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Gaya

My parents were sort of marriage therapists to my uncles, aunts, friends and, sometimes, complete strangers. I think it was because they had been married for such a long time and people assumed that meant they knew something the rest of us didn't. My dad, especially, was the person everyone seemed to trust for advice. 

I don't actually think my parents' marriage was particularly healthy, but that's a conversation for another day. From the outside, though, they looked like the perfect couple. The kind people pointed to when they wanted to say, "See? Marriage can work."

The funny thing about being raised in a house where everybody comes to discuss their marriage is that you hear a lot of things children are probably not supposed to hear. I heard about cheating. Money. Sex. In-laws. Infidelity. Men who were irresponsible. Women who were "too difficult." Women who wanted to leave. Women who were told to stay.

One of those women was Aunty Kate. She had found out that her husband, Uncle Odinaka, was cheating on her and wanted to leave. I was disappointed in Uncle Odinaka because I genuinely liked him. He was funny, kind to us, and seemed like a good man, but I was also firmly on Aunty Kate's side. Cheating was a dealbreaker. Simple.

So you can imagine my confusion when fifteen-year-old me, washing plates in the kitchen and eavesdropping on my parents' conversation, heard my dad say that Aunty Kate was making a mistake. Apparently, Uncle Odinaka was a good man. He took care of her. He provided for the family. He was good to the children, and, according to my dad, cheating was not enough reason to throw all of that away.

I remember standing there with a plate in my hand, thinking, how can cheating not be enough reason? I was fifteen, but I wasn't naive. I knew cheating was wrong. A few weeks later, everyone had successfully advised, or, more accurately, bullied, Aunty Kate into returning to her husband.

One afternoon, my mother was weaving my hair and we were gisting about everything and nothing. We were talking about Aunty Kate again, and my mother was explaining why she thought the marriage could still work. She told me that sometimes women had to look beyond certain things. That no marriage was perfect. That a woman shouldn't throw away a good man because of one thing. And then, almost casually, she said it.

You know that point in a conversation with your mother where you somehow forget she's your mother? Where she's just your gist partner? Where you're laughing and talking and suddenly you feel like you're talking to your best friend? That was where my brain was. So, without thinking, I asked:

The mood changed immediately. My mother looked at me like I had slapped her. What kind of stupid question was that? Why would I ask her such a thing? Who taught me to ask questions like that? She told me to get out. She wasn't weaving my hair again. Just like that, the conversation was over, but the sentence remained. Men are born to cheat. I carried it with me.

Good Men Cheat Too, You Just Learn to Manage It

I didn't question it because it wasn't presented to me as an opinion. It was presented as wisdom. The kind of thing older women know because they've lived longer than you. Men cheat. Good men cheat. Men who love you can cheat. Men who provide can cheat. Men who are responsible husbands can cheat. The trick, apparently, was to find a man who did all the other things well enough that his cheating could be tolerated, and that lesson followed me into my relationships. 

My first boyfriend cheated on me. If you've read <a href="https://aura.ng/life-and-love/unlearning-everything-my-mother-taught-me-about-being-a-good-woman-episode-1-if-you-don-t-sweep-every-morning-no-man-will-marry-you-">Episode 1</a>, you already know the story. I had been taught that a good woman works harder when something is wrong. So when I found out he was cheating, I didn't immediately leave. I asked myself what I had done wrong. Maybe I wasn't affectionate enough. Maybe I wasn't available enough. Maybe I needed to do more, and so I did.

 I cooked more. I cleaned more. I showed up more. I tried harder to become the woman who would give a man no reason to look elsewhere. It didn't work. I eventually learnt, a man's decision to cheat has very little to do with how well you perform womanhood, but even after that relationship ended, the lesson stayed.

My <a href="https://aura.ng/life-and-love/unlearning-every-single-thing-my-mother-taught-me-about-being-a-good-woman-episode-2-don-t-be-too-ambitious-men-find-it-intimidating-">second boyfriend</a> didn't cheat. That relationship was different. He liked my ambition. He didn't ask me to become smaller. He didn't make me feel like I had to perform some perfect version of womanhood to keep him.

