Love Life is a Zikoko weekly series about love, relationships, situationships, entanglements and everything in between.
Morenikeji* (49) and Thompson* (53) met at her mother’s food restaurant near a bus park in 2000. They have been married for 20 years.
On this week’s Love Life, they talk about how an unlikely meeting led to marriage, surviving years of toxicity, and how patience, faith, and time transformed what could have ended into a lasting relationship.
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What’s your earliest memory of each other?
Morenikeji: March, 2000. I’d finished secondary school and was working with my mum at her restaurant near the bus park. Thompson’s father owned buses at the park, and Thompson managed them on his behalf. Men from the park, including Thompson, ate at our restaurant.
I noticed him quite early. He always spoke English, which stood out in that environment. There was something about how he carried himself that was a little different from everyone else. But I never let any of my interest show. My mum had warned me seriously about getting involved with any of the men in the park. She didn’t trust the environment, and I respected that. So I kept my distance from everyone, Thompson included. He got the same treatment as everybody else.
Thompson: I started noticing Morenikeji not long after I became a regular at the shop. But what attracted me to her wasn’t just her looks. It was how she carried herself. She was strict. She didn’t give any man room to disrespect her. I observed how she handled customers, moved around the shop, and shut down anyone who overstepped. She wasn’t rude about it, but her boundaries were very clear. I found that extremely attractive.
When I tried to have conversations with her, she was always curt. Short answers, no warmth or invitation to continue talking. I kept trying because something told me there was more there. I wasn’t going to give up just because she didn’t make it easy.
Curious, Morenikeji. Why did he get that treatment even when you had some interest?
Morenikeji: My mum once told a customer off for trying to get chatty with me. So it was best to keep my feelings private.
What changed things was my birthday; he got me something really nice. I wasn’t expecting the gesture at all. I had been cold and curt the entire time I’d known him, yet he still paid attention enough to know when my birthday was and do something thoughtful about it. After that, I became warmer, started giving him more attention, and that’s really how things began between us.
How did you know her birthday, Thompson?
Thompson: I’d overheard her mum talking about it some weeks earlier, so I committed the date to memory.
Morenikeji started warming up after the gift. I was genuinely happy when she finally started letting me in.
Right. How did things progress from there?
Morenikeji: We kept it very private at first. My mum didn’t know, so we had to be careful about how we moved. We’d find moments to talk, spend time together quietly away from the observant eyes at the park. It felt good. For the first time, someone in that environment felt worth knowing; worth trusting a little. I started to enjoy having him around. We also snuck to hotels on some weekends.
Thompson: Those early months of getting to know each other were really good. She wasn’t someone who just agreed with everything you said or told you what you wanted to hear; she pushed back. She had her own perspective and wasn’t afraid to express it. I respected that.
But things took an unexpected turn.
What happened?
Morenikeji: I got pregnant towards the end of that year. When I found out, I was scared. I was young, wasn’t married, and I knew my mum would be disappointed. But I knew I didn’t want to abort. My mum was also against terminating the pregnancy when I eventually told her.
So she took the situation into her own hands. She went straight to Thompson’s family and confronted them. Things moved very quickly after that. There was an introduction, and we got married in 2001.
We went from a secret relationship to a rushed marriage in a very short time.
Thompson: I wasn’t ready. I didn’t even have my own place yet. Now I had to raise a family.
I had wanted her to abort the pregnancy. I felt cornered into the marriage even though I had genuine feelings for her. I resented how it happened and how the decision was taken out of my hands. I didn’t know how to process any of that, so I was often angry.
Considering the circumstances around your marriage, what did the early years look like?
Morenikeji: He was very aggressiveverbally and physically. Those early years were very, very hard. I would cry and go to my mum, and she would advise me to endure. She would also remind me that she warned me about the men in the park, which was her subtle way of reminding me I had brought it on myself. That made everything worse. I was suffering, and I felt like I couldn’t fully complain about it.
After I delivered our child, he calmed down for a period. I didn’t fully understand why at the time. Maybe having a child changed something in him, or maybe other things also played into it. But there was a 1-2-year stretch where things were more stable, and we actually lived like husband and wife.
Thompson: I think it boils down to the resentment I was carrying at the time. I was directing it at her, even though she was not the real source. I was young and angry, but that’s no excuse for my actions.
Hmmm.
Morenikeji: When he started again, my mum changed her advice. This time, she told me to retaliate. She said I should not allow him to treat me like a servant. So for every verbal attack, I returned it. Every physical one, I returned. It became very toxic between us. The house was genuinely a war zone for a while. I’m not proud of my own behaviour during those years either, but I was fighting to survive the only way I knew.
Did you consider leaving?
