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.
Zia* (37) married a man to please her parents, then divorced him to finally live her truth. She thought she’d found her peace in a woman she worshipped for five years, until an anonymous DM and a leaked link revealed a double life with politicians.
Let’s start at the beginning. Who were you before any of this?
Honestly? A people pleaser with very good taste in women and very bad habits around pretending to be someone else. Like many Nigerians, I grew up in a home where love had conditions. My parents are deeply religious, very traditional. You know the type, they pray loud and love as long as you do as they say. Asin, as long as we do what they say. I knew I was different from secondary school. Besides being a tomboy, I just didn’t have the language for it then. By the time I did, I had already learned to hide it so well that hiding felt like breathing.
When did it become unsustainable? When did the hiding start to cost you something?
It was a slow boil. In my early twenties, my parents started the marriage conversations in earnest. Not hinting, they were literally campaigning. From aunties and pastors to even family friends. I don’t know if they low-key suspected, but every gathering became a coordinated intervention. I was “too fine to waste.” That phrase still makes my skin crawl.
Eventually, I met this man through church. He was decent. Quiet. We liked each other well enough, which I now understand is a terrible foundation for marriage, but at the time felt like relief. I told myself maybe this was what love felt like for people like me. Manageable. Safe. Muted. At least nobody was asking me questions I couldn’t answer.
So after years of knowing him, when he asked, I said yes. I married him at 24. My only other choice was my parent’s and I would not marry who they choose.
How did it feel being married to him?
Weird is the word I would use. It was like wearing mismatched slippers. We were functional and technically. But every single step in that marriage reminded me that something was not right.
He wasn’t a bad person. That almost made it worse, there was nothing to be angry at except myself. We were like housemates who occasionally held hands and had sex. He wanted kids, and it didn’t really feel like I could say no, so I endured it because I was his wife.
I prayed, genuinely and desperately, for God to change whatever was broken in me. Church. Deliverance sessions. I went where I was sent. Nothing changed except my ability to keep performing. To keep masking as straight. Eventually, he could feel it too, even if he couldn’t name it. We parted quietly. My parents think we just weren’t compatible because that’s what I said. But I think they know.
How long were you married?
Three years without the children he wanted. Three years of my life that I will never get back, but also, and I say this carefully, three years that taught me I will never, ever do that again. To myself or to anyone else. That marriage was the last time I chose someone else’s comfort over my own existence.
And then?
After, I kind of met myself. Slowly. In small spaces. A women’s event here, a private group chat there. I started existing in corners of the world where I didn’t have to explain or justify. Just breathing rooms. Places where nobody needed anything from me. And when I was in my early 30s, in one of those spaces, I met her.
Who’s ‘her’?
She was — God.
She was everything. Creative, brilliant, annoyingly beautiful in this way that she seemed completely unaware of, which somehow made it worse. She worked in media: photography, videography, and some modelling on the side. Always moving, always with a concept or a camera, always in the middle of three things at once. She had this energy that made you feel like life was happening around her in real time, and you were lucky to be in her orbit.
I fell completely. Within six months, we were living together. Within a year, I had restructured my entire life around her schedule, my friendships, my priorities. All rearranged around this woman.
What did that restructuring look like, in practice?
She had expensive taste, and I didn’t mind. I wanted to give her things, that’s just how I love, I’m a provider by nature. But she never seemed to need me to provide. She always had money. I told myself she was just successful. Booked. Good with clients. She’d leave for shoots sometimes for days at a time, come back glowing and generous, bringing gifts, restocking the house, full of energy. I thought I had finally found someone who matched me. Who could hold her own. I found that attractive, honestly. I didn’t want to be someone’s ceiling. I wanted a partner.
It sounds like you were happy.
I was. Or I thought I was. Looking back now, I think I was in love with the feeling of finally being in a real relationship, finally being out, finally being with a woman, finally having chosen myself and I poured all of that relief into her. She was the symbol of my freedom and I think I loved the symbol as much as I loved the person. Maybe more. Because I’m not sure I ever fully saw the person.
When did things start to feel off?
In retrospect, the signs were always there. She low-key guarded her phone like it was classified government property. She had a rotation of “clients” she spoke about vaguely but never introduced me to, always described them in outlines, never names, never faces. Sometimes she’d come back from a shoot and go straight to the shower without even saying hello, and I’d tell myself she was tired. Creative people are like that. They need decompression.
There were moments that didn’t add up. A date she’d cancelled would get urgently rescheduled with no explanation. She’d say she was doing a portrait session on the Island but her location would show somewhere completely different. I noticed. I always noticed. I just…filed it. Didn’t open the file. Because opening the file meant something I wasn’t ready to know yet.
What finally opened it?
I got a DM from an anonymous account. No profile picture, no name, no context. Just a message that said: “Do you know what your woman does for work? Check your email.”
There was a link.
I sat with my phone for maybe twenty minutes before I clicked it. I think part of me already knew that once I did, I couldn’t unknow it. And I was right.
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What was in it?
Videos of her with men. Not candid, not accidental, proper, deliberate videos. And the men weren’t nobody. I recognised faces. Politicians. Industry people. The kind of men whose names appear on event banners. The kind of men who fund things and appear in newspapers alongside words like philanthropist.