Yet, I still carried that old belief somewhere inside me. Men cheat. Maybe not today. Maybe not this man. But eventually. It is strange what happens when you grow up expecting betrayal, you can start treating a healthy relationship like a temporary exception instead of proof that your belief was wrong. I didn't fully understand that until my third boyfriend.

The "Good Man" My Mother Had Been Preparing Me For

By the time I met him, I had become very good at making excuses for men. He was, in many ways, exactly the kind of man my mother had taught me to value. He took care of me. He was generous. He showed up. He was responsible. He had met my people. Marriage wasn't some vague idea we joked about. It was an actual conversation. Our families knew about us. I thought I had finally found the version of the story my mother had been preparing me for.

Then I started noticing the women. There was always a woman, and another one, and another. Sometimes I knew. Sometimes I didn't. Sometimes I confronted him, and he apologised. Sometimes he had an explanation, and every time, I went back to the same sentence. He's a good man. He took care of me. He was going to marry me. He wasn't perfect, but no man was. I had been taught that part too.

Then one afternoon, a woman sent me a message. She was pregnant for him.

I read the message once. Then again. Then the messages kept coming. She told me she knew who I was. She knew I was his girlfriend. She knew he had met my family and that we were talking about marriage. She said he had told her things about our relationship that I probably wouldn't believe if she told me. Then she started insulting me. She said I should stop pretending to be the "main girlfriend" because there was nothing special about me. She said I had apparently stolen her boyfriend and was now walking around like I had won.

I was furious. Then she threatened to drag me on social media. She said she would post our pictures, post our messages, tell everyone that I had knowingly stayed with a man who was expecting a child with another woman and let the whole internet decide which one of us was the real girlfriend. She said she would tag me, tag my pictures, find my friends, and make sure everybody knew that I was "fighting another woman over a man who had already chosen her." Then she ended with:

"Leave him alone before I disgrace you. You don't know the kind of person you're dealing with."

I was shaking with anger by the time I finished reading it. Not because she was pregnant. Not even because she was sleeping with him. It was the disrespect. The sheer audacity of another woman telling me to leave my own boyfriend and threatening to drag me online because she believed I had taken him from her. I wanted to fight her. I wanted to insult her. I wanted to remind her that whatever she had with him, I was the one he had taken home to meet his family, but somewhere in the middle of my anger, I stopped. 

I suddenly realised something uncomfortable. She didn't owe me anything. He did. She wasn't my boyfriend. He was. She hadn't promised me fidelity. He had. She hadn't come to my family and talked about marrying me. He had. She hadn't spent years telling me she loved me while simultaneously making other women feel like they had a legitimate claim to him. He had.

That was when I realised why her message had gotten under my skin so badly. This woman was threatening to publicly humiliate me because of a mess he had created. She had enough confidence to call me a thief because he had made her believe she had something to lose. She felt entitled to fight me because he had given her reasons to believe she was important to him.

Suddenly, I wasn't just angry at her anymore. I was angry at him. Because I had spent years hearing that men cheat, that it was just what men did, that if a man was otherwise good to you, you didn't throw away a relationship over one "mistake." But this wasn't a mistake. This was a whole other woman feeling confident enough to threaten me on the internet because of the relationship she had with my boyfriend, and somehow, I was still supposed to call him a good man.

There was no dramatic confrontation. No final dinner. No long speech about how he had broken my heart. I was simply done.

Of course, he begged. He said he didn't want to marry her. He said the pregnancy didn't change how he felt about me. He said he had made a mistake, that he loved me, that we had built too much together to throw it away, and my family was in chaos; my mother was hurt, my father was angry, everybody had an opinion, but what surprised me most was my mother's reaction. She wasn't asking me to forgive him because she thought cheating was good. She was asking me to consider everything else.

