Walking away from a relationship is never easy. The temptation is always to wait for another couple of months and see if he would stop being a leech or if she would stop cheating on you. But too often too late, a player is always a player, cheaters hardly ever stop. As you will soon find out, a leech is a leech. If you have invested in the wrong concern, it is better to divest and move on to more profitable things. Holding on may look like you are brave and long-suffering but please, must you suffer in a relationship that is going nowhere fast? Let go, dear. Walk.
Never ever forget that you can’t force anyone to love you. If you need to beg him or her to stay with you, what you feel is not love and it is time to let go. A man you blackmail not to leave you or you are considering trapping with pregnancy, real or fake, is not your man. Even if he stays, he’s only there in body not in spirit.
Although it feels like it, but the end of a relationship is not the end of life. Not all relationships have happy endings. Love leaves you sometimes. It does not mean you are cursed or jinxed. Just learn the lesson and move on. The right person will come. It may take a while but the right person is always worth the wait. As the saying goes, you must kiss a few frogs before your prince charming comes along.
If you are in a relationship where you are constantly having to sacrifice your happiness to please your partner, you are not on to a good thing. You have to pretend to be a teacher because his mum doesn’t want him to marry a lawyer. You have to pretend you do not have a Phd because his ego is fragile and he’s thin skinned. You have to pretend your brand new car is ‘tokunbo’ because it would make him ‘feel somehow’. You are in the wrong place. You may be managing it now but a few years down the road, you will resent him and what he has turned you into. A woman who demands but supplies no value to your life is only good for a short ride. If you allow a girl to make more withdrawals than deposits in your life, you will be out of balance and in the red before you know it. You must know when to close the account and take stock. It’s always better to be alone with dignity than in a relationship that constantly requires you to sacrifice your happiness and self-respect.
Is your relationship giving you more pain than joy? Do you wonder more why you are in it than wishing you had met your partner earlier? Don’t be so blinded by the past happy moments that you forget about all the unhappiness it brings you. If your relationship leaves you frustrated, upset, unhappy, miserable more often than not; if it leaves you in tears every so often, perhaps this might not be the right person for you. The relationship you are in now should be one which brings you happiness now. It is simple enough, in business the aim and objective is to make profit. In a relationship it is happiness, and it has no substitute. Any kind of abuse, physical or verbal, are definite no-nos. If he hits you, slaps you around, punches you to drive his point home, it is time to let him go. Forget the beautiful gifts and nice words he says after, there is clearly something wrong with him and you too for staying in there for this long. If her way of expressing anger is throwing the intercom at the flat-screen television, please start walking and keep walking. What those crazy moments show is something deep that needs addressing. Perception is reality. Emotional abuse is trickier because only the victim feels it. You have told yourself long enough that things will get better. It hasn’t. It won’t. Time to walk away is now.
She believes in God. He believes in science. The two of them aren’t heading in the same direction, so boarding the same train will be a mistake. For any friendship or relationship to work out, the parties involved must share certain fundamental beliefs and values. The values you share are the big rocks which will hold the relationship in place and help you weather through even the toughest storms. Of course you know there are storms ahead, don’t you?
On the other hand, if your core values are fundamentally different, love or no love, when the storm comes, holding your union together will be like jogging uphill or trying to hold the soil of the ground together in a mud slide.
Are you both growing or this relationship is holding one of you down? Indeed if you will be true to yourself, this relationship has altered your plan and desire for your life. You have God’s calling on your life. You know you have special gifts for pastoral work but she has issued an ultimatum that the day you become a pastor is the day she leaves you. So you are hanging in there hoping she will change her mind, praying on seven prayer mountains that God changes her. Bro, you are not married yet. If she’s God’s will for your life, why is she opposing God’s will in your life?
Sisi, you know your ultimate ambition is to become the first female Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) in your village but the man in your life has made it clear that no wife of his will ‘answer sir’ to any man because he makes enough to take care of his family. He told you his woman will not go out to work which is why you are learning cake-making. Take a step back and see the road ahead. Are you where you want to be and do you see a future where you will be happy making cakes? If the only reason you are doing what you are doing is to make him happy and keep him, then you need to think again. He is mean and abusive. He is lazy and unambitious. But he has proposed and his nice ring is on your bruised finger. So you decide to wait it out expecting a better future. Wake up girl. You don’t live in the past, you don’t live in the future. Are you happy now? You need to make it to tomorrow. It is okay to hope for better days ahead but not in this situation. Take a good look at what you have, at him. If he is what he is, why do you think a wedding ceremony will change him?
In all, when you give yourself to someone who doesn’t add value to you, you surrender pieces of your soul that you’ll never get back.
*Egbemode (egbemode3@gmail.com)
