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.
Adaeze* is a 36-year-old Chief Product Officer based in London who also runs a business in Lagos. She talks about knowing since she was a teenager that she never wanted children, building a life and a marriage around that truth, and losing the person closest to her because a doctor decided a woman’s body was her husband’s business.
Can you tell me about yourself?
I’m Nigerian, born and raised, though I’ve lived in the UK for about ten years now. I did my master’s here, stayed for work, and honestly never left. I’m a Chief Product Officer at a tech company in London. I also run a business back in Lagos because Nigeria never really leaves you, no matter how long you’ve been away. The business also made more sense back home than here.
In terms of who I am as a person, I’ve always been focused and driven. I knew early what I wanted from life, and I went after it doggedly. I’m not someone who does things by accident.
I turned 36 this year, and I am married. We’re mostly happy. I don’t feel like I can really complain. I have been lucky in life.
That’s nice. How long have you been with your husband?
We’ve been married for five years. We met when I was 26, so we dated for five years before that. He’s a good man. A really good man, actually.
Tell me about your upbringing. What was your family like?
I’m an only child, which has shaped a lot of things about me. My parents were present, hardworking, and all of that. But because I had no siblings, my cousin was essentially my sister. We grew up together, spent every holiday together, and called each other about everything. She was my person. My first call for anything, good news, bad news, random Tuesday energy. She’s only 2 years older, and we were inseparable.
What was growing up as an only child in Nigeria like?
Oh, there were constant expectations around marriage and children. You know how it is. Nigerian families don’t really ask if you want something; they just assume and begin planning. Marriage was always a given. Children were always a given. Nobody sat me down and said, “What do you want your life to look like?” They just assumed they already knew.
But I was always watching. Even as a young girl, I was very observant. And what I observed growing up didn’t quite match the picture everyone was trying to sell me.
What do you mean?
I mean, I was watching the women around me. Aunties, family friends, neighbours, women in church. And I could see something happening to them that nobody was naming. This slow erosion. Who they were before motherhood, their personalities, their ambitions, their energy, just quietly disappearing. Not all of them. But enough of them that I noticed. They became a shell of who they were. A mother and a wife. Almost nothing else.
And then there was something else I was watching. The children were carrying their parents’ unresolved pain around like it was their own. Trauma passed down like an inheritance nobody signed up for. I saw that too, and it sat with me.
How old were you when you started putting this together in your head?
Honestly, early. Fourteen, fifteen maybe. I know people hear that and they say oh you were just a child, you didn’t know. But I knew. Some things you just know about yourself, and this was one of them. I did not want to be a mother. Not because I didn’t love children, I genuinely do, but because I could see clearly what it would cost me, and I didn’t want to pay that price.
You say you love children, but you don’t want them. A lot of people struggle to hold those two things at the same time.
People find it very convenient to use that against me, actually. I volunteer at orphanages, I donate to schools, and I show up for the children in my life. And people look at that and say, “But you’re so good with them, you’d make such a great mother.” As if the only valid way to love children is to produce one of your own. I find that exhausting.
You can love something without wanting it for yourself. I love the ocean. I don’t want to live in it.
So you carried this knowing into adulthood, into relationships. When did it first come up seriously with someone you were dating?
Always immediately. I was never going to hide something that fundamental. In my early twenties, I was in a few relationships where I said it early, and the men either disappeared or tried to convince me I’d change my mind. One guy literally said, “You just haven’t met the right person yet.” I was done with him after that.
But when I met my husband at 26, something was different. He was different. And I still told him, within the first few real conversations we had, I don’t want children, I have never wanted children, and this is not something I’m going to change my mind about. You need to know this now before either of us gets any deeper.
What did he say?
He said it didn’t matter. That I was what he wanted. And I believed him completely because he meant it. I genuinely think he meant every word of it in that moment because of how he treated me in the following years. He also never brought it up or tried to convince or hijack me with it.
What was it like building a relationship with someone who accepted that part of you so fully?
It was everything, honestly. Because it wasn’t just about the children question. It was about being known. He saw me, all of me, and he wasn’t trying to edit any of it. No one had ever loved me quite the way he did. So patiently, so completely, so specifically. He knows me in a rare way, and I don’t take that lightly.
