The Initial Public Offering (IPO) for Dangote Petroleum Refinery and Petrochemicals FZE opened on September 14, 2026, and will close on October 13, 2026.  You can buy the shares through the Dangote Petroleum Refinery Public Offer portal or through any of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved banks. Other approved purchase channels include investment firms, fintech platforms, and electronic application channels listed on the IPO���s official . They include InvestNaija, Cowrywise, Bamboo, and PiggyVest. 

But before you join the frenzy, or if you already have, there are five things you should know about what you���re actually buying.

1. Buying Dangote Refinery��shares doesn’t mean you get a seat at the table��

You���ve heard that the Dangote refinery is offering 4.1 billion shares, and objectively, that is a big number. In reality, however, only about of the company is being offered to the public. Even if the company exercises its oversubscription option and offers another of the original amount it intends to sell to the public, Dangote will remain the majority stakeholder with an estimated % stake in the company.  If all 4.1 billion shares are allotted and you buy the minimum 10 shares at ���525 each, you would own approximately 0.00000000805% of Dangote Refinery. In summary, buying the listed shares makes you the owner of a very small fraction of the company. 

2. The Dangote IPO is not exactly sharing the national cake

An IPO is an opportunity to buy shares offered to the public before they begin trading on the stock exchange (secondary market). But subscribing for shares doesn’t mean you will receive them.  Your application still needs to be validated before the company offers the requested shares in a process called allotment. The process for the Dangote IPO is expected around (if the (SEC) has no objections). Till then, the money you paid when you subscribed is blocked in your account.

Here���s where it gets interesting: there aren���t always enough shares to go around. If the company offers four billion shares and gets six billion offers, ? If people subscribe for more than is available, you may receive fewer shares than you requested. That means subscribing for 1,000 shares does not necessarily mean you���ll receive all 1,000. The good news is that if you���re allotted fewer shares than you paid for, the excess money is usually returned to the bank account linked to your subscription.

3. The ���Dangote��� name is only half the story

Aliko Dangote is Africa���s richest man and a household name. Because of that, it���s easy to assume that investing with a billionaire immediately guarantees the safety of your money. But an IPO is not a savings account, and your investment risk is tied to the company,  not the man who owns it. Similarly, the past performance of Dangote���s other businesses, whether cement, sugar, or salt, does not guarantee the refinery���s success. Before you buy into the company, your wealth of information should be more than ���Dangote is the owner of the refinery���. 

4. Profits earned by the company are not automatically paid to shareholders

The IPO warns that the refinery���s estimated earnings depend on assumptions about crude oil prices, operating costs, economic conditions, and several other factors. The actual results may be different from the profits you���ve been told to expect. So there���s a good chance that the shares you bought will become more valuable. But there���s also a chance that the opposite could happen.

The company does not guarantee (a portion of the company���s profits paid to shareholders). One reason why dividends may not be paid is the refinery���s intention to expand its capacity. Because of this, the company may choose to keep substantial parts of its profit rather than distributing it to the shareholders. The refinery can be very profitable while paying you little in dividends because it is reinvesting the money.

5. It���s not a get-rich-quick scheme 

A bottle of Fanta costs 500 naira. Paying approximately that amount to own part of Africa���s largest refinery seems like a steal. But ���525 is the offer price, not a promise about what the shares will be worth once they begin trading on the stock exchange (secondary market). The question isn���t whether you can afford it but whether it���s a good buy for you.  Shares/stocks are a medium- to long-term investment, and it might not be a good idea to buy shares with your last 10k if you know you���ll need it in two weeks.  Not all opportunities are good for you. 

Next Read: How Much Does It Cost Women to Maintain Beauty Standards In 2026?

1. ���I had to unlearn the idea that wanting sex made me a bad girl��� ��� Momo*, 27

For most of my life in Lagos, people rarely talked about desire like it was something I was allowed to have. Sex was something women were expected to endure and partake in with shame. In my mid-twenties, after a relationship where my partner kept asking me what I liked and I realised I genuinely didn���t know, I decided to take matters into my own hands.

I started reading about sex, talking to trusted friends and slowly gave myself permission to figure out what I actually wanted. I grieved the version of me that believed that being sexual meant being shameless. They���re not the same things. Some days I feel fully comfortable with knowing I like sex. Other days, the guilt worms itself back in. But I know for a fact that wanting sex doesn���t make me a bad person.

2. ���I was always so worried about how I was being perceived��� ��� Tunde*, 26

I used to think that sexual confidence meant bravado. Acting unbothered, never admitting ignorance and talking loudly. Nigerian men are supposed to know things, especially in bed. So I acted like I knew it all, all the time.

But this one time, I had a partner that told me to slow down. She basically said ���You���re not here with me.��� She wasn���t wrong. I was in my head the entire time, imagining how I looked and worrying about how long things lasted. I started therapy around that period, mostly for work stress, but the conversations kept pulling me back to the issues I had with intimacy.

It was then that I realised that I���d never actually been present during sex. I ask more questions now, check in and admit when something isn���t working.

3. ���My body was the first thing I had to make peace with��� ��� Qiyammah*, 24

Before I could even get to the confidence part, I had to deal with accepting my body. I believed for the longest time that sexual confidence and appeal was for thinner girls and I���d earn it as soon as I looked different. But when I went to Uni, it was my first time being truly alone from what I was used to. I started existing in my body without judging it.

I dressed for myself and thought about myself with kindness. My sexual confidence started in letting myself take up space in a room. It���s still fragile, to be honest, and I know a bad comment can still weigh me down. But I���m progressing. I don���t see myself the way I used to anymore and I like knowing that.

4. ���Men aren���t taught to want things softly��� ��� Chi*, 29

The men I grew up watching treated desire like something to take. If you wanted sex or intimacy, you had to go for it and take it. Asking felt weak and if you were unsure of yourself, that was even worse.

Then I had a breakup that completely blindsided me. She said she never really knew me. Mind you, that was after three years of being together. I thought about that sentence over and over again, months after. I spent the next year in what I call the most honest period of my life. It was very uncomfortable. But I feel like the PTSD forced me to do it. I didn���t want to end another relationship like that. So I started telling my partners what I actually wanted and I sat with how exposing that felt.

The first few times, I wanted to disappear into the floor. But when I stopped hiding, intimacy actually became intimate for me.

5. ���I Used to Turn the Lights Off Every Single Time��� ��� Nini*, 26

When I started having sex, I kept it under wraps. Both my involvement in and enjoyment of the activity. A ���good girl��� can���t enjoy that kind of thing openly. I didn���t want my sexual partners to think I was loose, so I never communicated what I wanted. I felt like being confident about having sex was shameful. Every time, I would turn off the lights and get it over with.

Shout out to the partner whose constant ‘What do you actually want?’ finally made me realize I had absolutely no idea. I had never really thought about my own pleasure as something that actually mattered. Now, I speak up and communicate. It sounds small, but for someone who never wanted to be seen, I think it���s a refreshing change that I���m getting used to.

