When Lolade* (47) met Tade* in university, she thought she had finally found the person who would make up for every kind of love she had been denied growing up. She was wrong.

This is Lolade’s story as told to Sofiyah. 

I was raised by two heavily religious people. Mum is a deaconess, and Dad is a pastor, so all five of their daughters, including me, were raised in the way of the Lord. Growing up in a staunch Christian household meant that our childhood was riddled with conservatism.

We were told that listening to secular music was not something God approved of, and we couldn’t watch certain shows because they were considered “satanic”. And as we grew up and became aware of ourselves as women, we were told sex was something only married people did. If you participated in premarital sex and got pregnant, you should not even think of abortion because that’s murder.

This was drummed into our ears even in our 20s. I ignored their warnings against premarital sex and was having sex with my boyfriend, Tade*. I believed what they said about abortion being murder, so imagine my surprise when I found out I was pregnant at 21, and Tade brought up abortion.

Tade was my first boyfriend. He and I were coursemates, and he’d approached me to help him with a group assignment, and that was how our story started. Being raised by emotionally unavailable parents meant that I grew up as a woman who was constantly starved for affection.  When Tade started showering me with all the affection that my parents didn’t give me, it was so easy to fall for him.

When he said sex was not a bad thing and my parents didn’t know what they were saying, I agreed with him, and that was how we started having sex. 6 months into our relationship, I got pregnant, and he suggested abortion because “it’s something everyone does.” I agreed with him even though I didn’t actually want to.

I wanted to tell someone else about the pregnancy, but I didn’t really have friends. Just acquaintances. I couldn’t tell my sisters because I wasn’t that close to them, and I knew what would happen if I told my parents. Tade was my only person, really, so when he sat me down and told me that having a child right now wouldn’t be good for either of us, seeing as we were both students still financially relying on our parents, and that abortion was the only option, I agreed with him.

The next day after I agreed, Tade took me to this doctor’s house. The man didn’t look certified, but I didn’t ask any questions because Tade assured me he knew what he was doing. I don’t like to think about how the procedure went.

I was convinced that I was going to die, and I started begging God for forgiveness. Fortunately for me, I didn’t die, and when I was okay enough to form words, I told Tade that we would start taking protection more seriously, and he agreed.

For months after the procedure, the believer in me struggled a lot with my actions, and there would be nights when I would wake up with cold sweats, and there were even times when I would tell Tade that we were going to hell because of it, but he kept assuring me that it wouldn’t happen because God knew we weren’t prepared to have a child. I let those words comfort me, but I still made sure to tell him that I wouldn’t be getting an abortion again. Two years into our love story, his condom broke, and I got pregnant. Again.

When I found out, I was happy because in my head, 23 was a perfect time for marriage. My parents knew about him, and his parents knew about me. We’d been dating for two years and had already started talking about what life would be like when we got married in the future, so I thought that should be enough.

We weren’t done with university yet, but I was convinced I could juggle school, motherhood, and marriage. Some of my coursemates did it, so how bad could it be? I told Tade, and my heart broke as the disappointment began to show on his face in real time. Before he even opened his mouth, I already knew what he was going to say, and my stomach dropped because I knew I was going to agree with it.

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I wish I could say my second procedure was smoother than the first, but unfortunately, it wasn’t. The pain was just as bad, and I left the doctor’s place hollowed out. Over the couple of years that Tade and I had been dating, I’d been able to suppress the staunch believer in me, but in my head, the voice of my mum calling people who abort murderers would occasionally creep in.

I struggled with that voice after my second abortion, and I would ensure to avoid my mum every time I was at home because I didn’t want her to take one look at my face and find out that something was going on. It took me almost six months to feel okay after the second procedure, but I had Tade by my side, and to me, that was enough, even though he could never in his life understand what I went through. I told myself that when we finally got married, all of this would be behind me. Honestly, it felt like life was playing a sick joke on me because by the time Tade and I were celebrating our fifth-year anniversary, I’d already gotten two more abortions.

One would think that after having two procedures, I would get used to the other two, but no, I still had a hard time grappling with them. Even switching to a female doctor, as Tade’s best friend’s fiancée, Tayo*, suggested, didn’t make it any more pleasant. I was beginning to worry about how these procedures might affect my body because these doctors barely provided any instructions on how to take care of my body after each procedure.

This was something I obsessed over, but when I shared my worries with Tade, he told me not to worry and that even if the procedures affected my ability to have children, he wouldn’t love me any less. I was such a silly woman in love, and I believed him.

Three months after our fifth anniversary, Tade began to grow distant. At first, I didn’t notice because I was focused on getting a better-paying job than my current one, but later I started to notice, especially when he forgot my birthday, even though he had never done anything like that in all the years we were together. When I let him know how hurt I was by that, he apologised, but it felt flat. I didn’t think much about it because I knew how much the job market was also stressing him out. It was when this weird, distant thing started to stretch that I became really worried.

He went from visiting my parents’ house at least twice a week to not visiting at all, and he stopped dropping by my workplace, even though he loved doing so. It was the day my mum dragged me to the side and asked what was going on with him that I realised that I wasn’t the only one noticing the weirdness. Whenever I managed to reach him to ask what was going on, he would tell me nothing was happening and that I was just reading into something that wasn’t there.

I tried to believe that, but I remember one time when I was sharing my worries with Tayo, who I’d grown really close to, and she gave me the most pitying look. I didn’t understand what that look meant until two months later.

The day the news got to me was like any other. It was a Saturday, and Tade was even more distant than before, and the anxiety of losing someone who had become the only person my whole world revolved around pushed me to go to Tade’s best friend’s house.

I was hoping to ask him, for the hundredth time, to help me ask Tade what to do to fix our relationship, but when I knocked, it was Tayo who answered. She was the only one home, and when she saw me, her face immediately crumpled into that same pitying expression, and before I could finally ask why she always wore that look around me, she grabbed my hand and took me to their shared bedroom, sat me down, got me a cup of water and then handed me a wedding invitation card.

At first, I thought it was her and her fiancé’s invitation card, and I was even about to congratulate her before I fully read the names on the card. I couldn’t recognise the woman’s name, but I knew Tade’s full names and it was right there, engraved on the card. Seeing that knocked the air out of me, and I could barely comprehend my surroundings for a proper hour. When Tayo realised that I wasn’t listening to anything she was saying, she just sat down beside me until I forced myself to come back to my senses. When I did, the first thing I asked her was to tell me everything, and she began to share the little information she could gather because her fiancé was also very secretive about the entire thing.

Apparently, five months before our fifth anniversary, Tade had met this woman at a work event. She was a high-ranking executive at her company, and he liked that, so he pursued her. Fast forward three months, and he’d introduced her to his parents as the woman he wanted to marry, and two months later, he proposed.

I still remember bursting into laughter when Tayo broke down the timeline for me. I was laughing, thinking about how he was sure of a woman after ten months of knowing her, but he decided to string me along for five years. Five good years where I made my body go through unsafe procedures four times because the love of my life had promised me that no matter what happened, he would still love me very much. The sobs that came after that laughter almost took my entire breath away, and I am very glad for Tayo, who held me through it.

Despite everyone’s advice, I never approached Tade. I never got closure from him either. All I did was tell Tayo to wish him well on my behalf. My parents and sisters wanted me to do more, and if I had, I would probably still be in jail now. Acting like he didn’t exist was my best option. He is still very much married to that woman, but I, on the other hand, am not. I no longer trust men, and I never want to associate with any of them. Their existence irritates me, and that’s because every one of them reminds me of Tade.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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