We dated for five years and then got married when I was 31. And the first two years of marriage were just genuinely good, like bliss.
What changed after two years?
He came to me and said he’d been thinking, and he thought he did want children after all.
I want to be fair to him here because this is a public conversation and he’s a good person who deserves that fairness. People change. Life shows you things you didn’t know about yourself. He was watching his friends become fathers, his siblings, people all around him. Something had shifted in him, and he was being honest with me about it. I respected the honesty.
But I was also very clear with him. I said, “I have never lied to you. I told you from the very beginning exactly where I stood, and I told you that would not change. It hasn’t changed. Not even slightly. I have a full life. The lack of children doesn’t make me feel like anything is missing in my life.”
How did he take that?
He heard me. He wasn’t aggressive about it or manipulative. But I could see the sadness in him, and I couldn’t pretend I didn’t. It became this thing that lived underneath everything. We weren’t fighting; people always imagine it must have been this explosive conflict, but it wasn’t. It was quieter and in some ways harder than a fight. Just the same conversation on a loop with no resolution. His pain on one side, my frustration on the other.
What were you frustrated about specifically?
That I had been so clear. From day one. I gave him every opportunity to walk away before either of us was in too deep, and he chose to stay, and now here we were. I wasn’t angry at him for having feelings, but I was frustrated by the situation. Because I hadn’t moved. I was exactly where I said I would always be.
And he was frustrated too, not at me exactly but at himself, at the situation. Because he knew it was unfair to ask me to change. He knew that. But he also couldn’t help what he was feeling. We were both just trapped in this very honest, very painful loop.
While all of this was happening in my marriage, something happened with my cousin.
What She Said: My Husband Bankrupted My Businesses Until My Friends Helped Me Build One He Couldn’t Find
What happened?
She got married a few years before me to a man whom her family approved of. They seemed happy. She had her first child a bit earlier than she wanted, but she loved her baby. Still, she intended to keep the minimum 4-year gap she always wanted between kids. So she went to the doctor and asked about birth control.
What happened at the doctor’s?
The first thing they asked her was, “Does Oga know?” Meaning her husband. That was the first response to a grown married woman asking her doctor about her own reproductive health. Not, ‘what are your options’, not, ‘here’s what we recommend’, not, ‘let’s talk about what works best for your body’. But “Does your husband know you’re here?”
They told her to wait. Have a second child first, and then come back.
Did she have the second child?
Yes, she did and only 2 years after. Still, she tried to go back but she got pregnant again before she could get there, just months after the second child. So now she had three pregnancies back to back.
That’s an enormous amount of strain on a body.
It is. And after the third child, she went in immediately and asked for the implant. She wasn’t waiting this time.
What happened?
They told her husband.
He was completely against it. He blocked it entirely. Wouldn’t hear of it. And he also refused to use condoms. So she had no protection and a husband who wanted more children and doctors who had already shown her whose side they were on.
What did she do?
She stopped having sex with him for over a year. Just trying to hold the line around her own body because nobody else was holding it for her.
That must have been incredibly isolating.
I can only imagine because she didn’t tell me what was happening. Not the full picture. I knew bits and pieces but not the whole truth, and that is something I will carry for a very long time.
She could feel him pulling away from her during that period. She thought he was cheating. And she was terrified of losing him, of losing her marriage, of what it would mean. So eventually she gave in, and they had unprotected sex because that was the only version on offer. And she got pregnant with the fourth child. Her body was not ready for it.
This was a pregnancy she did not want. A pregnancy she had spent over a year trying to prevent. A pregnancy that led to serious complications.
When did you find out how bad things were?
Too late. That’s the honest answer. She didn’t tell me until it was too late. I think she didn’t want me to go into warrior mode; she knew me, she knew exactly what I would do. Maybe she was ashamed. Maybe she thought she could handle it. I don’t know, and I’ll never know, and that not knowing is its own grief.
By the time I understood the full picture, I was on the first flight to Nigeria.
What did you do when you got there?