6. ���Body Count Comments Used to Wreck Me��� ��� Samm*, 30

People don���t talk about how wrecking body count comments are. It sounds like jokes and banter, but for me, it was beyond that. My friends once asked what my body count was, and telling them the truth? Biggest mistake ever. It started as a joke, but I realised it was getting to me. They asked if my body count was zero because I couldn���t get it up or I didn���t have a penis. I started overthinking.

What fixed my self-esteem was seeing a therapist. It feels weird saying this out loud, but therapy worked for me. Apparently, sex wasn’t an exam that I could fail with one wrong move.

7. ���A Horrible Comment Followed Me For Years��� ��� Zee*, 27

My ex made an offhand comment about how my body felt on his. I was fat at the time, so the comment stayed with me for a really long time. The comment followed me into every relationship after him. I felt bad about wanting sex because I thought it was probably bothersome for the other person. Most times, I found myself wondering if they were even enjoying themselves.

It took having a completely different partner, who constantly reassured me, to finally heal from that. He made me feel wanted in a way that fixed me.

Next Read: We Can���t Talk About Male Privilege Without Talking About Mothers

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. 

The subject of today’s #WhatSheSaid is Amara Ogara, a 32-year-old Nigerian businesswoman, storyteller, content creator and filmmaker known online as Amara the Lesbian. She talks about growing up Igbo in the North, the complicated love she carries for parents who hurt her and shaped her, meeting the woman who became her wife, and reclaiming a word people once used to silence her.

Can you tell me about yourself?

My name is Amara Ogara. A lot of people call me Glory now because it is my first name and my work name, but Amara is what I respond to instinctively. Sometimes I forget I am Glory.

I am a businesswoman. I am a storyteller. Many people found me and connected with me through my stories. I believe in using stories as a medium to raise social awareness and drive impactful change in society, because what people see, they believe. What they believe, they can become.

I am a multidimensional creative, although I am currently working inside the corporate system in America. I recently completed a master’s programme and am now in the workforce, but I still identify as a creative. A storyteller. A filmmaker, because I know that at the end of everything, I will be making films. I still share my stories through my social media platforms.

And I am a lesbian. A married one. My wife is Nigerian, too. We have been together for eleven years and counting.

Where did you grow up?

I am the second-born and first daughter of an Igbo man and an Igbo woman, and I always mention that because being Igbo adds a specific layer of context to your Nigerian experience.

My parents met in Kano. I was born in the North. My dad was born in 1960, which means he was seven years old when the Biafran War started. My mum was born in 1970, the year the war ended. They were babies during that time. I never really understood what that meant until I became an adult and started reading and understanding my Igbo history, and what war leaves behind in the hearts of children, fathers and mothers who survive it. I feel like I was touched by that war even though I was not born during it. In some ways, because of my father. That trickle-down is real.

What was your father like?

Complex. My father struggled enormously with his anger, his temper, and his temperament, and I was a huge recipient of that struggle. He believed in spare the rod, spoil the child, so my dad would not spare the rod. He would spoil the rod, and so many rods were spoiled on me. I went to school with scars on my back. There was one time there was a scar on my face from the rod. I had so much anger toward my dad growing up. So much.

But I also want to say this, because it is the truth: my dad is a beautiful man, too. He was an artist. He would make our hair, plait it, relax it, and massage my mum’s feet. He created artworks. He taught us how to soak paper in water, let it soften, pound it, and then use the pounded pieces to make sculptures. He was a fantastic artist with a fantastic mind. He has had a stroke for the past fourteen years or so, and he is different now, but the person I grew up with was both. Both things are true at the same time.

What kind of child were you in all of that?

A pendulum. Going from one end of rebellion to one end of people-pleasing.

When I was in people-pleasing mode, I would not wait to be told to make the bed. If I knew Mummy liked the bed made, before she came back from the market, I would have already done it. I wanted her to feel good when she walked in. I wanted her to laugh. I wanted her to be happy.

But I was also the kind of child who would steal money from my parents. Because you beat me yesterday or last weekend, I am going to school now, and I want to buy minerals for my friends and eat shortbread, but I do not have the money for that, so I will take it. I cannot talk about my childhood without talking about how much I stole from them, and I say it honestly because I remember that child. That child struggled deeply with powerlessness and hated it. My mum had a restaurant and was bringing in cash daily, so I would take 200, 100, or 50 naira. Just enough for Coke and shortbread for my friend and me. That was the whole deal.

Underneath all of that, though, I was carrying a deep sadness. I was very depressed growing up. Some days, I would be crippled in bed and just crying, or wake up in tears like I had been running in my dreams, running from my father and his cane. I struggled with intense darkness for years. There was a period where I genuinely did not think I was going to make it to 30. Not that I was going to act on it, but it lived as a quiet background thought: “I am not going to live long anyway. Let me just experience what I can and then go.” It took growing up and fully understanding myself to realise where all of that was actually coming from.

But I was also a loving child. I loved my siblings. Something about experiencing my father’s anger made me want to be everything he wasn’t. I learned very early to communicate my frustration without raising my hand because I had experienced what it felt like to be on the receiving end, and I never wanted to pass it on to anyone smaller than me. My siblings called me a crybaby. Every small thing, Amara is crying again. But funny enough, they would do anything to avoid seeing me cry.

What She Said: I Left a Safe Marriage with a Man for a Woman Living a Double Life

What values came out of that upbringing?

Hard work, above everything. We would wake as early as 4:30 am to handle our responsibilities. My elder brother and I were in charge of opening the Santana leather, the ones used to roll eba and semo, getting them ready before the cooking started. Food was leaving for the shop by 6 or 7 am, so everyone was already in the process before the sun was properly up.

My parents also raised us to understand money very early. If the mai ruwa would normally be paid to fetch water, my mum would offer to pay us instead. So even as small children, we were calculating: let me go and fetch this water and make this money.

I had my own farm at eight years old. My father had unused land around the house. He said I could farm whatever I wanted, so I bought aleho (the Hausa name for a fast-growing leafy vegetable widely known as African spinach) seeds, planted them, harvested them, tied them into bunches, and hawked them. I had my own system for making money while also earning from my parents’ system.

Everywhere I go, I introduce myself as a businesswoman because I am constantly looking for money-making opportunities. When I walk into a room, trust that I have already found the demand and the supply chain. That comes entirely from that childhood.

What were you like in school?

A storyteller. If you ran a public poll and asked people who knew me from secondary school what they remember, I guarantee you would find someone saying, “That senior who would always tell us stories.”

After prep class, I would ask, “Who wants to hear a story?” And junior students would gather around my bunk, scatter into corners around me, someone calling from the top bunk, “Senior Amara, talk louder so we can hear from here.” I would make up stories on the spot. I still do this with my wife. When she is feeling a certain way, I say, “Should I tell you a story?” and I just create something right there.

I was also known for generosity. I am a big believer that nobody should starve around you. If there is food, share it. I was known for that, stories and trouble. I was mischievous and goofy. Still am. Just slightly more reserved now, if I do say so myself.

