick her up because, according to him, he had missed her so much that if he didn’t kiss her and do things with her, his day would be ruined. And my wife would respond, “I’m all yours. Come for me.”

Tony said if they weren’t careful, they would have a child, and my wife replied, “What are you scared of? If it happens, we’ll keep it. It will be my eternal souvenir from you.”

I was reading the messages and asking myself what I had done wrong or where I had gone wrong.

“Am I not man enough? Was I wrong to bring her back to beauty again? It’s all my fault for making her glow again.”

I woke her up. I asked, “Who is Tony, and why are you sleeping with him? What did I do wrong?”

She was shaking when she got up. All of a sudden, she said her heart was aching. “I don’t even know what to say. Will you forgive me if I tell you the truth?”

She was visibly shaking. I could see her hands trembling as though she was about to collapse. I asked her to be patient and tell me the truth. She was crying and shaking. I had to stop her from talking because I was scared something was going to happen to her.

She still didn’t stop. She kept crying. I was crying inside.

She said, “Let’s settle this between ourselves and not involve anyone. I swear if I ever do that again, may I fall down and die. Babe, believe me. It’s the devil. He wants to destroy our marriage. Please let’s not give him a chance. Oh God, my enemies will laugh at me.”

I tried to sleep, but I couldn’t.

The next day, I left home to stay with Charles, my best friend, who was also my best man. He was the first person I told everything to, and he couldn’t believe it. He asked me to stay with him for as long as I needed to heal.

I was trying, but the images were too vivid.

I Called My Girlfriend And Another Man Answered The Phone

I called her and told her to inform her family that we were divorced because I was going to do the same with mine.

She begged. She said she would die if I left her.

I left, and thank God she’s still alive.

I see her because of our children. She has gone back to where I had forced her out from. She doesn’t care about her looks anymore, and you can see depression written all over her. The same is true for me, but I know that with time, both of us will heal.

The scars, however, will never go away because they run too deep.

—Abusuapanyin

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