Why was a married man still being friends with his ex? He told me we are adults and that all the feelings had vanished. I didn’t think so. I don’t think it is ever that easy to move on entirely from someone you once loved. There are always small bits of love left behind. That is why I literally begged him to stop condoning that friendship with his ex, who was also a married woman herself.

But he didn’t listen. My husband started cheating on me after we celebrated our anniversary. Who knows, maybe they started dating right after we got married. There were signs. There are always signs. This man was holding on to his phone like it was his life. I couldn’t touch it. I couldn’t even play games with it. I watched him carefully. And one day, when he was forgetful of himself, I grabbed it and went through it.

Their relationship was mainly over calls and text messages. They spoke about their past, what went wrong, what they could have done better. She apologized. He accepted. They spoke about how they could make their relationship better going forward.

Words cannot fully capture the wave of emotions I went through each time I scrolled. I felt sick in the pit of my stomach. I was angry.

I was screaming, pouring out my frustration. I thought, with all honesty, that he was going to break down and beg for forgiveness. Instead, I was met with questions. “Why did you open my phone? Why?”

And then he left me standing there. Our marriage was only 2 years old.

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From there, it opened the floodgates. He spoke to her while I was in the next room. He did not mind. I would sit there with my heart sinking, listening to her voice, sometimes on loudspeaker. I would hear my husband narrate to his girlfriend about how his day went, what happened at work, the small, little things. I heard them by overhearing their conversations. The ordinary things that used to belong to us.

Some days, as strange and absurd as it sounds, I found myself listening. If I did not make him happy and she did, then maybe it was fine. At least he was happy. At least he did not look sick. It did not make me a bad wife either, because the frown lines I used to see on his face were slowly disappearing.

Other days, I begged him to stop, the way you beg God for healing. I begged him. My voice would break, my hands would tremble, but he did not change. Not once. He did not even promise to try.

I called for family intervention, his brothers and sisters. They all said the same thing, “our brother, we will speak to him.” Nothing changed. I called his girlfriend’s brother too, nothing changed.

By the third year, I learned to live with it. I grew to sleep peacefully without wrecking my brain over the problem. I became used to that kind of life. I showed up as a wife. When he wanted intimacy, I lay on the bed. I served him food. I washed his clothes. I carried his surname like a crown on my head.

When I had our second child, my husband was nowhere to be found. That was when I found he had been traveling with her, going to places I had never been. They had taken multiple trips together.

Having that child gave me some resolve again, so I went to find my husband’s girlfriend’s husband. I went to him as a wife. He was not shocked when I poured out my frustration. He said things that made my chest tighten. He too had not been sleeping in the same room with his wife because of my husband.

He said something that broke me. We are all the same, suffering the same fate.

After all this, my husband is the one asking for a divorce. He woke up one day and told me our marriage had not been working and that we should separate for our own happiness. He used that line, it is not you, it is me.

I have not accepted. I have not refused. He has temporarily moved out of the house. He comes and goes as he likes. His children barely see him. They ask about him, and I stutter when I try to respond.

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His mother knows about her and has accepted her into the family, as real as a second wife. As an elder and as a woman, she is not scolding her son for punishing me this way, when I do not deserve it. All I did was love him, care for him, pick him up and dust him when this same girlfriend left him to marry her now husband because he was living from hand to mouth.

Now she is back to harvest where she did not sow. She is back asking for money, enjoying the trips I should be enjoying. And my husband is sleeping with another man’s wife. It sounds like a movie, and I wish it was, something I could sit and watch and comment on. But it is my life. I am living it in full, and it is scary. Maybe it is black magic working on him. Maybe he is doing it with a clear head.

For the sake of my peace of mind and my children, I have asked him to get a place for me and the kids so we can move out. I am certain that if I am far from him and this house, my sanity will slowly come back to me.

—Marie

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