You mentioned feeling a deep sadness growing up, like something was off, but you couldn’t name it. When did you start to understand what that was?

Not until my early twenties, genuinely. Growing up, I was not exposed to anything that gave me that awareness. My siblings and I watched Diego and Paloma, When You Are Mine, Esmeralda, Super Story, and Nigerian movies my mother rented from the shop. Nothing that explored same-sex relationships. It was completely outside my radar until I was about 19 and I watched Blue Is the Warmest Colour.

That movie stayed in my mind, both conscious and subconscious, for almost a year. The character Ad竪le had so much of me in it. I had always gotten along well with boys, had good friendships, and had good banter. But once it came to romance, it always felt like I was giving them an upgraded friendship. I did not understand the disconnect.

I started learning about boy-girl relationships around 13 or 14. I even set a rule for myself that I would not date until I was 18. On my 18th birthday, there were boys waiting, and I had to pick one. Even after I did, it always felt like a weird chore. Every time I thought about the future, I did not even know what to think. Looking back, that depression was wrapped up in everything I had not yet understood about myself. I was carrying so much that I could not yet name until I got into university.

What was university like?

I went to Eastern Mediterranean University. That distance from my family and from Nigerian culture genuinely helped. It created space for things I would not have had space for back home.

In the first semester, I was out with a friend. We went dancing, drank, and on the way back in the Uber, we were cuddling into each other, and it felt so natural to look at her and ask if I could kiss her. She said yes. I asked if she wanted to come back to my dorm. She said yes. That was my first physical, sexual experience with a woman.

The next morning, she woke up, and we went straight back into friend mode. We never spoke about it. Not once. Not until thirteen years later did we finally have a proper conversation about what had happened between us. In the moment, it was just something that lived between us in silence. What we do in the darkness we do not talk about in the light. During the day, I was her friend, she knew my boyfriend, I knew her boyfriend, and that was that.

You had a boyfriend at the time? How were things with him?

He was actually one of my closest friends. We were like best friends. We talked about everything, including non-monogamy and my feelings for women. It was not like I was hiding things from him. He knew me in ways that most people did not.

When I met my wife for the first time while still with him, I came home and told him I had met this person and I really, really liked her. He understood. Our relationship ended because of how much I liked her. I eventually lost that friendship because he couldn’t just be my friend anymore, but I have never regretted the choice.

Can you tell me about meeting your wife?

She punched me on the school bus by accident. Every time we ran into each other after that, she would say, “Oh my God, I am so sorry about the other day!” This went on for about a year. One afternoon, she came to find me while I was sitting outside the department and said she just wanted to say sorry again. I told her, “Girl, you need to find something new to say to me. You cannot keep saying the same thing all the time.” We laughed. We talked.

She had grown up queer in Nigeria. She had dated women since she was a teenager. She was the first real-life lesbian that I ever actually experienced, and I was completely mind-blown. She had so many stories, so many experiences.

And then one day, we were taking a walk, and I asked her what she thought about marrying a woman. She stopped walking, looked at me, and said something about how some things are sacred and should stay sacred, that marriage is not for people like us.

And I stood there thinking, wait. I understand the world is against you, but why are you not on your own side?

That conversation changed everything for me. I walked back to my dorm with this conviction in my heart that I wanted to shift the world for this person. Even if I could not change everything that was wrong with it, I wanted to change the way she saw herself in it. The next day, I started talking about her. I told my friends. I talked about her on YouTube. I made a video about kissing a girl. I just started talking, and I did not have a game plan. All I wanted was for the idea of being with a woman to feel as normal as being with a man. Years later, I started going by Amara the Lesbian.��

When did you become certain you are a lesbian?

Before I met Yinka, my wife, I had been telling myself I was pansexual. I like people. I am attracted to people. That is what I kept saying while I was still dating boys.

Then I remember the first time Yinka and I were intimate, and I thought, yo, this is exactly what it should feel like. That was also, coincidentally, the very first time I had an orgasm in my life. And I lay there thinking, my body is not actually broken. I can feel things. I can actually feel things. Because before that, I had genuinely wondered: Is something wrong with me? Is my body broken? Did my father break my body with all those canes? It had always felt like a chore with boys. Something I would do to reward someone, or run away from when I could.

With Yinka, I understood. I stopped saying pansexual and started saying what I actually was. You like women. You like women, women, women.

You mentioned you had started making YouTube videos about this around this time. Did your family ever find them?

I wasn’t really hiding. I was documenting my life on Snapchat, bits and pieces. I hosted a River9ja Network event where I talked about having a girlfriend. People back home heard, and somebody told my parents. To this day, I do not know which video they found or exactly how they heard about it. I just know they heard while I was still in Cyprus.

At the time, I was working so hard to sustain myself. From the day I landed in Cyprus, I was looking for ways to make money. I brought two bags from Nigeria, one full of foodstuffs and another full of hair attachments, human hair, relaxers, and combs to sell to girls in my dormitory. I made enough to save 500k to 600k in my GTB account that first semester without touching the money sent from home.

Later on, I started cooking for students, especially Yahoo boys who were my primary customers. I was cooking for them like mad, making $200 to $300 a day. I also wrote academic papers for students before ChatGPT existed.

By my fourth semester, I was paying my own school fees out of pocket. I even enrolled in a master’s program in film in Cyprus, paid the first instalment to renew my residence permit, and then realised I would rather use that tuition money to buy land and build a business back home. My wife and I pooled our money together and bought land in Nigeria.

Because I was paying my own way and sending money back home, I was the breadwinner. And I have learned something very clearly in my journey as a lesbian: Dem no dey challenge breadwinner. Everybody moves accordingly around a breadwinner. My parents did not say anything directly to me until I came back to Nigeria in 2019.

What happened when you came back to Nigeria?

I built a poultry farm in the village, about 15 minutes away from my childhood home. I bought land, fenced it, built the structures, and bought birds. I was running a real commercial business. I was showing up at my farm by 6 am, feeding my birds, doing the physical work alongside my workers, supplying eggs to airport caterers, and selling meat to slaughterhouses.

Because I had tools, resources, security, and a small farm car, money shielded me inside that village. I was oblivious to much of the gossip about me because I was so focused on calculating feed costs, managing supply chains, and poaching customers.

But my cash flow had changed since I had been abroad, making dollars. When that financial interaction changed, the resistance surfaced. Instead of people being honest and saying, “You are back home now and not sending as much money,” they started saying, “Oh, your sexuality, we don’t accept your sexuality.”

And I was not taking it lightly. We trended because I was not going to absorb it. There was a day my mum was saying what she was saying, and I just picked up my phone, recorded my goodbye saying I was not coming back to that house, and posted it. That video went viral on Instablog9ja and everywhere. That was the height of our falling out.

Half the time, most people do not actually care what you are doing with your life. What they care about is what they can benefit from you. When it is beneficial to be associated with you, they are. When it is not, they will use any available excuse. Sometimes that excuse is your sexuality.

