At 30, Dora* was a rising professional with a solid financial map. But after a decade of “temporary” sacrifices for her husband’s business, she’s now 40 with a drained bank account and a vanished professional identity. 

Now, she shares how she’s reclaiming her life from the wreckage of a one-sided partnership.

As Told To Boluwatife

If you had met me at 30 and asked what my life would look like at 40, I’d tell you I’d be stable and established, in the process of setting up an education fund for my children and building a retirement fund for the future. I’d say nothing about figuring out how to rebuild my savings from scratch.

But unfortunately, this is where I am.

When I met my ex-husband, David*, in 2014, I had a consulting career in advocacy and was starting to get recognition. I travelled for work and paid my bills. I even had savings and a few investments to my name. I was comfortable. 

David ticked all my boxes, and the cherry on the cake was that his drive matched mine. He had an energy business idea I knew could become big if we joined forces. 

So, when we got married in 2015, I imagined we were more than romantic partners. We were a team, building a business empire together. 

Two years into our marriage, I turned down a major career opportunity. The money was good, but the job required me to relocate to a different country for a year. It would have come with a lot of exposure, but it would have meant leaving David to manage his growing business alone.

He didn’t outrightly ask me to reject the job. Instead, he asked questions that implied he didn’t support me taking the job. 

Questions like, “Will you be able to focus on our marriage?” 

“Do you think we can survive long-distance?” 

“What happens to the business? You know it’s still at a fragile stage.”

So, I declined that job and told myself it was a temporary sacrifice. “Temporary” turned into 10 years.

I stopped applying for specific roles because I didn’t want to disrupt our home. I avoided contracts that required much travel and mostly took work that didn’t require much of my time. The trade-off was that they were low-paying opportunities. I was essentially making myself smaller to make our marriage feel stable.

In addition to all that, I still had to take on almost all the financial responsibilities at home. David’s business struggled a lot in the early years, and I often had to step in.

There were months when business was slow, and I had to dip into my savings to pay David’s staff (the two people who helped him with logistics and operations). I paid the house rent and covered our feeding expenses more times than I can count. 

I even “borrowed” him ₦3m to sort medical bills incurred from the emergency surgery and intensive care hospital stay when we had our twins in 2020. He didn’t have the money, and I had to gather money from my mum and siblings to settle the hospital so they’d allow us to go home. 

David promised to pay the money back, but every time he made some money, there was always something else to pay for. I ended up liquidating my ₦4m fixed deposit savings to repay that debt and handle other household expenses.

In all this, I never confronted David or complained about taking on his responsibilities. I was the perfect picture of an understanding wife. 

Then, one random day in 2025, David said he wasn’t happy anymore. Even as I recount this, it sounds like the kind of stuff you see in movies. How do you explain to people that your husband left you because he “wanted something different”? It’s not like he caught me cheating or could give me a good excuse for why I was no longer enough for him. He just said he’d provide for the kids, but he needed to walk away, and he did.

It was when he left that I realised how much of a disservice I’ve done myself in the past 10 years. I’d poured all of myself into him, into his business and our family, such that there was almost nothing I could point to as mine.

I’d stopped working entirely in late 2023 to be more hands-on with our children after a nasty experience with a domestic help. The help was excessively beating the kids, and we (David and I) thought it best for me to look after them full-time until we could find a suitable replacement. That was yet another “temporary” arrangement that turned out to be permanent. 

Another thing that took the urgency out of returning to work was that David’s business was finally picking up and paying the bills. I thought I had put in the work and could finally reap the fruits of my effort. Until David ended the marriage and forced me to reevaluate my life. 

I didn’t have the financial cushion I thought I did. My savings had been drained slowly over the years. The investments I once had were liquidated to “help us”, and my career had practically taken a back seat. I was 40 and vulnerable. 

Nothing prepares you for that reality. It’s different when you’re younger. At 25, you still have time to make mistakes and start over. But what does starting over look like at 40? I should be thinking about retirement and settling into old age with my family.

Instead, I’m back into the hustle and bustle of building a safety net. I had to dust off my CV and try to reclaim a professional identity. I even added everything I did for my husband’s business in the CV and gave it official-sounding titles like operations management, vendor negotiations and budget oversight.

I was fortunate enough to get a fairly decent job in January 2026 after months of job-hunting, but I know I would have been several positions ahead if I hadn’t let David derail me. Still, I can only look forward.

It will be tough to do on a ₦200k/month salary, but I plan to set up an emergency fund and have consistent savings by the end of the year. I also have ideas for a business, and my siblings are ready to lend me capital to get started. 

I like to maintain a positive outlook, so I’ll say one good thing about this ordeal is that I can see clearly now. I used to think keeping my home stable was the highest form of contribution. Now I know stability also means making sure you can survive independently. No one imagines their home breaking, but if that happens, you need to be able to stand.

If I could talk to my younger self, I wouldn’t tell her not to support her husband. I would tell her to have an untouched safety net, never stop growing professionally, and, most importantly, never reduce her capacity to make someone else feel secure. Support should not mean self-sacrifice. 

I’m not where I imagined myself to be at 40, but I believe I’ll still get there; it’s just going to take me longer. I’ve learned my lessons, and it’ll only get better from here. 

*Names have been changed for the sake of anonymity.

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