When my husband cheated, it broke me into pieces. It wasn’t so much about the cheating but the person he cheated with. If it had been some polished woman from his office or a stranger from another town, maybe the shame would have landed differently or I would have looked at the cheating differently. But guess who my husband cheated with? The daughter of the woman who owned a small provision shop in our neighborhood. A girl I had watched grow up. A girl I would never have imagined standing in the middle of my marriage like that.

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I felt shame on behalf of my husband. I kept asking myself, “Out of all the women in the world, why her? How am I supposed to tell my friends that my husband had chosen that girl over the dignity of our marriage?”

He apologized. He said it meant nothing and that he regretted listening to the urging of his flesh. He told me such a mistake would never happen again, but some mistakes are too insulting to be softened by an apology. I wanted to leave the marriage, but wanting to leave and being able to leave are not the same thing. We had three children, and at that time the reality of raising them alone felt too heavy to carry. School fees, rent, food, clothes, medical bills. I knew the kind of struggle waiting outside that marriage, so I stayed.

From the day I found out, I stopped giving him my body. He could sleep in the same house, sit at the same table, and speak to me when necessary, but that part of the marriage ended when he cheated with that “fianga” girl. At first he was patient. Then he tried to be charming. Later he became frustrated. But I had nothing left to give him.

We had become parents to three children who were too young to understand that the marriage they were growing up in had already died. For two years that was how we lived. He would try and I would tell him no. He said, “Are you trying to push me to cheat again?” I answered, “I know you’re already cheating, and that’s fine. Go ahead and leave me alone.”

Two years without feeling loved does something to your emotions. You start to see every little gesture from a stranger as love because you’ve been starved for far too long. It started with a colleague at work. There was no grand plan to sleep with him. It was just conversation at first. He listened to me in a way my husband had stopped doing a long time ago. He noticed when I was tired. He asked questions and waited for answers. Around him, I did not feel like a woman trapped inside a broken promise. I felt seen.

We messaged too often and talked at ungodly hours when my husband wasn’t watching. We were moving toward something, even if we had not fully crossed the line yet. In my mind, I would have done it if he had the courage to ask me to. Then my husband found out.

To this day, I still remember the look on his face when he read the messages between me and that man. He was devastated. It drew him close to tears when he talked. “So it’s because of this guy? You won’t give me your body because there’s another man?”

I watched him go through the pain. Part of me was shocked that he was hurt. Another part of me felt nothing. He left the house and stayed away for days. I didn’t call him. I thought he was gone for good. I thought maybe that was how the marriage would finally end. I didn’t beg him to return. I didn’t even ask where he was. When he eventually came back, he came back as a man choosing convenience over collapse. He said, “The only reason I’m here is because of the kids.” I said in my head, “That makes it the two of us.”

When he cheated, I stayed because of the children. Now he too was staying because of the children. Neither of us was in that house because of love. We were there because of our children. They tied us down to a chair that was damaged beyond repair.

One day he sat me down and said, “Let’s make this marriage work again. It’s obvious we both have nowhere to go.”

Maybe he was expecting me to fall on my knees and say, “Aww, that’s too sweet,” or hug him in tears and promise him my undying love, but none of that happened. He thought I had nowhere to go because I hadn’t told him what I was planning.

For months, I had been arranging my escape. I had found a man who was helping me secure a nursing job in Ireland. I had hidden everything from him because I didn’t want him to know my next steps. I told no one about it, not even my parents or my siblings. I moved through that plan like a woman carrying a candle and protecting it from the wind.

One day, all my plans fell into the right place and I was ready to leave the country. I didn’t make a dramatic announcement or tell the world I was running from my marriage. He was very angry when he found out. He felt betrayed that I didn’t tell him about my plans. He was like, “When did traveling abroad come into your head that I didn’t know?” I owed him no answers. I just took the children to my mother, packed what I needed, and left.

Even then, he still believed that as long as there was no divorce, there was still a marriage. When I arrived abroad, the distance made everything clearer. For the first time in years, I could hear my own thoughts without the noise of that house pressing on me. And in that silence, I knew I could not go back to what nearly destroyed me. Too much pain had been stored in that marriage for it to ever become a home again, so I sent him a divorce letter.

That is where we are now, still moving through the process of ending what should have ended long ago. He’s pained. He wishes I was still with him so he could say painful things to me in my face. I don’t pick up his calls. He talks to my lawyer and the lawyer tells me what he said to her. Some days I think about how strange it is that two people can remain under one roof for years after love has already packed its bags and left. Some days I think about the children and wonder what quiet sadness they absorbed from us without having the words for it. They are my biggest fear now.

It’s Not God’s Law For A Man To Apologize To A Woman

Once everything is said and done, I will bring them here and rebuild my life around them. They’ve seen a lot and have been through a lot. It’s time for them to heal with me while we try to forget everything we’ve been through because of one bad marriage. Yes, I did stay in that marriage for them, but the truth is that, in the end, I also left because of them.

—Serwaa Akoto 

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