I���m sorry you went through that. You mentioned calling yourself Amara the Lesbian publicly during that period. Where did that name come from?

People had been using that word to try to silence me for years. My housemate in Cyprus called me a bloody lesbian during an argument. My elder brother, during a disagreement, said at least his own was better because he was not a lesbian. Every time someone said that word to me in a high-energy moment, I would go quiet because they had called the word that was not supposed to be called.

Then one day in Nigeria, I was walking and heard children whispering, “That is her, that is Amara the Lesbian.” And I heard that name, and I thought: Amara The Lesbian? That is such a powerful name.

That was the beginning. I changed my YouTube name. I started saying it constantly. At first, the word tasted funny in my mouth. Now I say lesbian so much it sounds like my surname. It sounds melodic and sweet. Sometimes, with my friends, I just say “l-lesbian.” I love the way my tongue does lesbian.

I took the power from the word by becoming the one who called it first. So before you can say, “Oh, you’re a lesbian,” I have already said it. No be for my page you hear am? You cannot use it to insult me anymore. And funny enough, since then, nobody has tried.

That���s truly empowering. After you moved back to your farm in Nigeria, was there a specific moment that made you realise that living here was becoming unsustainable?

It happened gradually, especially after the farm closed down and I had more time to feel. But #EndSARS was the turning point.

During #EndSARS, my wife and I were unemployed. News started circulating locally via WhatsApp that my partner and I were instigating youths to fight for queer laws, when we were fighting for EndSARS. Local clickbait headlines made us scapegoats in a community that didn’t even understand the mainstream Twitter conversations.

Things became hostile fast. One night, we went to dispose of our trash and met vigilantes who were usually friendly, but that night, they were stubborn. A local man drove up in his car and tried to confront my wife. When she ignored him and walked away, he started his car and drove directly toward her. The next thing I saw was Yinka on the bonnet of his car. I completely froze in terror, reaching out and pulling my wife close to me.

After #EndSARS, our daily experiences became openly confrontational. We started escaping to town or travelling to Lagos for weeks at a time just to be away from the village’s hostility.

When Yinka left Nigeria in September 2021 to finish her PhD, I went completely underground. I stayed inside my gated compound, planted crops, made self-care videos, and minded my business. My heart was broken from being in the public eye without boundaries.

By 2023, I told myself, “Guy, you either pour yourself into work or you kill yourself.” So I poured myself into making an independent short film. We produced it, screened it in Lagos and Abuja, and got selected for the Lift-Off First-Time Filmmakers festival in the UK.

You’ll Enjoy: Why Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD) Is a Suicide Risk

How did you end up leaving Nigeria, and how did your wife become your wife legally?

In April 2023, my wife called me from the US in tears. She was lonely and terrified of facing another winter alone. I promised her right on that call that I would be with her by next winter. That same day, I started applying for master’s programs in the US. I got accepted, did my interview, and left Nigeria on December 22, 2023. I graduated with my master’s in December 2025, and six months later, I entered the corporate workforce here.

When I landed in America, the transition was so freeing. I felt like a human being again. I could walk around, arrange our home, shop at the supermarket, and drive.

We had been talking about getting married since 2023, but we both had fairy-tale ideas and didn’t want to rush a legal process out of pure necessity. But by January 2025, we looked at each other and said, “Why are we not married?” It would make a lot of things easier for us. We know we want a fairy tale, but we can���t afford that right now. That doesn���t erase the love. So on February 15, 2025, we gathered our close friends and signed our marriage certificates. We are legally married now, though we still plan to have our big fairy-tale wedding ceremony someday when we are ready.

That���s beautiful. You recently posted a video tapping your wife out at her military graduation. What did that moment mean to you?

It took so much to get to that point! My wife is an incredible person who loves to challenge herself. She already has a BSc, two master’s degrees, and a PhD, but she wanted a new challenge and decided to join the US military.

On the day of her tapping-out ceremony, I thought she was going to be the one crying, but I started crying on the drive there. I was in complete awe, thinking, “Look at me, the Nigerian lesbian Amara, driving onto a US Army military base because my wife is being tapped out as a US soldier!” It felt completely surreal. I will frame that day in the wall of my heart forever.

What has this freedom you have outside Nigeria taught you about yourself?

I had to learn how to hold joy. In Nigeria, I was constantly on guard, waiting for the worst to happen. I used to associate myself only with power, never beauty. When I looked in the mirror, I only checked if I looked powerful enough to step outside.

Here, I had to learn the necessity and responsibility of beauty. Beauty is a testament to self-devotion and self-care. I built strict discipline for myself. I wake up at 4:00 am every single day for my workout classes, whether it is Solid Core, Jungle classes or Saturday runs. I limit myself strictly to one weekend cocktail, I watch my sugar intake because I realised sugar makes me sad, and I treat my body with care.

I also do deep inner child work. People see a hard guy on the outside, but when I take off my clothes at night, there is a little broken girl sitting in the boardroom of my mind. I commune with her, I talk her through my day, and I protect her fiercely. For the first time in my life, I have the privilege of loving myself, spreading out, and genuinely feeling like a human being.

If you���d like to be my next subject on #WhatSheSaid,  

I���m happy for you. Is your relationship with your family different today?

Not once, but twice, has my father apologised to me for my childhood. Apology does not change the scars or the memories, but I am grateful that I am now dealing with an evolved mind. My mum also tries. When I bring something up and say it was painful, she says, “I’m sorry.” Back in the day, she would have said, “You don’t see what we sacrificed for you.” Now there is a real conversation. Now there is an acknowledgement that where they were was not okay.

I am experiencing restoration. I am experiencing forgiveness. I am experiencing what it feels like to choose healing. And my parents are a part of that. I am genuinely grateful for that.

You mentioned your community of friends earlier. What has that community meant to you?

It is great to be a lesbian with lesbian friends, I am telling you! It makes everything so much more navigable. Even right now, being a married Nigerian woman married to another Nigerian woman is a foreign concept, but having lesbian friends who are on their way to getting married or are already married makes you feel understood.

Amara, the Lesbian brought so many incredible friends into my life. I had to learn boundaries, discernment, and emotional regulation along the way, but having that community saved me.

What do you think the version of you who was still in Nigeria would say if she could see your life now?

I think she would say thank you. Every version of me that came before did her absolute best to take care of this house we live in and contribute to the journey. None of them tried to destroy my temple. I look back at the version of me in Cyprus and the version in Nigeria, and I say, “Thank you, really, thank you.”

What do you want people, especially queer Nigerian women, to take from your story?

Stay focused on your empowerment. Look out for yourself. Protect your retirement. Think about who you will be as an older woman. Invest in things that will take care of you.

My sexuality is a constant reminder to hustle and stay financially independent. ���Na lesbian you be o! Lesbian.��� I remind myself. It���s also made me more intelligent and more aware. I think from a more refined and seasoned place than I did when I did not yet know I was a lesbian. It has been a lot. I have learned so much. One day, I should gather my thoughts into a book. But in all things I know this: I am capable of my life, and I stay capable.��

And if someone has used a word to shame you or silence you, take the word. Wash it. Bathe it. Remove the shame from it. Carry it so loudly that they can never use it against you again.

