This week we continue our presentation of letters and/or interviews with men whose relationships have failed.
WHAT WOULD MAKE a woman cheat on and then leave a man she was involved with for 22 years?
This is the question I keep asking myself since my girlfriend left me.
What hurts me most about this is that she used to tell her friends that she lacked for nothing and was happy. Yet after years of saying this, and never giving me any indication she had become dissatisfied with me, she horned me.
I loved and trusted her, and for all those years we were together I never looked at or touched another woman. I never raised my hand at her or in was abusive in any other way.
I encouraged her to take evening classes as she left school without certificates. I then helped her to get a job.
I taught her to drive, and then bought her a car.
I did everything and more that could be expected from a partner because all I was interested in was in improving the quality of her life. From the time she moved into my home I treated her with respect and gave her unconditional love.
I did that because I always believed in what the Good Book says: “Do unto others as you would have them do to you.” That’s why her walking out on me, along with the downright nasty way she did it, is still painful.
As I said, our relationship was a great one as we used to live really well. I worked hard and provided for her. We used to talk about all sorts of things, go driving, and never really quarrelled as we used to discuss just about everything.
But this situation started to change after she got a little business successfully going.
She started coming home later and later at night and having all sorts of excuses about not being intimate.
Then the telltale signs began to appear. One night when she took off her blouse, only one strap of her bra was on.
I questioned it and she only put me off by asking me why I was making a big deal out of something that was an accident.
The next thing was the calls she kept getting on her cellphone after she got home. Whenever it was this new-found friend of hers, she would only answer with “Yes”, “No”, “Don’t know”, “I can’t say now” and so on.
The thing is when I asked her who this man was, she would only say that he worked with her and then would change the subject.
If I insisted, she would ask if she was not allowed to have a friend and say that her friends did not have to be my friends.
After that she started walking around in the house with her cellphone in her back pocket.
I used to tease her about it because to me it was so silly.
Then there were her trips to the bread shop or to relatives which started taking hours instead of within an hour or so.
Quizzed on why these things should now take such a long time, she would always bark back that she wanted time for herself.
The final telltale sign was her moving into the other bedroom and no longer wanting to sleep with me because, she claimed, I was confusing her too much. Yet she and I never had any big noise as such. All I wanted to find out was who this friend was and why she refused to say.
It all came to a head when her vehicle broke down and the man came by our house pretending to be a mechanic to look at it. I knew it was him because she slipped once and called his name once before while speaking to him, I presume, on the telephone.
After the man left, I challenged her about it and we had a big noise. Afterwards she picked up her things and left the house.
She cursed me in the worst possible way and told me I had never done anything for her. Those words cut me like a knife, given all I had done for her. How she could say those things to me, I would never ever know!
To this day I am still hurting at how I was abused and betrayed. But I have come to realize that what happened to me is what men go through in this country every day at the hands of women.
They show you one face and then when they no longer have use for you, they dump you.
Yet they like to give the world the impression that they are ever so good and men are ever so wicked. Nothing is further from the truth.
A woman can do anything bad a man can do, but can do it even worse. How my former woman treated me is proof of that.
