Every week, Zikoko spotlights the unfiltered stories of women navigating life, love, identity and everything in between.
What She Said will give women the mic to speak freely, honestly and openly, without shame, about sex, politics, family, survival, and everything else life throws our way.
The subject of today’s #WhatSheSaid is Maya*, a 30-year-old product manager based in Lagos. She talks about a relationship she believed was the real thing, the day she discovered the man she was building a future with had gotten married while they were together, and how she found the other women, confronted him with evidence, and chose to tell her story anyway.
Can you tell me about yourself?
My name is Maya. I am 30 and a product manager. I grew up in a pretty average Nigerian household, with strict parents who made school the priority above everything else, even though they had separated before I was born. I lived with my mum in my early years, and then with my dad from about 11. My dad is a marine engineer who was mostly offshore. My mum has always been an entrepreneur.
As a kid, I was very outspoken. Talkative, playful, always around people. Then something shifted around 16, and I became quieter, more inward. That became my adult self. I am still a chatterbox with the people I love, but I am not the face you notice when you walk into a room.
I am very career-focused. I like being alone. You will barely find me at social gatherings. And I have always been extremely guarded about love, not because I hate it but because I spent a long time choosing myself. After university, I ended a relationship because I genuinely just needed to be by myself, to live for Maya for the first time. That decision created a four-year gap of not being with anyone. Until him.
How did you meet him?
We worked together at one of the big fintechs in Lagos. We had a lot of back and forth at work, not the smoothest working relationship, but nothing hostile. Then, one December holiday, he needed some clarification on something and had to call me. I told him that if you want my help on something you could have sorted during working hours, you are going to bribe me for it. He laughed and sent me fifty thousand naira. We just clicked from there. Started talking as friends, running ideas by each other and personal conversations crept in gradually.
I had resigned by the time things progressed romantically. We started dating properly around the end of February or the beginning of March 2025. He lives in Germany. Has been there for about three years on a work visa. So from the very beginning, this was a long-distance relationship.
What was he like when you first got together?
He was everything. I am not even going to sugarcoat it. From day one to the very last day, he never dropped the performance. He was attentive, present, and emotionally available. We would stay on calls for eight to ten hours, just living our lives. Not even talking all the time, just existing in each other’s space. I would put my tripod up, go about my day, and he would just be there on his end doing his work. Like we were already living together. My sister used to walk past and say, “This your silent love.”
When I got diagnosed with PCOS in January last year, he was there. He researched it. He suggested I use a period tracking app, then found out the app had a partner feature, downloaded it on his side, and we tracked my cycle together. He sent me a period care package every month without me having to remind him. Sometimes I would be cranky and not even realise why, and he would ask me, “Wait, what time of the month is this?” By evening, a care package would arrive. My house is still full of those boxes.
He was the kind of man you would see in a relationship and type God when under it. That is genuinely what my friends thought about him. The girl who was anti-relationship finally found someone, and he was perfect. Everyone said so.
How did your relationship progress?
We eventually got to the point where we started building a lot, honestly. We had started a business together earlier this year. I had a product idea I had been working towards, and he offered to co-build it with me since he is a senior software developer. We put together a business plan, brought on two other people, and he was paying for the tools and infrastructure while I handled the product side.
Beyond that, we were talking about relocation, me getting to Germany through work or a scholarship, and eventually living together. He pushed marriage more than I did. I was always the one saying, “Let us try to work first; let us get to Germany first, and then we can talk about the rest.” Looking back, I understand why he kept steering me towards marriage. I was not someone who would rush into it, so he was safe. He had hit what he probably thought was a gold mine with someone who was not after a ring. So he used it as a tactic to make me think he was serious.
What She Said: I Sometimes Wonder If I Married the Wrong Brother
Were there any other tactics or signs?
Yes. But they were not things that looked like signs or tactics at the time.