That is what I did. I became Amara the Lesbian so fully that the name now sounds like the most natural thing in the world. Because it is.

You’ll Also Love: 10 Nigerian Women on The Male-Centered Women in Their Lives

For Dada*, 30, she first noticed that her ���usual��� PMS symptoms were a little more than that at the age of 26. ���I was in a car that was on Third Mainland Bridge, and I nearly jumped into the water. I was so scared because it felt so real; I could clearly see myself doing that. The only thing that stopped me was the fact that I thought about how cold the water would be.���

is a severe form of PMS, and suicidal thoughts are one of its symptoms. It causes intense physical and emotional symptoms every menstrual cycle in the week or two before your period. Symptoms often abate as soon as the period comes. We spoke to Clinical Psychology Researcher about PMDD and how it increases suicidal ideation in women.

What is PMDD?

PMDD affects roughly ; that is, 1 in every 18 women has PMDD. To get a diagnosis, at least five symptoms have to show up in the final week before a period, ease off within days of the period starting, and disappear in the week after the period starts. Because so many conditions can mimic it, doctors are meant to confirm the pattern with daily symptom tracking across at least two cycles before calling it PMDD. Most women never get that far.

The “just” in “it���s just PMS” is where the trouble starts. Women with PMDD have almost seven times the odds of attempting suicide, and almost four times the odds of experiencing suicidal ideation, .

For Dada*, those two weeks before her period meant she was fighting her mind in addition to all the physical symptoms. ���I would literally be in a fetal position, crying, and my mind would tell me how worthless and useless and stupid I was, and how I should kill myself because I wasn’t worth the time and space and nobody would love me for me,��� she says. ���It would stay for two weeks. I’d feel fatigued and exhausted, easily irritated and extremely emotional. It was like my nerves were exposed.��� She would start fights with her sister and her partner at the time, and she believes the fog of it kept her in a toxic situationship far longer than she should have stayed. At work, she would lock herself in the toilet and cry for hours, ���trying so hard not to die.��� She cancelled plans because she felt drained and unworthy of being around people. ���There have been times when I thought I was actually going to die. I’ve almost cut myself multiple times.���

For years, she didn’t have a name for any of it. ���I didn’t think of PMDD until two years later, when I saw a post on X (fka Twitter). I thought it was just stress. I didn’t even track the frequency of my cycle until I was 27, and even then, I thought it was just usual period nonsense, because it would stop immediately when my period came.���

Next Read: 11 Nigerian Women Share How Their Mental Health Affects Their Romantic Relationships

The pattern of symptoms that build before a period and lift almost as soon as it arrives is one of the signature tells of PMDD, and one of the reasons it hides so well. Researchers now understand it as a sensitivity in the brain’s response to the normal hormonal changes of the menstrual cycle, not too much or too little of any hormone. The hormones of someone with PMDD would look perfectly ordinary on a test. What differs is how the brain reacts to them, and because the reaction is timed to her cycle, it is easy to mistake it for stress, a bad week, or a personality flaw.

Ibukun*, 23, an artist, spent years doing exactly that. She had always had depression, so when things got dramatically worse in the days before her period, she filed it under her existing diagnosis. ���I just thought that was me being me,��� she says. ���I wasn’t very good at relationships, so I always thought it was a me problem. I just thought,��� Oh, my depressive episodes get worse before my period. Cool.��� 

In that week, she would stay in bed, struggle with basic hygiene, cry at everything, and pick fights with the idea of cutting people off entirely. ���Every time I have an issue with a friend before my PMDD hits, I just consider cutting them off when I’m in a PMDD rut.��� 

When she was younger and severely depressed, that same week came with self-harm. ���A week before my period, I would constantly cut my arms. I’ve stopped that, thank God.��� She only learned PMDD existed in 2021, when a friend posted about it, and she educated herself; she was formally diagnosed in therapy in 2023. Even now, she is unmedicated. ���I’m not medicated or anything. I’m just aware that okay, yeah, it’s PMDD, and I rawdog it.���

Adesuwa*, 26, also had to find the word herself. The first time she noticed something was wrong was in 2020, and when she told a friend how she was feeling, the friend ���jokingly��� told her to kill herself. She assumed it was the pressure of school. Her worst days bring body weakness that keeps her in bed, anger at the world and then at herself, and a depression deep enough that she thinks about dying. Her darkest moment came while cooking, when she caught herself wishing the gas would explode and kill her. Her period arrived less than an hour later. Like many Nigerians, she read about PMDD online and immediately recognised herself in it. Naming the feeling was her first step to coping. She sees a therapist now, and while she has no formal diagnosis, her therapist gives her techniques that help.

Some women never get that close to an answer. Funmi*, 23, started experiencing worsening anxiety and feelings of low self-worth about two weeks before her period, around the age of 20, and she dismissed it herself. ���I really just thought this was what everyone experienced when they said they experienced PMS,��� she says. She has no official diagnosis and had never spoken to anyone about it until last year. Her lowest point came during her medical board exams, when worsening premenstrual symptoms collided with exam anxiety. ���It was such a haze, honestly, and I can’t even say how I got through it. It’s a blank space in my memory.���

The women who did seek medical help often came back with nothing useful. Dada* was repeatedly told it was stress and that she should improve her diet and exercise more. ���The gynaecologists kept saying it was normal, which is crazy,��� she says. She was only diagnosed in the end because her therapist was working carefully to rule out ADHD and autism. ���I wish women weren’t always dismissed with ‘that’s how it is’,��� she says. ���It irks my soul every time I hear it.���

Why is Getting a PMDD Diagnosis Hard?

Like most mental disorders, PMDD doesn���t come alone, and that is one reason it hides for so long. Between 42% and 49% of people with premenstrual disorders also live with a . An existing diagnosis can become a hiding place. Ibukun spent years filing her worst weeks under the depression she already knew she had, because a worsening of what you already have does not look like a new condition.

The overlap with ADHD is even sharper. Provisional PMDD in 31.4% of women with an ADHD diagnosis, against 9.8% of women without ADHD. Women carrying ADHD together with depression or anxiety were the most at risk in the entire sample, with more than four times the risk of women without ADHD. Dada*’s experience sits inside this pattern: her PMDD was only named because her therapist was carefully ruling out ADHD and autism first.

PMDD is also . Women with mothers and sisters who experience PMDD are more at risk of developing the disorder. 

PMDD rearranges lives, especially in Nigeria, a country where women’s diagnosis is a Herculean task. Funmi missed classes for days at a time, absences she couldn’t afford and had to scramble to make up for. Adesuwa* can’t do meaningful work in her bad week and now plans her workload around her cycle. Ibukun*’s executive dysfunction deepens. And because Nigeria’s mental health support is largely private and largely unaffordable, therapy, the thing that moved three of these four women forward, stays out of reach for most. ���I just wish everyone could afford mental health support services, because they go a long way,��� Adesuwa says.