She was not behind the camera. And in many of these shots, she was completely naked.
What did you do?
Nothing, at first. My brain just went offline. I sat on the bathroom floor and stared at the tiles for a very long time. Then slowly, slowly, I started thinking and then I couldn’t stop thinking. Every shoot. Every late return. Every vague client meeting. Every generous weekend where money appeared from nowhere, the gifts, the holidays, she said she won a campaign deal to fund the apartment, the life. All of it was scrolling through my head like a receipt I was finally forced to read. Five years of it.
Five years?
Five years. The whole time. From the beginning of our relationship, it turned out. Even before then. It did not matter that we were not married. We are women in Nigeria, we have no rights besides our own. In many ways, I saw her as my wife and vice versa. Or so I thought.
Did you confront her?
That same night. I wish I could tell you I was measured and calm. I was not. She came home, and I had her phone in one hand and my own in the other, and I showed her everything. She didn’t deny it. She went very still, the way people go when they’ve mentally rehearsed for a moment and are deciding which version to use.
She said I was being closed-minded. That she was doing what she had to do. That it didn’t mean anything. That she loved me and only me, had always only loved me. She said a lot of things very fast, and none of them landed, because the only question I kept thinking was: how long? And when she told me, from the beginning, long before me, that was the moment I understood that I had been living inside something that wasn’t real. That I had been the only person in our relationship who was actually in it.
How did that night end?
Badly. I’m not proud of how I responded. I’ve never been a physical person, that’s not who I am. But something broke open in me that night, some version of grief that had no place to go, and it got physical between us. We hurt each other. I don’ t remember who threw the first slap, I just remember being on top of her when our neighbour started banging on our door. I don’t fully remember the order of events. I just remember sitting on the kitchen floor afterwards, and thinking: this cannot be my life.
She left that night. I haven’t spoken to her since.
And you’ve kept that distance?
I blocked everything. Every number, every platform, every mutual who might carry messages. I don’t want to know where she is or what she’s doing. I can’t afford to. Not right now. I’m still too… there’s still too much of her in my chest. I don’t trust myself to hear her voice and not dissolve. So the wall stays up until I’m a different person. Or at least a more solid one.
Everything feels like a joke now.
What do you mean by that?
I mean, I was married to a man I didn’t love so my family could sleep at night. I found a woman and thought, okay, this is it. This is the real thing. This is what I broke everything for. I sacrificed comfort and safety and the easy version of my life for this. And it turns out she was living a completely different life behind my back the entire time.
There’s something almost cosmically funny about that if you look at it from far enough away. If I wrote it as fiction, nobody would publish it, it’s too much. So sometimes I just laugh. Because if I don’t laugh, I’ll cry on the floor again, and I have already done that enough.
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You said you sacrificed safety. What did that cost you, actually coming out, leaving the marriage?
My family, for a while. At least officially. My parents didn’t speak to me for close to a year after the divorce. Not because of her specifically, they didn’t know about her, but because I left a marriage for reasons I couldn’t explain to them without explaining everything. So to them, I was just a woman who threw away her husband for no good reason. My mother would send food through my cousin, which is its own specific Nigerian language. “I’m not speaking to you but I don’t want you to starve” But officially there was silence.
I lost friends. Some quietly, some loudly. I lost the version of my life that required no explaining. All of that, I paid willingly, because I thought I was paying it for something real and I was. The problem was that what was real wasn’t what I thought it was.
Do you blame yourself for not seeing it sooner?
Every day. And then I stop. And then I start again. I’m in some form of therapy right now. The first time in my life I’ve sat with someone who knows everything. The marriage, my sexuality, her, all of it. Apparently, I have a habit of choosing love that asks me to be invisible. I confuse intensity with intimacy. I’m attracted to people who take up a lot of space because I was never taught that I was allowed to take up space myself, so I outsource it. She says it in this very calm voice that makes it even more devastating.
I’m sitting with it.
Does sitting with it help?
Some days it does. Some days I sit with it and I just feel stupid. Like, I had all the information and I chose comfort over clarity. I filed things instead of opening them. And I understand why, intellectually. She was my proof that I hadn’t destroyed my life by leaving. She was my evidence that the sacrifice meant something. So I protected her from my own suspicion. I needed her to be real more than I needed to know the truth.
That’s hard to admit. But it’s true.
What do you want people to take from your story?
I’m not in a generous enough place to want to teach anyone anything right now, honestly. But if I had to say something, stop outsourcing your own peace. I spent so many years living for other people’s comfort. My parents’ comfort. Then hers. And every time I did that, I disappeared a little more into the shape of whoever needed me to be something.
I’m trying to find out who I am when nobody needs anything from me. When I don’t have to be a wife or a provider or a secret or a symbol of someone else’s freedom. When I’m just, a person in a room, being that person.
It’s terrifying. It’s also the most honest I’ve ever been.
Are you okay?
Mmmm, yes. Some days, hours or moments. I’m here. I got out of bed today, I’m talking to you, I haven’t lost my job. Small evidence, but it counts. I’ll figure out the rest.
What She Said gives women the mic to speak freely, honestly and openly, without shame about sex, politics, family, survival, and everything else life throws our way.
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