I went to that hospital, and I was very clear. What they did, disclosing her request for contraception to her husband without her consent, is a breach of doctor-patient confidentiality. It is a violation of her rights as a patient. I told them I would pursue every legal avenue available if they did not take her care seriously from that point forward. I am not someone people easily dismiss. I made sure they understood that.
And I spoke to her husband. I won’t repeat exactly what I said to him, but he understood me.
Were you able to get her any protection going forward?
They agreed she would get the implant after this final pregnancy. I even started pushing for her husband to get a vasectomy since the idiot would not use condoms. I was fighting on every front I could find.
How did your fight end?
She died. The baby died too. Her body had been through too much: four pregnancies, back to back, no real recovery time between any of them, and a fourth one her system simply could not survive.
She was my sister. The person I called first for everything. And she is gone.
I’m so sorry.
The thing I keep coming back to is how preventable it was. At every single point, there was an intervention that could have changed the outcome. The doctor who asked “Does Oga know?” instead of just doing their job. The hospital that told her husband instead of protecting her privacy. The husband who decided his desire for more children was more important than her life. Any one of those moments, if it had gone differently, she might still be here.
How has losing her shaped the way you think about your own choices and about not wanting children?
It didn’t change my mind. I want to say that clearly because I think people expect me to say it did, like losing her was some kind of lesson that pushed me one way or the other. I had already decided long before any of this happened.
What it did was show me in the most devastating way possible what is at stake when women don’t have control over their own bodies. This is not abstract. This is not a debate on Twitter. Women are dying. My cousin died. Because she could not access basic healthcare. Because the system around her treated her body as something that belonged to her husband rather than to her.
My grief needed somewhere to go. So I’m building an NGO focused on women’s reproductive rights in Nigeria. Specifically, around access to contraception, patient confidentiality, and the right of women to make decisions about their own bodies without requiring anyone’s permission.
If you’d like to be my next subject on #WhatSheSaid, fill this form.
Coming back to your marriage. You’re building this NGO, you’re carrying this grief, and you’re also navigating something very personal at home. Where are things with your husband now?
We’ve arrived somewhere. It took a long time and a lot of honest, painful conversations, but we got there together.
He wants a child. He has wanted one for a few years now, and that hasn’t gone away. I don’t want one. That hasn’t gone away either. And we love each other too much to keep asking the other person to be something they’re not.
So he’s going to have his child. Surrogacy or adoption, he hasn’t decided yet. And when that baby comes, we’ll live separately.
Wow. How did you arrive at that decision?
By being honest. About what we both needed and what we could and couldn’t give each other. I don’t think I should stand in the way of him having the thing he wants most. Just like he doesn’t think it’s fair to ask me to have a child I don’t want. So we’re trying to find the most loving version of a situation that has no perfect answer.
That’s an enormous thing to agree to. Are you scared?
Of course I am. I’m terrified of what it means, of whether we can actually make it work, of losing the version of us that has existed up until now. I love this man. I love our life. And I’m watching it change shape in real time.
But what’s the alternative? Watch him grieve something for the rest of his life that I could have stepped out of the way of? Stay in something that starts to curdle because we were too afraid to be honest? That’s not love. That’s just two people being afraid together.
Do you think it will work?
I don’t know. I genuinely don’t know. What I know is that we love each other enough to try. And if it doesn’t work, it won’t be because we lied to each other or because one of us pretended to want something they didn’t. We will have been honest every step of the way, and that matters to me.
To be loved is to be known. He knows me. I know him. Whatever comes next, that part doesn’t change.
What do you want women, especially Nigerian women, to take from your story?
That your body belongs to you. Not your husband. Not your doctor. Not your mother-in-law. Not society. You.
My cousin was a grown woman and a mother who walked into a hospital and asked for help, and the first question she was asked was whether her husband approved. That question cost her everything. It set in motion a chain of events that ended with her dying over a pregnancy she never wanted to carry.
No woman should have to negotiate access to her own healthcare. No woman should have to choose between her body and her marriage. No woman should die because the people around her decided someone else’s opinion of her body mattered more than her life.
She deserved better. They all deserve better. And that’s why I’m doing what I’m doing, because if I can’t bring her back, the least I can do is make sure fewer women end up where she did.
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