Next Read: Body Dysmorphia: It Is MORE Than Hating Your Body

So what actually helps? 

The women have answers they built themselves. For Funmi*, she optimises her life around her cycle, and keeps her closest circle to people she doesn’t have to apologise to, reminds herself that some of what she feels in that week isn’t real, and protects her school attendance so that the days she truly can’t show up don’t cost her. 

Adesuwa* tracks her cycle to plan and leans on music. She goes to therapy, watches comfort shows, and surrounds herself with friends and family who make things feel lighter. 

Dada* tracks her period with an app and her calendar so she can catch the shift early, and finds that exercise, eating well, and sleeping well all help. ���Having a safe community of people who can listen without judgment, and who can care for you in the aftermath of an episode, is extremely important,��� she says.

Modern medicine has answers, too. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists strongly SSRIs, a class of antidepressants, for the mood symptoms of premenstrual disorders, and lists hormonal treatments, counselling, exercise, nutritional therapies, and self-help strategies among the options. Many patients do best with a combination. A diagnosis matters because the treatment for PMDD is specific, and because a woman who knows her calendar can prepare for her hardest week instead of being ambushed by it.

The week before a period should be uncomfortable at worst. It should not be a week a woman has to survive. For the roughly 1 in 18 women living with PMDD, “it’s just PMS” is not reassurance, and for some women, the distance between that dismissal and a bridge, a blade, or a kitchen is one bad cycle. As Funmi puts it: ���People make a lot of jokes about ‘oh, it’s that time of the month’, but it’s not normal to feel like you want to jump off a bridge because of your period.���

It’s more than mood swings. It always was.

If you or someone you know is struggling with thoughts of suicide or self-harm, you can reach out to someone:

• Mentally Aware Nigeria Initiative (MANI): 08091116264 or 08111680686

• International Association for Premenstrual Disorders (IAPMD): iapmd.org

• Find a Helpline: findahelpline.com

In this article, we asked ten women to share the moments they realised their friends were too male-centred.

1. ���She Missed My Birthday to Meet a Man for the First Time��� ��� Chloe*, 30��

My ex-best friend is a pick-me who is very male-centred. At first, I hardly paid attention to it because I didn���t really think it was a bad thing until it got worse. Every time we hung out, our conversations revolved around men she was attracted to, or thought might be attracted to her. Whenever I try to steer the conversation back to something else, she gets irritated, and in the end, I let her keep talking about what she wants to talk about.

She also had a habit of standing me up at our hangouts just because she wanted to see a guy she had barely known for a week, and if it didn���t go well, it was still my house she would come to rant at. That kind of thing was exhausting. In the end, my breaking point was when she missed my birthday just to go to another state to meet a man for the first time. What pissed me off most was that she expected me just to accept it, and I refused to do that. Good riddance, honestly.

2. ���When I Tried to Intervene, He Beat Me Too��� ��� Eghosa*, 24

In my second year of university, I befriended Teni*, a third-year student, and our friendship was something I truly appreciated, even though some of her actions were something I would attribute to her being a male-centred friend. I don���t know if it was a trauma thing, but Teni loved to date and spin the block with abusive guys. The more emotionally or physically abusive they were, the more Teni loved them, and this was very concerning because she didn���t want to hear reason at all. She cut off most of her friends because those ones were trying to tell her that it wasn���t cute that she kept dating men who disrespected her in every way they could.

Out of fear of her cutting me off, I didn���t tell her the same thing, but then one summer, when we were out of school, I went to her apartment to find her boyfriend actively beating her, and when I tried to intervene, he beat me too. That was actually the first time someone had ever beaten me in my life, and I ended up at the nearest clinic for that. I thought that the state of our bodies would have been enough to convince Teni to dump the man, so imagine my surprise when weeks after the incident, I opened her story to see her in Dubai with said boy. No one had to tell me to block her immediately.

3. ���She Would Invite Me to Places to Scope Out Men��� ��� Jackie*, 28

I thought male-centred friends were a concept that was created by the patriarchy to cause rifts between women until I actually befriended one. I didn���t even notice that she was male-centred until she would do this thing where she would invite me to places so that she could scope out men. I didn���t even mind because in my head, nothing matters as long as I���m hanging out with my friend, but it became really annoying when she would barely pay attention to our conversations at those hangouts, just because she was focused on a guy who caught her attention.

It even became more annoying when she would get really mad at me if the guy showed interest in me instead. It didn���t even make sense to me because I���m a lesbian, and she was aware, so I didn���t understand why she would become pissy and give me silent treatment for weeks. For months, I did my best to understand her, but then, after another bout of silent treatment, I realised that if our situations were reversed, I would never do that to her, so I cut her off.

4. ���She Took Out Our Savings Money For Her Boyfriend��� ��� Alia*, 40

My ex-friend and I had a really big plan to own any kind of business together, so right from the time we decided, we would be saving little by little. This was going well until she got herself a new boyfriend, and it was like her entire brain rewired. I didn���t mind the fact that she had a boyfriend, but she stepped up to this level of male-centeredness that I���d never seen in my life. She had always been, but that was concerning. She began to forget herself, her hopes, and her dreams just to satisfy him, so to speak.

Around three months after she started dating the guy, she stopped saving for the business, and I actually didn���t mind because, honestly, I thought she was just short on cash. What I didn���t know was that she was giving her boyfriend all her money.

One day, I received a debit alert from the account we���d both been saving in and saw that 80% of the money had been taken out. We both had access to the account, so the first thing I did was call her to ask what was going on. In a very casual tone, she told me that she���d withdrawn the money because her boyfriend needed it desperately, and she had no other option. After she said that, I hung up the phone and refused to see her for weeks. I do not mind her taking out the money, but she didn���t even ask for my permission. She just woke up one day and decided to because of her boyfriend. That���s not acceptable.

5. ���She Told Him I Was Talking to Him for His Money��� ��� Ola*, 25

My friend, Ama*, exposed her male-centeredness by going behind her friends��� backs to talk shit about them to their prospective talking stages or situationships so that she could be the one having a thing with them. Even though we usually joked that all of us were unlucky in love, except Ama, because of the talking stages that randomly ghost us, we didn���t think that she was actively stealing our talking stages��� contact numbers to sabotage us. We didn���t even really find it suspicious that she would go on dates and not show us her date���s pictures because we always just believed that she���s a really private person.

It wasn���t until one day that our other friend got sent a picture of her former situationship with Ama on a date before we all realised. I even tried to be rational and argued that maybe Ama didn���t know, but then I messaged an ex in a talking stage and asked why he ghosted me. He said he hadn���t planned on doing that until Ama told me that I was talking to other men, and I just wanted to talk to him for his money.

The other girls also began messaging the guys who had ghosted them, and all their reasons for ghosting led back to Ama. We didn���t even have a loud confrontation with her; we just sent screenshots of the guys admitting that Ama told them one thing or another to our group chat and tagged her. After she did that, we collectively blocked her and avoided her anytime we saw her.