"Ada, Is it possible you can manage this issue? He is not marrying the girl."

That sentence made me so angry. I remember looking at her, thinking, " Does that make it better? He had cheated on me. He had gotten another woman pregnant. Another woman had threatened to publicly humiliate me because of him, and the question being asked was whether I couldn't manage it because he wasn't marrying her.

Manage it? That word stayed with me. I understood exactly what I had been taught all those years. Not how to have a healthy relationship. Not how to recognise respect. Not how to decide what my boundaries were. I had been taught how to manage a man. Manage his temper. Manage his wandering eye. Manage his bad habits. Manage his mistakes. Manage the things that hurt you because "no man is perfect."

I was tired. So I blocked everybody. Him. My mother. My father. Everybody. For almost a month, I disappeared. And that month was probably the most important month of my adult life.

For the First Time, I Wasn't Listening to Anybody But Myself

For the first time, I wasn't listening to my mother. I wasn't listening to my friends. I wasn't listening to him. I wasn't listening to the woman he got pregnant. I wasn't listening to anybody telling me what a reasonable woman should do. I was just listening to myself. And I kept coming back to one question:

If I marry this man, what exactly am I agreeing to?

Not, will he cheat again? Not, what if he changes? Not, but he takes care of me. Just: what am I agreeing to?

I realised I was being asked to build a marriage around the assumption that I would eventually have to tolerate things that would hurt me. And I realised I didn't want that marriage. I didn't want to become the woman who stayed because the man was "good otherwise." I didn't want to become the woman who heard about another woman and started calculating whether the betrayal was serious enough to leave. I didn't want to spend the rest of my life asking myself whether I was being too dramatic.

I wanted to be able to say: you hurt me, I don't want this anymore. And leave. That was it. No complicated equation. No list of his good qualities. No calculation of how much money he spent on me. No consideration of whether another woman was going to get him if I left. Just me deciding that something was no longer acceptable to me.

After almost a month, I went home. I apologised to my parents for blocking them and disappearing. My mother cried. My father was quiet. But neither of them tried to convince me anymore. They already knew. There was no going back.

I Wasn't Unlearning Infidelity. I Was Unlearning Endurance.

I thought I was unlearning the idea that men cheat. I wasn't. I was unlearning something much bigger: the idea that a woman's job in a relationship is to endure whatever comes with the man she has chosen, because once you believe men are naturally unfaithful, everything becomes a management exercise. He cheats? Manage it. He apologises? Forgive him. He provides? Remember that he is a good man. He doesn't marry the other woman? Surely, you can manage. He loves you? What more do you want?

I had been taught to measure a man's goodness by everything he did around his betrayal instead of asking the most basic question: how does this relationship make me feel? And I had been taught to see leaving as failure. As though a woman who leaves a relationship has failed to make it work. As though staying is automatically the more mature choice. As though endurance is a virtue even when the thing you're enduring is destroying you.

I don't believe that anymore. I don't think all men cheat. I don't think cheating is an unavoidable part of being in love with a man. And I certainly don't think a woman should build her entire understanding of marriage around learning how to survive a man's bad behaviour.

My mother wasn't trying to ruin me. She was passing down what she had learnt. That is the complicated thing about unlearning: sometimes the person who teaches you the wrong lesson genuinely believes it will save you. Maybe "men are born to cheat" was my mother's way of making sure I wouldn't be shocked by the realities of marriage. Maybe she thought she was teaching me resilience. But resilience should not mean becoming so accustomed to disrespect that you stop recognising it.

So, yes. I finally unlearnt it. Men are not born to cheat. They are born human. They make choices, and I am allowed to decide which choices I am willing to live with.

I don't want to be a good woman who knows how to manage a cheating man. I want to be a woman who knows she can leave one.

My mother told me early that all men cheat, and for years, I thought she was preparing me for reality. I didn't realise she was also teaching me what I should be willing to tolerate. 

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