Usually, I give people three strikes before I decide I am done with them. It doesn’t matter who you are or how much you mean to me, when it gets to strike three, I am done. And don’t think I am an intolerant person who goes about cutting people out of my life. It actually takes a lot for me to even launch one strike against someone. In Izzy’s case, her first strike was the fact that she entertained the idea of taking back her ex-boyfriend who also happens to be her baby daddy. This is how everything happened.…
At the time I met Izzy, I was recovering from my divorce. My ex-wife and I have a daughter together but that did not stop our marriage from collapsing. As much as I was willing to make things work for the sake of our family, I couldn’t stand the way she criticized my every move. She was always trying to change something about me. “Dress like this.” “Don’t talk like that.” “Change the way you walk.” I’m sure if she had her way, she would have taken me apart and remoulded me into her idea of a perfect partner.
Her need to change me affected my self-esteem. It got to a point, I would ask myself, “What will this woman say about this?” before I did anything. I was no longer myself. That was when I realized I had to walk away from the marriage. It’s one thing to compromise on certain things to make a relationship work, but it’s another thing to scrape your entire identity just to please a partner. After my failed marriage, I took some time to heal and restore everything the cankerworms of my past stole from me. When I was ready to start dating again, my friend introduced me to Izzy.
The first time I saw her, I felt the world tilt a little and I was slightly off balance. There was no doubt that what I felt for her was love at first sight. When we spoke, it felt like I had met a duplicate of my mind. We had an intellectual connection and it was mind-blowing. She thought the same way I did and shared the same feelings about the world. All my struggles in the past began to make sense that instant. Izzy and I are twin flames if you ask me. The good news was that she felt the same way as I did about her. Through our conversation, she said, “I know you are divorced with a daughter. So it’s only fair that I tell you that I am a single mother. My son lives with my mother. And you don’t have to worry about baby daddy drama, because my ex is not in our lives. Should I worry about your ex-wife causing problems?”
I smiled at her directness and shook my head, “No, we have a respectable relationship for our daughter’s sake but that’s all.” That was the beginning of us. We had just met but we started making future plans. That’s how connected we were. One thing I noticed that should have made me ask questions was that she earned less money than she spent. Izzy is single-handedly taking care of her son, her mother, and her younger siblings. But looking at her job and how much she earned, she couldn’t have afforded to do that without external help. I wanted to ask how she could afford to do all of it but I also didn’t want to come across as a nosy boyfriend so I let it slide.
Although I have been burned by my first marriage experience, I am not afraid to try again. And Izzy was so perfect for me that I started making plans to marry her. I took her home to meet my family, and they love her. She also introduced me to her family. They are expecting us to tie the knot soon. I thought everything was good, until one day she told me, “My ex finally decided to be a part of his son’s life. He reached out to me with a lot of apologies. He is even trying to get me to take him back. He says he wants all of us to be together as a family.” The emotions behind her words raised the hair on my neck. It seemed she was considering his proposal and that terrified me.
I asked her, “He abandoned you when you got pregnant and now he wants you back? He must be joking. You are not considering taking him back, are you?” She responded, “I don’t know. It’s a lot to process. I told him to give me time to think about it.” “You are thinking about it? What about us? Our love, the plans we made, does that mean nothing to you?” I almost yelled. She told me I meant everything to her but she also likes the idea of not having kids with different men. I was hurt but there was nothing I could do.
The days that followed were difficult. Izzy who used to call me twenty times in a day avoided my calls and ignored my messages. She even changed her WhatsApp privacy settings so I wouldn’t know if she read my messages. With this attitude, she was slowly slipping out of my grip. I couldn’t let that happen, so I had a conversation with her about it. She apologized for hurting me and promised to change. True to her words, she changed. We were in a good place again. Our conversations were as intriguing as ever. Our bedroom affairs were always fireworks. I believed we were fine.
However, after a few months, she started acting up again. She was subtle about how she avoided me but I picked up on it. One night we were talking on the phone when she yawned. Then she said, “I am so sleepy this evening. If I keep talking to you I will fall asleep so let me just say good night now. Let’s talk tomorrow.” Her behaviour was strange but I wished her a good night and hung up. Izzy is not someone who would go to bed at 8:00 PM, so the excuse of being sleepy didn’t go down well with me.
I decided then to go to her place that very night to have a talk with her. By the time I arrived, it was 11:30 PM. I knocked on her door several times but she wouldn’t respond. Out of frustration, I kept pounding on the door until one of her neighbours came out and said, “She is not home. You will have to come back in the morning if you want to see her. That is when she will return.” The neighbour was a middle-aged woman who seemed willing to talk to me. So I engaged her in a conversation. Everything she told me about Izzy that night tore my heart into tiny pieces. I didn’t know whether to cry or scream. So I thanked the woman and asked her not to tell Izzy I was there.
From the stories Izzy’s neighbour told me, it’s safe to conclude that I am not the only man in her life. It made sense then to me how she is able to afford all the things I didn’t expect her to. So that’s strike two for her, the fact that she lied to me just so she would go and sleep with someone that night. It hurt but I chose to forgive her without letting her know that I know what she is doing. At the moment too, my ex-wife has popped out of the blues and wants us to try again. After being with Izzy, I know that my ex and I were bound to crash. We were mismatched. It would never work with her, but I am thinking of considering her as a backup plan. I know if Izzy finds out it will ruin our relationship, but she is the one who started this whole thing.
My head tells me to walk away from the relationship before it destroys me, but my heart says I should hold on till it gets to the third strike. There is currently a conflict between the two. Which one should I listen to? Should I confront her about the discovery I’ve made with the hope of getting her to change for good? Or should I just allow her to kill the love?
