WHEN I WAS PLANNING to get married and went for the first pre-counselling session, the reverend at the church told my boyfriend and me it would be better to choose a date that was not significant to any of us.
He advised against us choosing either of our birthdates or a date near Christmas or Easter. His reasoning was that should there be any fall-out in the years ahead, then whenever that celebratory period came around, instead of us being happy, we would be very sad.
I remember him breaking into song singing, “Memories don’t leave like people do, They’ll always be with you, They’re the main thing good or bad, They’re something you’ll always have.”
I thought then he was really funny and thanked him for his serenade, but we were determined to get married on December 24 that year. I recalled joking that as my boyfriend always forgot things, there was no way he could ever forget our anniversary. After all, who cannot remember an event the day before Christmas? So we ignored the reverend’s suggestion.
Now here I am 17 years later realising how right the reverend was. Each Christmas for the last six years has been sad for me. All it reminds me of is the biggest mistake I ever made in my life and all the suffering that I endured over the years before splitting with my husband after 11 years living in the same house together.
Destroying confidence
I prefer not to go into all the details about my hapless marriage as I still get angry at how I was betrayed by my husband. But I must comment on the things men do that destroy their wives’ confidence in them, and I want to suggest ways women can avoid ending up like me.
The first thing was his penchant for chatting up teenaged girls. When we were courting, I didn’t like it, but as he explained that talking and encouraging young people was part of his outreach work for the youth ministry I tried to turn a blind eye to it.
Still, I always had a fundamental problem with a 25-year-old man being so friendly with 15 and 16-year-olds. As he saw nothing wrong with it, throughout our marriage he would always have these young girls around and got upset when I complained that too much of his time was taken up with them.
Mentorships
In the end, though, I was proved right because it was one of these mentorships, as he called them, that turned into an intimate encounter which undermined our marriage.
The second problem was the lies he told. Before we got married he was always forthright but around our third year together, and with me expecting our first child, I noticed he would not be forthcoming on even the simplest of things.
It got so bad that he stopped telling me beforehand if he was going out an evening. I only knew when he came in, bathed, put on his clothes and went back out.
That was when he first started counselling a certain 17-year-old who was always calling on him for something. She was the one he eventually got involved with.
The third and last matter which I’d like to mention is his behaviour towards me. From always being loving and attentive, he became just interested in having sex – whether I enjoyed it or not seemed not to matter.
He also spent most of his spare hours at the church with his youth charges, primarily these young girls. Our relationship slowly became one in which he said very little, showed minimal interest, with only sex bringing us together for a few fleeting minutes.
As I said, I prefer not to go into many details because I think those three points alone demonstrate what I endured. What hurt most about all these things was that I loved and believed in him so much that when a cousin of mine told me to watch him, I told her off.
I would never have believed that a grown man with a loving Christian wife, who earned more money than he did but gave most of it to him to run the household as he was the man of the house, would be treated like this. He lied and cheated on me, along with disrespecting me.
Walk away
Where I went wrong, and the reason why I am speaking out, is that I saw a situation I did not like but convinced myself that after we got married it would improve. Far from getting better it got worse. I would therefore advise people who are in love to deal early with any problem they have with their spouse, and if he or she does not want to stop it, walk away.
The other lesson I learnt and would like to pass on is about getting involved with men
who have an obsession with a body type. For my ex-husband, it was for petite girls. I was petite too but added size after the children were born. He seemed to be turned off by my size after a while, but got excited over his small girls.
But the biggest lesson I learnt from this is that you should get to know your partner inside out before you get married. Talk with him or her, find out about their background, and ask personal questions. If you are going to become involved with someone you owe it to yourself to find out everything you can about them.
I did not do that. I trusted him and took what he said at face value. If I had done the necessary checking, I would have found out that he couldn’t keep his hands off teenaged girls well before I came along.
My investigations would have revealed that he used another church’s youth ministry to get at girls but was caught. So when he got involved with me and then into my church’s youth ministry it was all a plan to pursue his sick obsession – nothing else.
So he was fooling me from Day 1. That’s why I urge women to ask a lot of questions about their partner before taking the plunge.
