HOW CAN I ever trust a man again? That is the question I have been wrestling with for the last four years. After bad experiences with the three males, I feel all men are no good.
The only reason I think about one now and then is because I could never imagine myself being intimate with another woman. Ugh!
My problem though is that each man I have ever been involved with has cheated on me.
My first boyfriend used to fool around with a girl I could not stand. I only found out when I was celebrating my O level results and was showing off on her and her friends. She told them to ignore me as all I knew about was studying; otherwise I was so boring that my boyfriend had to come to her for fun.
I wanted to shut her up with one blow, but she had her friends with her and I knew they would have beaten me up. So I just called her a liar and a dunce.
She then said something only my boyfriend could have told her. It was about the location of my birth mark and how I felt about it. He was the only person who would have known that apart from my mother.
I was 17 and to this day I can’t stand him because of that betrayal.
Disappointment number two came just over a year afterwards when the guy I was going out with left me for somebody else. I found out later that they had been involved for years, but had broken up over her friendship with another man.
So he hooked up with me to make her jealous.
After a few months she begged him back and he dumped me and went back to her.
That wiped out my self-esteem. For years afterwards I was not interested in another man. I focused on working hard and saving my money to get my own house so I would never be dependent on any man, as my mother always advised. I did this successfully until I met the man I eventually married. All my fears and anxieties about relationships initially disappeared. We met at church and he appeared to be a God-fearing person. After about two years going out, and my testing him by always questioning him about whatever he said or did, we got married.
Things went well for the first six years and some until I noticed that he was spending more time with a man he trained with. This was unusual as before my husband tended to only associate with other men from church. But how this man looked at my husband disturbed me.
Although bothered for weeks I never said anything about it. Then one evening when the two of them were training in the little room my husband had the exercise machines in, I didn’t hear any noise coming from there for a while.
So I went to see what was happening. I saw my husband in his underwear and this man rubbing his thigh. They both looked shock to see me, but my husband told me he had a muscle strain and the man was rubbing the leg for him.
Though what he said was reasonable I had my suspicions, so I did something I had never done before. When my husband went into the shower, I checked his BB messages and texts to this man in particular. To be honest I felt like vomiting when I read both of them saying LY (Love You in text speak) to each other.
I confronted my husband and we had a big argument and a shoving match. He then began calling me names, and our children were there.
They heard everything. He never once answered the question or denied that he was involved with this man.I decided to leave him. I moved back to my mother’s house with the children.
The last four years have not been easy trying to cope with the knowledge that my husband had a man on me.
I have been through counselling, cried until no more tears came, talked and talked about this thing day in and day out, but I still can’t figure out why I never saw this aspect of him during our long courtship.
That experience has made me totally wary of all men, but I would dearly love to have a father figure for my two children. I would also like to have a man in my life.
Life is not just about working, taking care of children, paying bills, eating and sleeping. We all need companionship – someone to talk with, to care for us and be cared for by us. That is what living is all about; and that is what I crave. But after all I have been through, how can I ever trust another man again? I just don’t know.