You’ll Love: 7 Nigerian Women on the Lies They Told Themselves to Accept Bad Sex

6. ���She Would Joke at My Expense Just to Amuse Men��� ��� Amirah*, 35

My former best friend was every definition of male-centred. She���s the kind of person who would come for a hangout just because of the boys who would be there, and I don���t think I���ve ever had a conversation with her that didn���t end up leading to a man she fancied.

If men do not approach her at events, she will make it my problem by talking about it throughout our ride home. If men approached her, she would make jokes at my expense just to amuse them, even though I���d told her over and over again that I didn���t really appreciate it.

I believe it was when I became uninterested in going on hangouts with her because I knew she would make the experience uncomfortable that I knew I had to end our friendship.

7. ���Someone Like That Could Kill Us Over a Man��� ��� Promise*, 49

My former friend had a habit of liking only the men her friends liked. They were never attractive to her until she saw her friend talking to the guy, and then she approached the guy, and because a lot of the women in our friend group weren���t confrontational, they just thought it was something silly she would grow out of. Unfortunately, it didn���t stop.

She would even try it with our boyfriends, and there were times when a fight broke out because of her actions. If you asked us why we didn���t cut her off even when she was doing all that rubbish, we wouldn���t have an answer. I guess it���s because we all valued our friendship and didn���t know how to push anyone out of the circle. It wasn���t until one of us got married, and she tried to approach that person���s husband, that we finally decided to have a talk. It was obvious that she didn���t respect our friendship and just acted selfishly. Someone like that could kill us over a man, and we were not going to risk that. We had to cut her off for our sake.

8. ���When She Gets a Boyfriend, It Becomes a ���My Man, My Man��� Affair��� ��� Cynthia*, 24

Every time my friend started dating someone new, she would disappear for weeks. She would ignore our texts, messages, and requests to hang out simply because she was interested in the person. When she comes back online, she will start talking about this person immediately instead of even apologising for disappearing.

From the moment she gets a boyfriend, it becomes a ���my man, my man��� affair, and God forbid anything happens to her friends during that period, because she will actually not care. When I fell really sick to the point that I was in the hospital for weeks, she didn���t so much as text or visit because it was at that time she was dating a new guy. I didn���t even think twice about ending our friendship because I would never do something nasty like that to her.

9. ���She Didn���t Believe Her Boyfriend Assaulted Me��� ��� Ella*, 27

My sister is male-centred in the sense that she always takes the man���s side. Even if he���s the one at fault, she would take his side. Our dad was not kind to our mum, and yet she took his side every time his name came up. When her best friend told her about her partner cheating on her, my sister didn���t even comfort her before asking her what she did to make her partner go out and cheat.

When her boyfriend grabbed my ass, I told her about it in the hopes that she would see that she was dating a creep, but she didn���t even believe me. She tried to gaslight me, even, and asked why her boyfriend would even want to do something like that to me. She���s now married to said boyfriend, and although I can���t cut her off because she���s family, I���ve taken a huge distance away from her.

10. ���We Got Chased By a Man���s Dog as We Were Leaving��� ��� Tega*, 27

My friend lives to please men. I wish I were exaggerating, but I���m not. She���s so male-centred, it���s infuriating. I give her so much grace because I���ve seen her mother, so I know where she gets that male-centeredness from. I can���t count how many times she has left us at a club just because a guy was showing interest and she liked it.

I also can���t count how many times she has called us to come and pick her up from a random stranger���s house. There was even a time that we got chased by a man���s dog as we were leaving the house, and I can���t lie, that was really traumatising. She has put us in a lot of precarious positions because of a man she���s involved with, and honestly, I am really this close to ending our friendship.

Next Read: 8 Viral Skincare Products You���re Probably Using Wrong

In many Nigerian homes, there is a difference between raising a boy and raising a girl. Nobody necessarily sits the children down to explain the rules; they just become obvious with time: who is expected to help in the kitchen, who gets asked to run errands, who is allowed to stay out later, who is expected to know how to take care of themselves and who is quietly expected to take care of everybody else.

A girl might be helping her mother in the kitchen while her brother is sitting in the living room watching TV. She may be asked to serve his food, wash his clothes or clean his room. If she asks why he can���t do these things himself, the answer might be, ���He���s a boy.���

And sometimes, that���s all the explanation she gets.

Who Teaches Boys That Women Will Take Care of Them?

Patriarchy is often discussed in terms of men’s actions, but some of its everyday rules are introduced much earlier and reinforced within the home. Sometimes, the person enforcing the rule is a woman.

Many Nigerian mothers were raised to believe that a girl should know how to cook, clean, care for children and keep a home running. So when they teach their daughters these things, it can feel less like enforcing inequality and more like preparing them for adulthood.

The problem is that their sons aren���t always given the same preparation.

A daughter is told to learn how to cook because ���you won���t be living with your mother forever.��� Her brother can grow up without knowing how to make anything beyond noodles because nobody considers it urgent that he learn because ���he will eventually get married and his wife will cook for him.

The daughter is preparing for a future where she will supposedly have to take care of a home. The son is preparing for a future where someone else might do it for him.

���You Will Marry and Leave���

The phrase ���you will marry and leave��� carries more weight than it seems.

Girls hear it when they���re being taught domestic responsibilities, when decisions about education are being made, and sometimes when conversations about money, property and family responsibilities come up. The assumption is that a daughter will eventually become part of another family, while a son remains part of his own.

That belief can shape what parents expect from their children.

A daughter may be encouraged to learn how to manage a household because she will eventually have one of her own. A son may not face the same pressure because his future wife is assumed to handle those things.

The same idea can also influence how families think about education, financial support and inheritance. If a daughter is seen as someone who will ���leave,��� while a son is seen as the one who will stay and carry on the family name, the two children may not always be treated as though they are building the same future.

Sometimes Favouritism Looks Like Less Responsibility

Favouritism isn���t always obvious gifts, better schools or being handed more money. Sometimes, the privilege is simply being allowed to do less.

One child is expected to help with younger siblings, wash plates, run errands and assist whenever there is work to be done. Another can leave the house, play games, watch TV or stay in his room without being called.

Over time, this creates a strange imbalance. The girl gets good at managing a household because she has spent years doing it. The boy doesn���t develop those same skills because nobody has required him to. Then, when both eventually become adults, the woman is expected to naturally know how to cook, clean, organise a home and care for other people.

It is difficult to call that ���preparation for life��� when only one person is being prepared.

You’ll Enjoy: 7 Nigerians Share the Financial Consequences of Divorce

In the Fight Against Patriarchy, Women Have To Be Part Of The Conversation Too

This isn���t about blaming mothers for inventing patriarchy. They didn���t.

Many women are simply passing down rules they were taught themselves. A mother who tells her daughter to serve her brother may genuinely believe she is teaching her respect. A mother who insists that her daughter must know how to cook may believe she is protecting her from future embarrassment. A mother who gives her son more freedom may see it as part of raising a boy.

But good intentions don���t automatically make the expectation fair, and that���s where the conversation about women and patriarchy gets interesting.

