We almost got married. While we were planning our wedding and buying the things we needed, he had an accident that almost cost him his life. He was at the hospital for two months, healing from broken bones and learning to be himself again.

At the hospital, we spent a lot of money getting him back to health. All the money he had saved was gone. As a supportive fiancée who wanted nothing more than to see my man healthy again, I spent what I had saved too and even took a loan at some point to be able to afford surgery and other medical care. It was hard, but the love we had for each other ensured we sailed through.

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When he was discharged and brought home, I stood by him through it all. We were not married, but I went to live with him, nursing his wounds, massaging his body, and doing everything a wife was supposed to do for a husband.

His mother became my mother. His father became the father I didn’t have while growing up. They didn’t have much, but they had kind words and love. They came to visit. They called when they had to. They told me I was not alone and thanked me for the work I was doing for their child. For several months, I was with him until he was strong enough to start working again.

When he did, I was a woman on the moon, knowing that soon we would recover what we’d lost and return to normal again. After work every night, I went to see him. When I couldn’t go to his house after work, I went there early in the morning before I went to work. I gave him myself and dedicated the life I had to ensure we never missed each other.

While doing all that, my own parents were not happy, especially my mom. She didn’t understand why a woman would use her money to help heal a man she wanted to marry. I did my best for them. I didn’t neglect them in any way. I sent their monthly allowance even when it was hard, but she still didn’t understand why I was wasting my money on a man I wasn’t married to. “What if he doesn’t marry you after all this?” she asked me.

My dad, on the other hand, didn’t say much, but he was praying I would see sense and abandon my fiancé. I told him, “You were all here when he came to do the knocking rite. You all know we were planning to marry until he had the accident. What woman would I be if I abandoned him at the time he needed me the most?”

Dad responded, “I’m not saying you should abandon him. I’m only saying you should be careful.”

I couldn’t wait to prove them wrong, but time has a way of changing narratives and twisting the stories of our lives. Today, it’s my parents who have been proven right by time.

When he recovered and started working, everything was going very well. He even helped me pay the loan I took to help with his bills. Two years later, after we had dated for six years, we thought it was time to get our plans back on track. We fixed a date for our wedding and started counseling.

Along the way, we talked to a photographer we wanted to cover our wedding. He sent us a folder to go through to see his work and how much he charged. He downloaded the image folder onto his computer so I could also watch later and decide. One evening, after we had returned from counseling, I asked to see the photos, and he gave me his laptop.

He had already opened the folder the images were in, but I thought there was more, so I opened the next folder. There was a folder named “Photos.” When I opened that folder, there was another folder named “Videos.” When I opened the video folder, I met another folder named “Kingdom.” The Kingdom folder had another folder called “FYEO,” and inside the FYEO folder, there was another folder whose name I’ve forgotten. One after the other, I opened folders until I finally met a lot of videos with porn thumbnails.

I took my time to watch each and every one of them. Some of the videos were of white people, but many of them were videos he had recorded of himself with other women. His face and the faces of the women were clearly visible.

I watched with a broken heart, but I continued clicking through until I clicked on another one and saw me and him in bed. Eventually, I saw about four of our own videos. Some were old, and others were as recent as a few months ago. I could see myself and figure out when the videos were recorded, but with the other women, I couldn’t tell when the videos were recorded.

I left one of the videos playing and called him to come and see. Immediately he saw the video, he pushed the screen down to shut the laptop. “How did you get here? Is that the folder I opened for you?”

There were already tears in my eyes. “You have all these women in your life? Where were they when I was suffering with you at the hospital? When we needed money to make you better, where were they?”

He said the videos were recorded years before we met. We had dated for six years already, so I asked, “You mean these videos are over six or seven years old? What are you telling me?”

He still defended his stance and said I had no reason to be bothered because those were old videos. I said, “You recorded us too just a few months ago. How did you do it without me knowing?” He explained it as if he had every right to record us because we were dating and about to get married. I was expecting to hear him say sorry, but he defended himself until I left his place.

I was in bed thinking of what to do next when he texted me to say sorry. I read it and didn’t respond. My heart was breaking. I saw every minute of the videos in the folder. I knew what I was looking at, and those videos couldn’t have been that old. It was hard for me to tell anyone around me, so the next time we met at counseling, I decided to share what I’d seen with the counselor, even though he had pleaded with me not to bring it up.

The counselor was equally shocked. He spent the whole evening trying to understand my emotions and what I was going to do next. I said, “He said they were old videos. I know videos have dates just like photos. I want to see the dates each one was recorded before I will accept his apologies.”

He told us he deleted them the day I saw them. I told the counselor, “Then there’s no need for this. We end here.”

The counselor gave us time to go through our emotions and resolve our issues, but I told him there was nothing to resolve. Once those videos had been deleted, our journey to the altar should also be deleted.

It took me weeks and courage to be able to tell my parents what was going on. I knew they were happy to be right. Everything they said showed they were happy to be right, but that didn’t hurt me more than what I had seen with my own eyes. His parents called me. His mom was crying and kneeling to beg me to change my mind. I loved her—I still do—and it hurt my heart to see her crying and kneeling, but I told her there was no way I would change my mind without seeing the dates those videos were recorded.

We had made some financial moves toward our wedding. After two weeks without any proof from him, I started calling and canceling every arrangement we had made. I didn’t care about the money I’d spent. It’s better to waste money than to burn your heart on the altar of marriage. This happened in September last year. He is still begging for us to be together again.

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I’m no longer angry. I even laugh about it. This shows I’ve forgiven him and moved on to a state of no return, but he doesn’t see it that way. There’s no way I would marry a man who has such videos with other women. Even if he brought the videos and I saw the dates and he was right, what I saw would have still haunted me out of the relationship. It was better to leave than continue to suffer with the memories of those videos.

We are over, but life isn’t. I’m at a happy place, knowing I took the right decision to be where I am now.

—Letitia  

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