Two years ago when we got married, we both knew we had taken the right steps and were meant to last. She’s very vocal about her feelings. I’m different. Instead of saying “I love you,” I would rather show it. She would say it and still let it show. I learned a lot from her and called her my soulmate, something I’d never said to anyone.

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We only dated for a year and got married because everything felt right for both of us. We didn’t fight, we hardly disagreed on anything, and had a lot of things in common. When we started living together, we had our first fight. It was normal. We resolved it even before the sun set and made a plan for what we would do in case we found ourselves in a similar situation that made us fight.

We were like that; we tried to prevent chaos before it happened, but I didn’t see this one coming. I was thrown into it. It was like you wake up one day and find yourself in the eye of the storm. I saw a message pop up on her phone while she was lying on the sofa next to me. The message read, “I’m happy you want it too. So when and where?”

It was the “When and where” that drew my curiosity. Are they fixing a date? Who is this person who wants what my wife wants?

I picked up the phone and went into it. That was the only message from that number. No name saved. Just a number asking when and where. I got curious, suspicious actually. “She’s seeing another man,” I told myself. I took a photo of the message so I could have the number and then deleted the message.

I tried sending the person mobile money so I could find the name. She was Wendy. “Oh, a woman?” I smiled at myself in soothing relief, knowing I was being jealous for nothing. A woman texting another woman shouldn’t draw suspicion from me and make me jealous, but I asked myself, “Why does she delete messages from her? What is she hiding?”

Every night when she came home from work, I went through her phone secretly. Most often, there were no messages from Wendy. Other times, I would read messages that didn’t make any sense or say anything of note. This went on for over a month. I nearly gave up until I decided I was going to chat with Wendy myself using my wife’s phone.

That day she came home very late from work and went to bed while I was watching TV. By the time I went in, she was snoring, but her phone was under her pillow and her head on it. It took patience and strategy to be able to pull the phone without waking her up. They had chatted before she slept.

My wife: “I’m home now”
Wendy: “I’m home too. Let’s do it again very soon.”
My wife: “Yeah, we should, but we have to be careful too. 😁”
Wendy: “Yeah, you’re right. Is he a jealous husband?”

My wife didn’t respond to that, so I continued from there, apologizing to her for dozing off without responding. We chatted for over thirty minutes. I had to stop because she was becoming suspicious with the questions and the line of chatting. She could feel something was off, so she kept asking me to send a voice note to clarify what I was saying, but I knew it was her way of determining if she was indeed chatting with my wife.

My heart was breaking, but at the same time I couldn’t believe my eyes. I was like, “Wow… My rival is a woman?”

She and Wendy dated years ago when we were not married but broke up. Wendy had met the man she ultimately married and was not paying attention to my wife. I suspect that was why they broke up. She said, “But you also found a man and married him? We both didn’t know what we wanted.”

It was Wendy who reached out to my wife asking her for a comeback. My wife was proving hard to get because she was still angry and hurt about the past. So all that while, Wendy had been on a journey to get my wife back, and it was that day when the message popped up that my wife agreed to start dating her again.

It was hard patching up the pieces to form this conclusive story. They had met after work that day. And Wendy was even looking for an opportunity to be touchy, but my wife told her another time.

I didn’t delete my chat with her, and that was what led to our separation.

When she saw it, she accused me of invading her space and using her phone to talk about something she knew nothing about. She said I trapped Wendy and coerced her to say what she said. It turned into a fight where I gave her the details of how long I’d been monitoring their conversations. I even lied that I had hacked her phone so I could read the messages before she deleted them. She screamed, “Liar!”

For a week we were not talking. One night before we went to sleep, I begged her; in fact, I even told her I would kneel if it was the only way she would tell me the truth. “I’m happy it’s not a man but a woman,” I said. “All I want is the truth so we know where to go from here.”

She said, “I have nothing to tell you apart from the truth I’ve already told you. Take it or leave it.”

I didn’t leave it, but I left her instead after telling her parents about the whole story. They couldn’t believe it either. My wife was still defensive, telling them I was lying. I had rather chatted with her friend who’s into women, and she fell for it, thinking she was talking to her.

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I’ve left home for a month now. Honestly, I don’t know where to go from here, but I know what to do after the truth is told. If she’s willing to say the truth and nothing but the truth, and she’s willing to receive help, why not? We can mend and move from here. She only has to accept the truth, but she won’t.

I’m going through my own shock and healing. If things remain like this for long, maybe I’ll have to put down my love gloves and call it quits. It’s the only way for me now.

—Oman

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