Dear Diary,

“I don’t feel sexually attracted to you anymore”.

“It feels like you’re just my roommate”.

These were the words that Dozie, my husband of five years used to explain why he would no longer touch me. In the last six months, we had almost no sex, and I kept prodding to know why.

I bought new lingeries. New cosplay outfits. Almost walked around the house naked. Just to get his attention. Even when I would try the not so subtle approach of rubbing his nether regions, he would give an excuse. He was always tired, not in the mood, or stressed. There was always something with Dozie!

I have heard a lot of reasons why marriages break up—silly things like how one partner presses the toothpaste, or the woman not knowing how to cook. But the most predominant reason I have heard is cheating. If I have listened to ten divorce stories, nine times out of ten, cheating was involved.

Unfortunately, I was one of those women who didn’t believe that all men cheat. But after what I have been through since my marriage ended, I am more inclined to think that I was wrong.

The thing about cheating is that it’s never a mistake. No matter the circumstances that precede it, it’s never unplanned. Cheating starts from the mind. You have to have it as one of the things you’re willing to do to your partner before you can do it.

In my case, it was well planned, and premeditated for months before the deed – at least the first time it happened, before it became a regular occurrence. I know because he told me.

Dozie, my now ex-husband, and I met at the university. He was the most ambitious person I ever met. Perhaps that was why I fell for him. But it wasn’t love at first sight.

When I met him in our second year of school, he had just transferred from another university. He noticed me when I answered questions during a combined class with his faculty. After the class, he walked up to me and simply told me we had to be friends since I was so smart. From that moment on, I liked him.

Our friendship blossomed quickly and soon enough, we were inseparable. I wasn’t surprised when he asked me out after two months of “just” being friends. Of course I declined. As an over-serious student, I didn’t want to be distracted from my studies. But being the ever-ambitious Dozie, he persisted for months before I finally gave in. It was an easy yes. Actually, I had fallen for him even before he asked, but I just didn’t know it at the time.

We were each other’s first love. And though we broke up a couple of times while dating, we always found our way back to each other.

After school, he got a job, and in classic boy meets girl pattern, we got married. I wasn’t so lucky in the job market. So, a few years after graduating, I had to start a small business to keep myself busy and sane.

Our marriage had its ups and downs but our love continued to wax strong, at least from my perspective. It took a while before we conceived and we were beyond elated to welcome our boy. Little did I know that having our baby would trigger a cascade of events that would sour our marriage.

Antoinette was our unmarried neighbour. Her relationship with my husband became “a thing” while I was pregnant. It was a difficult pregnancy. I had hyperemesis gravidarnum – a condition in pregnancy that causes you to throw up frequently, and as a result, lose a lot of weight. It can be dangerous for mom and baby.

To mitigate the effects of too much loss of fluids and get me to eat without throwing up, there were frequent visits to the hospital for intravenous hydration. This was our life for most of my first and second trimester. The drugs that helped keep the vomiting at bay made me very drowsy. Sleep was my solace during this period. It was also the thing that gave Dozie and Antoinette the time they needed to frolic around without being noticed.

They used this opportunity to act out their romantic fantasies. I would never have suspected if she hadn’t started blackmailing him for a more committed relationship. When he could no longer deal with her haranguing, he came to me.

I still remember that day. It was late morning on a Saturday – barely three months postpartum. I was wearing my yellow sundress that I was happy to discover I could still fit into. I went to our bedroom to tell Dozie about my reclaimed dress, but I found him in a somber mood. Before I could ask what was wrong, he knelt down, crying. That was very strange. He had never knelt to beg me when we quarreled, so whatever he had done must be really bad.

Immediately I saw the tears on his face, I had the strangest feeling. I can’t even find the words to describe it but I knew that something had gone terribly wrong. My body went numb as I braced myself for what he had to say.

He confessed everything about his relationship with Antoinette. When he was done talking, he expected me to say something but my lips refused to move. My heart felt like a brick had been placed on it. So I went to sit at the edge of our bed.

He continued talking, but this time, I couldn’t hear him. A million thoughts were simultaneously running through my mind. It felt like a dam had broken and I could barely hold one thought. But as he spoke, I could feel his remorse and he kept promising never to do it again. I just sat there staring, but not seeing anything.

