I caught my husband cheating. The first time it happened it broke my heart into pieces but I was willing and able to forgive. I told him, “We have kids we are raising so I won’t talk about divorce but you have to promise that it won’t happen again.” He was remorseful. His actions and the things he said felt genuine. “I don’t know what came over me. I was selfish. It will never happen again but when you pray, pray for me. It could be the work of the devil.”
It was very easy to forgive him because of the kind of man my husband was.
When we met at first he was a virgin. Everything concerning sex was alien to him. He was the one who asked for no sex until marriage. I remember teasing him, “If your thing doesn’t work, please say it ooo so we start looking for help. Don’t wait until our honeymoon before you tell me stories.” He called me crazy. Someday I’ll engage him in a tussle, trying to touch it and see if it really works. He would laugh at my fears and I’ll laugh at his innocence.
One day I felt it and screamed, “Wow, there’s a fire in it.” He said, “You think I’m joking here? I’m reserving all the fire for you on our honeymoon. Make sure you don’t burn on that day.”
We dated for a little over a year and got married. Our first wasn’t that exciting. He knew where to go but that was it. He didn’t know what makes lovemaking exciting. It was my job to teach him and I did it religiously without fail.
“Amankwah, wait. Where are you rushing to? Hold me this way. Touch here, slowly….sloooowly…yeah sloooooooow. Good. You’re doing a good job. I’m feeling it. Now turn this way, look at me this way, say the words this way. Learn to take a pause midway and tease me. It’s not a sprint. Walk, jog, run and then stop abruptly. Begin again but slooowly. Yes! You’re hitting it.”
It wasn’t easy but as time went on, he started losing his innocence. He could start building romance from scratch without fail. I called him a man of my own skills because I built him to suit what makes me happy. He was a clean slate so I wrote whatever I wanted on him.
A year later, we got our first baby. Two years later another baby came. A year after that, I caught him cheating. Amankwah was showing off the secret I taught him in the bedroom. The more I thought of what he could do, the more it hurt me but he showed remorse. He covered his sins with promises and I looked at the man he was and forgave him easily.
Everything showed he has changed but I couldn’t bring myself to trust him. I questioned his movement but once he explained, I accepted his explanation without putting up a fight. Just when I was easing down to trust him whole again, another incident happened. It was between him and a lady in our church. It started like a rumour. Two people told me about it so I started investigating. The truth came out right in front of both of us when I read his messages.
He was talking to the girl about a pregnancy they both agreed to get rid of. He said, “If we didn’t let it go, we would have been parents by now.” The lady answered, “It’s all your fault. Why did you marry her when you knew I had a thing for you.”
The day I reported the issue to our pastor, I used that portion of the message. “Pastor, he got her pregnant and was happily talking about a family they couldn’t raise because of our marriage.”
One day, the three of us met in the pastor’s office, me, my husband and the other lady. They both accepted their mistake and begged to be forgiven. I looked at the lady and her mannerisms and my heart broke afresh. She looked like a lady who won’t even commit to my husband. Apart from my husband, there could be other men in her life. If my husband could also cheat with such a lady then there could be other women I didn’t know about.
The pastor did what pastors do and after that day, we spent several days going to counselling. I made it clear that I’ll not sleep with my husband again until he had gone through a series of tests and had come out with a clean bill of health.
I did my own test. I checked for STDs and got screened for other things. They were all negative. My husband did too and came out negative but you know HIV test, you ought to do it again three months later to be really sure. The outcome of the test was going to give me some form of false security that all was well but it was a straw I could hang on to.
My husband started asking for sex even before the next test and I said no. “I gave it to you as often as you wanted but you still had the audacity to cheat. I’m protecting myself. I have kids. I can’t die and leave them orphans because of your infidelity. If you want it now, you have to use protection until we are done with the series of tests.”
Come and see this man. It was as if I had stepped on his balls. He went berserk talking as if I had stolen his headship from him. “Regardless of everything, I’m still the man in this marriage and you can’t tell me what to do. You want to starve me for three months? All because of a little mistake I did? I thought you said you’ve forgiven me? So why are you punishing me this way?”
He saw the use of protection as punishment but didn’t see the emotional damage his infidelity caused me as enough punishment. He went to report to the pastor that I had started denying him sex. When he spoke to my parents, he left the cheating part of the story out. He made it look like I woke up one day and started denying him shuperu. “I’m not denying him of anything. I only said he should use protection until I’m sure we are both clean.”
We ended up in front of our pastor again. The pastor said, “Your wife is making a good point. It’s hard but this should teach you a lesson to stop going after other women. Control your urges and you’ll be fine.”
My husband used the unavailability of shuperu as an excuse to cheat once again. This time around, he didn’t hide it from me. He spoke to the lady on the phone at night on a loudspeaker so I would hear them. He spent the best part of his night texting and smiling with this new lady. Even when I hadn’t asked him any questions he thought he should give me an answer so he told me, “There are a lot of fishes in the sea. If you escape through the holes of my net, it’s not the end of the world. Another fish will come and she will be big enough to get stuck.”
He returned from work one day, and we were not home. We had packed out. When he called late at night to ask where we were, I told him, “Now you have all the house to yourself. You can even bring them home. I and my kids won’t stay to be disrespected by you.”
I was with my parents. My dad was waiting for him to call or come home so he could tell him his mind but he didn’t come and didn’t call until two months later. Within those months, I learned how to live without him and was getting better at it. When he apologized and asked to be forgiven, I told him to ask forgiveness from his kids and not me because I’d moved on long ago.
He’s still pleading. Now he’s telling everyone that the girl he was talking to at night was just a trick to scare me to give him sex. He said the same thing to my mom and she laughed at him. My dad told him it was a childish way to handle issues of such nature if indeed it was true.
To me, the veracity of what he did doesn’t concern me now. Life after him is what I’m thinking of but everybody thinks he deserves one last chance, my parents included. My dad has been pleading. My mom has been praying with me. I hate to disappoint them but it looks like I’m going to disappoint them this time because I’m not going back to that marriage again.
–Efiba
