I was twenty-four when I got married. I dated my husband for five years. I was in school when he found me. He was a teaching assistant in a different department. One day our paths crossed and he said he wanted me to be his girlfriend. I was young and new in school. I wondered what a teaching assistant saw in me but I said yes days later and we became partners who didn’t allow air to pass through them.
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After my national service, he told me he was ready for marriage and if I was ready, we could get married the next day. I asked what I was going to do in marriage when I had no job. He said, “Don’t worry, I will take care of you.”
So we got married a week before my twenty-fourth birthday. My husband had a dream I didn’t know about until marriage. He made mention of wanting to travel overseas to study but he didn’t make it sound like a burning desire. It was after marriage that he made it his sole purpose to have that dream come true. While I walked from one company to another, he went in and out of embassies looking for scholarship opportunities and travelling mercies.
We were married for only eight months when my husband’s dream came through. I begged him to get me pregnant before he left so I could have a companion in his absence. We tried. Night and day we were at it but we couldn’t do it until his plane was ready to fly him out of the country. He left early at dawn in September. I was with him until the final moment.
Our marriage survived only a year after he travelled. We fought often because he wouldn’t call regularly. We could go for days and sometimes weeks before I got a call from him. He always talked about work and school as the reason but I knew there was something more to it. He had drunk from the cup of forgetfulness and was slowly forgetting that he had left a wife behind.
After a heavy fight one day on the phone, he said, “It looks like you’re tired of me already but that’s fine. You can return my drink. Honestly, I’m not even coming back to Ghana again so what’s the point?”
A few weeks later, I heard from one of his family members that my husband was living with a woman and they were even expecting a baby. It all made sense. The fights. The silence. The ease with which he told me to return his drink. I told my parents about it.
They asked what I wanted.
“Divorce,” I responded.
I got the divorce and moved on with my life. I was so young that when I told people I was a divorcee, they doubted me. They asked when I got married and for how long that I would get a divorce. It was my story and a part of my life but I didn’t let it pin me down, especially when I heard from the same source that my husband had a new baby.
I went to a church with a friend to pray to God to give me a good husband. It was my third time in that church to pray for the same thing. One of the junior pastors approached me and said he would love to pray with me because he saw light surrounding me. He wanted to be in that light too. He took my number and we prayed on the phone every Friday night. He told me God had revealed to him that I was his wife so I should also pray about it.
I did. I prayed every day about it but God didn’t say anything to me. I asked myself, “Even if God is speaking to me, how will I hear? Maybe He has said yes and I didn’t hear, so let me go ahead with it.”
We dated for a year and got married the following year. That was my second marriage even before I turned twenty-nine. My husband was deeply rooted in ministry. That was his call and I was bent on helping him respond to that call.
In church I was respected because of him. They called me “Mom” and gave me a special place to sit but my husband had issues with the church. He felt he wasn’t being given the right recognition for his role in the church. He wasn’t paid well for his role and wasn’t given much opportunity to grow, so he told me he was going to establish his own church. The anointing on him was too much to waste in a place where he wasn’t shown respect.
So we started a small church in our house. We would place plastic chairs on the veranda and have services there. It started as a community service. We would go for evangelism every day after work, telling people about the church and the anointing on it. A few months later, we had over forty members.
So we moved from the veranda and mounted two canopy structures in front of our house for services. We had a large open space in front of the house that could contain over seventy people. My husband would do individual intercessory prayers for church members who had special needs. He used our hall for such meetings. So on Sundays and during Friday night mini-services, while I stood in front of the church and led them, my husband would be in the hall doing intercessory prayers and counselling.
One evening, I thought the queue at the gate was getting longer so I decided to go in and tell him about it so he would speed up whenever someone entered. I could hear him shouting and praying so I opened the door slowly so as not to disturb the anointing.
I saw a lady kneeling in front of my husband while his hand was inside her bra, pressing her breasts and pretending to be praying.
It was the lady who first saw me and quickly pulled away and started fastening her buttons. My husband saw me and quickly got to his feet. He even had a bulge in his trousers.
I didn’t say a word until the lady quickly walked out.
“What’s going on here? In our room while pretending to be praying?”
This man pretended what I saw didn’t happen and kept asking me what I was talking about.
I said, “The evidence is in your trousers but God sees.”
I didn’t go out again. I entered the bedroom and began crying. Service ended early that evening. The fact that he was trying to gaslight me got on my nerves.
I rented the place before marriage. He moved in because I was lucky to have that place all to myself and we could use it to start the church.
I told him, “No more church. I told him I wasn’t going to stay married to a man of God whose hands find their way into women’s bras.”
For days he was still gaslighting me.
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I told him, “That’s fine. It’s all in my head. I need my place to keep my head, so move out and do your church elsewhere.”
That marriage lasted only three years and I was back to being single.
My mom was angry. My dad said marriage wasn’t for me if I would walk out this easily. I agreed. Marriage isn’t for me. I’ve tried twice and failed. That’s enough. I’m thirty-four years old currently but I’ve been married twice and divorced twice. Maybe it’s a sign to rest and I’ve heeded it.
—Sandra
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