When he came to Nigeria the first time, I suggested he go and see his family since he had not been back in two years. He gave me a whole story about how his mother would never let him leave the house once she had him there, that she would insist he stay for days, and he just wanted us to have this time to ourselves. I told my friends about it, and they helped me rationalise it, so I let the thought go. But now I understand. There was no mother drama. There was a wife.
Another time, I made a sticker using his face and sent it to some friends. He lost his mind. Why would you use my face and send it to everyone, people I do not know, my face going to places I am not aware of? I thought it was odd but not alarming. Now it makes complete sense. He could not have his face circulating because at some point a sticker lands in the wrong DM and somebody recognises him.
There was also a period where he just started needing to get off our calls constantly. For a year, we had existed on hours-long calls. All of a sudden, he needed breaks, had excuses, and would mute his laptop. I would speak, and he would not respond because he had lowered the volume to zero. I noticed him close his laptop and pretend it had died. He would take his phone to the bathroom for hours. I started asking him directly, Have you met someone in Germany? If you cannot do this anymore, just tell me. My initial thought was cheating. Not marriage. Not multiple women. Just that he had started seeing someone else and did not know how to say so.
Wait, what do you mean by marriage?
It started with a name. K.
About a year into the relationship, he had shown me his call log for some reason I cannot fully remember, and I noticed a name appearing repeatedly. I asked who K was. He said K was a man who had a woman’s picture as his profile photo. I pushed back because that made no sense. He laughed it off, and I let it go.
When things started feeling off this year, my friend looked K up. K’s page was full of pictures of herself. Her bio said daughter of God. Then my friend spotted what looked like an engagement ring in one of her videos. He said that actually made him think nothing was happening because she appeared to be engaged to someone else. Fair.
But I could not sleep that night. I went back to the page around 2 am and saw that three days earlier, K had posted a picture in a studio and tagged only one person. Not the photographer, not the makeup artist, not the person who made her dress. Just him. A woman tagging him like that can only mean one thing.
My sister took it from there in the morning. She is a proper investigator. She dug deeper and found pictures from a court wedding. He was not in the pictures, but she was. And the timing matched. The court wedding had happened during our relationship.
Did you confront him?
When he came to Nigeria in April, I had already suspected enough that I decided not to confront him yet. I wanted evidence. While he was with me, K kept calling. Then a name I had not seen before, and then another. I started paying attention to his calls, the muffled conversations with his head buried in the pillow, the way he would answer in the living room only when he thought I was far enough away.
Then came the laptop moment. My dance instructor had gotten me an invitation to a conference in Berlin, and I needed to fill out a visa application form on the German consulate website. I used his laptop because mine was not loading. When I got to the name field, the autofill suggestion was K’s full name. When I got to the passport section, there were two sets of autofill suggestions. His and hers. He was logged into her email. Everything that came into her inbox, he had access to. He had been delaying her relocation to Germany while leading her to believe the embassy was causing the delays. He had married her and was using her as a cover story for his trips while stopping her from actually joining him.
That was when I understood I was not dealing with someone who was cheating. I was dealing with someone who had architected multiple lives simultaneously and was maintaining each of them with the same level of detail, care and performance.
I can’t imagine how you felt in that moment. What did you do next?
I pretended I was not feeling well, shook myself up to the point I actually ran a temperature, and sent him to the pharmacy. He does not have Uber on his phone, so I pulled the ride for him and tracked his movement. The moment he left, I went through everything.
I found his passport. I found travel records showing he had been in Nigeria the previous May through June, the exact period he had told me was a demanding work trip to Berlin with limited communication. That was the same period as K’s court wedding photos. I found out his real age. He had told me he was 35, turning 36. His passport said he was 40.
Was that enough evidence for you to confront him?
I stayed in character for days. I knew I needed my friends present for the actual confrontation. I told my sister and two close friends. We planned it. The day I was ready, I told him I needed to drop something off for my sister downstairs. I came back up, left the door unlocked, and sat down in the living room with him. I put my phone in my pocket and called one of my friends so they could hear everything through my earphones.
