A Marriage I Knew Was a Mistake
I was married for three months, many years ago, to a mixed-race doctor. The marriage took place in England, which later proved to be critically important. Everyone warned me about her, including my parents.
I recently became good friends with her second husband, and his stories would make a horror film.
Before the wedding, I knew I was making a serious mistake. I was very close to leaving her standing at the altar, but guests had flown in from all over the world and it would have caused a major scandal. I arrived at the church drunk with my best man, fully aware that I was doing the wrong thing. All my friends said we were not compatible.
After just three months, she ran off with our son. The only reason I married her was because she was a doctor and had become pregnant. It later became clear that it was a setup. I then spent a full year in the English courts undoing that mistake. It cost me a great deal of money, time, and ultimately my job.
She was a disaster waiting to happen, but what she later did to her second husband, also a Nigerian, was even worse than what she did to me. She tried to have him arrested in Florida, had multiple affairs, and treated a good man appallingly. They had three children together.
My father warned me that I was being set up. When it came to the divorce, she tried to take a large sum of money from me, but the judge made it clear that she had only been married to me for three months and would not receive a penny. The divorce proceedings took place in Manchester, where she had moved after abandoning the marital home and disappearing with our son.
This meant I had to fly repeatedly to England and then take a four-hour train from London to Manchester just to see my child. At the time, I was living in Jamaica, which made the situation even more brutal.
She was half British and half Nigerian and had a reputation for being involved with wealthy men much older than herself. I remember asking her, “You’re a doctor—have you never heard of the pill?”
Eventually, I had the marriage annulled. It was a wake-up call. Because of that experience, I did not marry again for a long time. When I eventually did, my partner was much younger, and my life became a kind of catch-up race, trying to heal and make up for the pain and trauma I had endured.
Her second husband was also warned. He was a doctor from a good family, and his parents were strongly against the marriage. Like me, he fell under her spell and lived to regret it. Unlike me, he had been married to her for twelve years, and she took him to the cleaners in the same Manchester courts, using professional financial advisers.
Some women are dangerous sharks who use children or pregnancy to control men. This woman had a PhD in exploiting the British legal system. What made my experience especially nightmarish was that what was meant to be a two-week visit to England turned into a year of travelling back and forth to Manchester because of a woman I had been married to for only three months, who had disappeared with our son to Jordan, where her British mother worked.
What I went through, I would not wish on anyone. It made me extremely cautious about commitment. Not all women are like this—thank God, particularly African women—but this experience left deep scars.
The British divorce system is not stupid. In my case, they saw her for what she was and treated her accordingly. Unfortunately, her second husband bore the full weight of the system because of the length of his marriage.
I do not wish her well.
LEADERSHIP BY TONY OYATEDOR
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