Morenikeji: It crossed my mind many times, and I would be lying if I said I never got close to actually doing it. But I had decided that I didn’t want to have children with different men. I wanted one family. And as bad as the worst days were, there were also genuinely good days in between. We had moments that reminded me of why I had been drawn to him in the first place. There were real things worth holding onto even in the middle of all the chaos.
Thompson: When she started fighting back, something happened inside me. I think on some level I had been behaving the way I was because I expected her to keep absorbing it. When she didn’t, I had to look at myself differently. It forced a confrontation with my own behaviour and the aggression started losing its grip on me. Over time, I began to pull back from it.
That still sounds like a very difficult and prolonged period. What actually turned things around for good?
Thompson: Faith, genuinely. I became more serious about my religion, and it changed how I saw everything around me. My marriage, my responsibilities as a husband and a father, my own behaviour and character. I had to sit with who I had been and what I had done to the woman I married. It’s not easy, but I did it. And I changed because I had to, not because anyone was forcing me.I looked at my life, and I didn’t like the man I was seeing.
It was a slow process, and it required real work. But the intention was clear, and even Morenikeji could see that the change was real and not just temporary.
Morenikeji: I didn’t trust the change immediately. I remember telling my mum and she said I should stay on guard. She said he was only slowing down because he’d seen that I couldn’t be trampled upon easily. And it was true, you can’t just wake up and say you’re a changed man, especially after all you’ve put me through. But, even with all my doubts, the change was obvious. There was a time he even brought his pastors to for forgiveness from me. So slowly, I let my own guard down. We eventually found our way back to what a marriage should feel like.
When I look back now, I think it was a combination of everything working together. His faith and the personal reckoning it brought. My own stubbornness in not walking away. Time doing what time does. The grace of God, as both of us would say. None of it was easy, but we came out the other side.
Curious, though. How did those hard years affect the children? Did you make any effort to shield them?
Morenikeji: When children are small, they sense tension, and they feel the atmosphere of a home, but they can’t fully understand what they’re seeing. So I like to think they didn’t fully understand what was happening. Now that they’re grown, they see everything clearly. They can read a room. They know when something isn’t right between us. This knowledge guards how I handle conflict now. I don’t want them watching us treat each other the way we used to.
Thompson: We still argue. I want to say that clearly because I don’t want us to sound like a couple that has arrived at some kind of perfection. Things still get heated sometimes. But there is a maturity in how we handle it now that simply did not exist before. We don’t cross certain lines anymore. When a conversation starts going in a bad direction, one of us pulls back before it escalates. That of restraint didn’t come easily or naturally. But it’s there now.
Right. When you look back at those early years, what do you think you could have done differently?
Thompson: I see that period as a test. I say that not to minimise what happened or to wrap it in a neat spiritual explanation that lets me off the hook. I don’t believe that. What I did was wrong, and I own that fully. But I understand now that we were two young people in a situation that neither of us had planned or chosen on our own terms. We were young and immature. We didn’t know how to communicate. We didn’t know how to give each other grace. We learned all of that the hardest possible way.
Morenikeji: I’ll say I don’t regret standing up for myself. It was necessary to do that. But that period no longer defines us. We have built something real on the other side of all of that, and the fact that our union survived is the thing I hold onto. We didn’t come through all of that for nothing.
Fair enough. What is the best thing about being with each other today?
Morenikeji: He knows me completely. Twenty years means there is nothing hidden between us. He knows my moods before I speak them. He knows which silences are fine and which ones mean something is wrong. There is a sense of comfort in being fully known by someone and having them choose to stay anyway.
Thompson: She never gave up on us when I gave her every reason to walk away. I think about that often. The strength it took to stay and fight for something that must have felt broken beyond repair. That is not something I take lightly. She is a stronger woman than I deserved in those years. I’m grateful for where we are now. I’m grateful that we found our way through.
What would you say to a young couple going through a very rough patch who are wondering whether to stay?
Morenikeji: A rough patch is not the same thing as a broken marriage, but you have to be honest with yourself about which one you are actually in. There are things that can be worked through over time, with effort and genuine change from both sides. And there are things that cannot. Only you know which situation you are truly in. For us, the good that existed between us was always real enough to hold onto, even during the worst of it. That mattered. It kept me there when leaving would have been easier.
Thompson: I would tell the man specifically to look at himself honestly. A lot of problems in a marriage begin with a man who has not dealt with his own unresolved issues and is taking them out on the people closest to him. I know because I was that man. Deal with yourself first. You cannot build something healthy while carrying things you have refused to address. It is uncomfortable work, but it is the only real way through.
On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate your love life?
Morenikeji: I would give it an 8. Not because things are perfect, because they are not and I would never claim otherwise. But because of how far we have come from where we started. There is still work in any marriage. There will always be work.
Thompson: I’ll give it an 8 as well. We’ve built something that went through the very worst and still held together. You don’t appreciate calm water the same way if you have never been in a storm.
*Names have been changed to protect the identity of the subjects.
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