I asked him casually who K was. Not the male K, the other K. I watched the shock move across his face. Then I started listing what I knew. Where K lived, what she did, the church she attended, the trip, he claimed, was to Berlin, the court wedding, and his real age, while holding his passport in my hand with his face on it. He went defensive immediately. You are stalking my friends. I knew something was wrong with you. I knew you were possessed. Then he told me to leave the apartment and started throwing the gifts he had given me on the floor, putting everything back into his boxes.
That was when my friends walked in. A male friend, a female friend and my sister. He thought he could front because he saw two women. Then my male friend walked through the door and told him to drop everything. He froze.
Then K called. I was close to his phone. I picked it up.
I told her my name and explained who I was. She cut me off and said, “Give him the phone.” Before I could hand it to him, he walked over and slapped me. My friends went after him. Long story short, he eventually left.
What happened next?
He called me from Germany, crying. He said the marriage was a contract marriage, a paper arrangement to help her relocate. He showed me a prenup. He wanted me to keep our relationship quiet for six months, give him time to end things with her, and then he would come and meet my family properly. He said he really loved me, and she was not the kind of woman he could actually settle for.
He said the other lady, Emma, whom he also married, had signed a contract under which she would repay him 10,000 euros once she relocated and settled in Germany.
I agreed because I still had access to everything and needed to keep it that way to get the full picture. While he was telling me this story, he was already back in Germany picking up exactly where he had left off with the other women.
Can you tell me about the other women?
So, besides his wife, there was Favour*, who lived in Germany, whom I found through a mix-and-match of names and email addresses because their Instagram profiles were private. I sent emails. Two bounced, and one reached her. She called me.
She had been with him for three months by the time everything surfaced. She told me he had told her he was coming to Nigeria to do a demo for investors, that he had a product he was developing. The product he was describing to her was mine. He had shown her my pitch deck and presented my business as his own. He had told her he was staying at his mother’s house while in Nigeria and had given her a delivery address he said was his mother’s. He always had an excuse for not making the delivery. She had been so suspicious that, the day before my email arrived, she had prayed and asked God to show her a sign.
Then there was Bimbo*. She was based in another city. He had started dating her in November the previous year. By the time everything came out, they had been together for five months. He had been at her apartment the week before he came to Nigeria to see me, which explained why he was so volatile and quick to pick fights just before his trip. Her parents had visited Germany, and he had told her he wanted to meet them to begin the conversation about marriage.
There was also another woman, Wemi*, with whom he was in contact simultaneously.
All of them in their mid to late thirties. All of them are highly educated, successful, and looking to settle down. All of them met him on Hinge.
If you’d like to be my next subject on #WhatSheSaid, fill this form.
What did you learn about how he operated across all of them?
He never fully lied. That is the most important thing I figured out. He would take things from each of our lives and recycle them. When I told him stories about my week, he would tell them he had experienced the same thing. Stories she told him, he would tell me in the same way. When we all started comparing notes on our calls, we kept saying, “Oh, so it was you, so it was me, that is where that came from.”
He gave each of them a different age. One got 37, another got 36, another got 35. He is 40.
He had different stories for his trips. When he travelled to Favour’s city, he told me he was going to see a friend. When he travelled to Bimbo’s city, he told me he was going with friends to a fun fair. Each trip was explained to each woman as going to the city of one of the others.
There was a moment when I called him while Favour was on the other line with him. He answered me with yes, ma’am in that formal Yoruba way. Favour heard it, and he told her it was his mother calling. She believed it because, yes, ma’am sounded like a response to a mother. It was me.
Did you all keep talking to him even after you knew?
We had to. He had access to the engineering architecture I needed to extract from our joint product. I agreed to his fake six-month terms because it meant I kept access to everything. The other women were still talking to him, so I could know when he was planning to travel again. We became a full intelligence operation.
One Saturday, he was supposed to go and see Favour. Bimbo called him that same day and said she was sick and needed him. Favour cancelled one hour before they were supposed to meet. He got on a train to Bimbo’s city. While he was on the train, Favour called him back and said she was near his house and wanted to see him now. He told her to give him two hours. He got back on a train, went back, and spent the night apologising that he had taken so long to appear.