For weeks, he followed me around with his eyes begging for forgiveness. Before saying anything, he would check for my mood. It was as if he was walking on eggshells, and I secretly enjoyed seeing him suffer for what he did. I truly believed he would never do it again. How could I not? He readily answered every question I had.

Why did you do it?

How many times did you have sex with her?

What was it like? Was she better than me? Will I ever forget?

Will we ever go back to having sex without me imagining that this must have been how you did it with her?

Every question, he patiently answered. No matter how many times I asked.

But that was only the first time. A preamble. He had only tested the waters to see how I would react in the face of his infidelity. And I fell for his trap.

It wasn’t long before he was back to romping with our unmarried neighbour. This time, he diversified his cheating portfolio. It got so bad that at some point, there were so many women, I couldn’t keep track of who was who.

The day I discovered the depth of his lechery, I was shattered! How did a once beautiful romance story turn sour very quickly? You might ask. Well, it started with complaints about our sex life. He said (I am borrowing his words) there was no spice in my bedroom skills. It was too much vanilla and he wanted variants of flavours. In my defense, I did my best to spice things up in the bedroom. But no matter what I did, the complaints never stopped. In fact, it seemed like the harder I tried, the more he complained.

Before long, he started keeping late nights, with excuses of having to work overtime. As an understanding wife, I believed him. And this was after his confession. Then, the late nights became so frequent that his closing time moved from 6pm to 11pm. At that point, no person with a good head on their shoulder wouldn’t smell a rat.

So one day, I went to his workplace. Pretended to be passing by and did a little digging into his office itinerary. The receptionist said he still closed by his usual time. Then I asked her, “When is his usual time?”. She said, “6pm, ma!”. Aha!

That evening, I logged into his home computer and accessed his Google Maps timeline. What I saw broke my heart in a million tiny pieces. At one point, I thought my heart would explode from the pain. He did not come home that night. Maybe he would have noticed the wet pillow and bed. But Dozie had stopped noticing me and I didn’t even realize it. It became clear to me the day I bawled my eyes out from the pain of what he was doing to me. That day, he was in the parlour and I was in the bedroom. When my wailing was loudest, he walked into the room, perhaps to know what the sound was about (I rarely cry), then he went back to the parlour. The man I called my husband never came to ask me what was wrong.

I suffered through many sleepless nights and almost became a walking zombie within a fortnight. He simply refused to see me or my suffering. When it became too much for me to bear alone, I reached out to my family and friends. Everyone told me to endure.

That’s part of the things that happen in marriage, they said. Everyone’s marriage has faults. Try and make it work. So, I tried to endure and make it work.

Then, I fell pregnant again in the fifth year of our marriage. He started to show more concern. He reduced his frequent nights out and I even began to think that having our new baby would make him change. How delusional I was!

Shortly after the birth of our daughter, he resumed his sexcapades like he never stopped. It got to a point where he would bring them to the house as his coworkers and I was made to entertain them.

When I informed his parents about his conduct, his father told me that there wasn’t really anything wrong with what he was doing. That as a man, he was technically free to do as he pleases, but he’ll speak with him about discretion. His meek mother advised me to join a strong prayer group. That was how she saved her marriage when loose women were trying to take him away from her.

I still stayed. It was not until I had an episode with boils in unusual places that became a HIV scare, before I decided to leave.His parents called to make sure I knew that divorce is against the word of God and the Bible says that any divorced woman who remarries becomes a prostitute.

My parents begged me to stay because of what people will say. Nobody in our family had ever divorced. Why must I bring this shame and stigma to them and the family?

Not once did anybody care about how I was coping with the mess. They all wanted to save face in society.

Nevertheless, I did what I thought best for my children and I. They were too young to be motherless. And at 35, I was too young to become one of the many victims of abusive marriages, albeit not from physical violence. And that was the thing about the trauma that Dozie made me go through. Because it was emotional and no one could see it or know the extent of the damage he caused, it was difficult for them to fathom. It seemed like I was complaining about something silly. But Dozie had fallen out of love with me. In short, he had even started hating me.

I would have stayed for my children if he agreed to never touch me again. But he was one of those men that thought they could eat their cake and still have it.

Everyone concluded that he had been jazzed, but I knew there was no jazz involved. Dozie’s head was very clear and he knew exactly what he had done, and still continued to do.

That was how my husband of seven years destroyed our marriage, the year I turned 35.

Till I pick my pen again.

Ya diba!