Another time, Bimbo called him to say she was sick and needed medication. He was in one city. He took a train to another city, bought her medication, dropped it at her apartment, then took a train back and was somehow at his own place again by morning.
We were on calls, laughing at him. It had gone from devastating to the funniest show any of us had ever watched. He had no idea that the women he thought he was managing were coordinating in real time.
How did you finally end things with him?
Exactly two days before I turned 30, I realised I didn’t want to enter my new age still keeping up with these shenanigans. So I quietly decided to cut ties. He called once, and I ignored it. Since then, we haven’t spoken to each other. He did try to follow up on the project we were working on together, but I did not respond to that either.
My birthday was in late May, and I think Favour stopped talking to him in June. Bimbo broke up with him sometime in June as well. We all just pulled away. Bimbo didn’t let him know she was talking to us. By that time, she had already found her own evidence. She found a note where he mentioned “Travel Visa for K.” She had also seen K call him, and he would always speak to K disrespectfully. Saying “Shebi, I told u I’m busy, why do u keep calling?” all the while he was with her. So she used that as a reason for the break-up.
I had told them I would go public with this. I didn’t know how at the time, but I would eventually. So I begged that nobody confront him directly. At least until I did. So this publication would be the first time he sees it.
What has this done to how you approach trust?
I saw a tweet not long after this happened. A woman talking about how her ex ignored her cramps, but her current boyfriend sends her a period care package before her cycle even starts. Men know how to love when they love you.
My reaction was to scoff. Not because I disagree. But because I have seen a man do exactly that and still lie. In every indicator we as women are taught to look for, he performed perfectly. That is the thing people get wrong when they say there must have been red flags. They have not encountered someone willing to go this far. They imagine cheating as someone who stops calling, who gets cold, who gets distracted. They do not imagine someone who orders you a period care package every month while maintaining three other women across two countries.
I do not know what trust looks like anymore. I had a friend ask to reschedule a date because his business partner’s mother had died. I felt nothing. No sympathy. I caught myself later and realised I had somehow lost the ability to believe someone’s ordinary excuse. That scared me more than anything else about this whole situation.
Why did you decide to tell this story?
Because I watched the other women feel ashamed of something done to them, and I refused to add my silence to that.
People will say there must have been signs. They will say maybe the money was too good and that blinded us. They will say at this age, you should have known better. They will find the angle that makes it our fault. I know that, and I am telling this story anyway.
He went to extraordinary lengths. He spent money. He took trains across Germany in a single day. He tracked our cycles. He showed up to hospital appointments, sent care packages, and video-called from hotel rooms he had booked specifically to perform faithfulness. He maintained a product business with me while building a marriage with his wife, romancing three other women across multiple cities and maintaining another business, Emma, as well. Vantrace – that’s the business name. He also used her business as a front for the other women, making them believe he had two businesses. He even told me he had come up with a new idea and wanted to run it by me. All the while, it was Emma’s business idea. This is not a story about careless women. This is a story about someone who chose to make deception his full-time occupation.
His name is Olaoluwa Alli. He is 40, not 35. He is a software developer based in Wolfsburg, Germany. And I am not ashamed of a single thing he did to me because none of it has anything to do with my character, but everything to do with his.
What do you want women reading this to take away?
First, do not go into love with your guard up. That is not the lesson. The lesson is that the playbook exists and people study it. The things we post about what a good man looks like, what care looks like in a relationship, someone is reading those posts and taking notes. That does not mean you stop wanting those things. It means you stay connected to your own instincts even when everything appears correct.
Second, it is okay to leave. It is okay to hurt. It is okay to tell someone what happened to you. What is not okay is staying broken when the person who caused the damage is out there living their life as if nothing happened.
And last, do not let anyone make you feel ashamed for trusting someone. That is the oldest misdirection in the book. You were not foolish for believing him. He was foolish for thinking he would never get caught.
Some names have been changed *