A woman can tell her daughter to be financially independent and still tell her to serve her brother. She can complain about men who expect their wives to do everything while raising a son who has never had to wash his own clothes. She can tell her daughter never to depend on a man while teaching her son that women exist to take care of him.

That contradiction matters. The fight against patriarchy cannot happen only in conversations about men, workplaces, politics, or romantic relationships. It also has to happen in kitchens, bedrooms and living rooms, where children are first taught what men and women are supposed to do.

What Are We Actually Teaching Them?

Boys who grow up being served can easily grow into men who expect service. Girls who grow up watching women shoulder most of the domestic work can easily become women who see that arrangement as normal.

Of course, growing up this way doesn���t mean a boy will automatically become an entitled man or that a girl will accept the same treatment in her adult life. People unlearn things. They question what they were taught. They build relationships that look completely different from the homes they grew up in.

But children shouldn���t have to unlearn an inequality that could have been avoided in the first place.

A son can cook. He can wash his clothes. He can clean the house. He can look after his younger siblings. He can serve his sister food. None of these things makes him less of a man.

And a daughter shouldn���t have to become ���a good woman��� by learning how to serve everyone around her.

You’ll Like: Virginity Is a Social Construct. So, Why Does It Carry So Much Weight?

���Maybe he’s tired, maybe it’s me, maybe this is just how sex feels.��� 

When sex isn’t good, the majority of Nigerian women make explanations rather than tell a partner what isn’t working. In some cases, it was a matter of protecting said partner���s ego or avoiding the uncomfortable conversation. 

We asked seven Nigerian women about the excuses they made for a man who was bad at sex, what accepting it looked like in the moment, and when the story they were telling themselves finally stopped making sense. 

1. ���Let Me Not Judge Him From One Experience��� – Ola*, 23

I met him at the gym, so I had high expectations. I was thinking, ���This one is a gym bro, at least the energy will be there.��� Unfortunately, I was very wrong. The foreplay was not giving; he finished really quickly, and I felt like I was doing most of the work. Instead of admitting the sex was bad, I told myself, ���Maybe he’s just tired. Maybe he’s stressed. Let me not judge him from one experience.���

It became my favourite excuse. I liked him, and I wanted there to be a reasonable explanation. I was attracted to him, and I’d already built this whole image of what he’d be like sexually. I became an Olympic-level excuse maker. During sex, he was giving pillow princess while I did most of the work. I didn’t have a serious conversation with him because I was still in my ���maybe he’ll do better next time’ era. Then we had sex a second time. I thought this was where things would improve. Instead, this man judged me for swallowing his cum. Some of you men have a lot of confidence for people who should be focusing on their own performance.

If the same thing happens twice, you have to start questioning your theory. I wasn’t making excuses because there was a good reason. I was making them because I didn’t want to admit the sex was simply bad. I stopped trying to convince myself that everything was fine. I was lowering my expectations and calling it understanding, and questioning whether I was asking for too much when I wasn’t.

I should be able to say what I like and need, and attraction isn’t enough.�� I can find someone extremely attractive and still realise that, sexually, the chemistry is giving a grand total of nothing. Omo, I ghosted him o.

2. ���Maybe It Was First-time Jitters With A New Partner��� – Enkay*, 35��

It was my first time with a new partner, and we’d been heavy on the foreplay for weeks. Then the day of the deed came, and it was over in five minutes. It was like he’d just jerked off because the whole experience felt like I wasn’t even involved. I told myself maybe it was first-time jitters with a new partner, and a friend validated that. I’d only had two other partners, so I also wondered if I was the inexperienced one. Maybe this was just how it was.

After a while, it became predictable: it’ll be over in ten minutes, then you’ll go back to whatever you’re doing. I’d give myself that timeline. During sex, I tried to draw pleasure from how turned on he was by my body. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. I always tried to make sure we were at my place so I could ask him to leave as soon as it was over.

It was temporary. I was only in that location for a year, and we really did vibe over movies, anime and work. I didn’t want to look for another partner or risk being seen as slutty in such a small community. I never directly addressed the problem. A few times, when I was in charge of how sex went, I tried to show him what I wanted instead of telling him. Of course, that didn’t always work.

Around the same time, I had sex with someone who literally worshipped my body the first time. It opened my eyes; I started thinking, “So this is how it can be?” I could finally acknowledge that the other sex had been bad, mediocre at best, and that I should have moved on much earlier. I was still considering his feelings, so I let things fizzle out, especially since my year there was nearly over.

I really had to learn that you have to take charge of your own pleasure. Men will cum regardless. If a partner doesn’t know what they’re doing, you can speak up and tell them what works and what doesn’t. If they’re unwilling to change, feel free to wave goodbye.

3. ���I Kept Thinking Something Was Wrong With Me��� – Yvonne*, 27

By the second time or so, I realised this couldn’t be it. This was my first encounter with sex, but it just felt wrong. Remembering it makes me angry all over again. God will actually punish that boy. It was just about him. There was hardly ever any foreplay, although he was very particular about me not being hurt. I remember thinking my nerves weren’t sensitive enough.

I pathologised it as I often do, even now. I kept thinking something was wrong with me. Then I just accepted it. I thought that was all there was to it. Overall, he was a terrible person, so I was really warped in the head when it came to him. The adrenaline was really something. I did try to talk to him about it, but he paid me no mind and didn’t even entertain the conversation.

I accepted the other bad parts of the relationship, too, which, honestly, was all of it. I carried that lack of demanding better into everything else. I centred him and basically wanted whatever made him satisfied. After we finally parted, he tried to move toward me one more time. By then, I was disgusted with him, so I turned him down. We were already over, and he stayed gone. I just knew that what we’d had couldn’t be all there was to it, especially when there was hardly ever foreplay.

More women need to learn that sex is as much for you as it is for them, and an orgasm isn’t a myth. If there’s no foreplay, please close the chapter quickly. A man who doesn’t care if sex is satisfying for you won’t care about you in other parts of the relationship either. He centres himself in bed and everywhere else; you’re just a tool.

4. ���I Had Sex With Multiple People to See If It Was Me��� – Ari*, 25

When I started having sex with men, there was almost never any pleasure beyond the initial thrust. I’m such a people pleaser that I’d fake moans until he finished, and he always took forever. I had sex with multiple people to see if it was me. I liked the idea of sex more than the act.

So I took it like a champ. If I was the problem, why should it be less pleasurable for them? For the longest time, I wouldn’t even say it didn’t work for me. I’d zone out and let out moans now and again. I’ve faked orgasms to end sex multiple times. I read a lot of books growing up, and I thought that everybody couldn’t be lying about how good it is, so the self-blame just kept going.

I liked the prospect of a warm body. It was only during sex that I’d ask myself why I was there. With my first boyfriend, it was painful every time, but he’d convince me, and love would make me do it. With my last partner, I knew he liked sex a lot, so it became a chore I did for him. Conversations seemed to put partners on edge. My last partner liked trying to please me, but I figured he’d give up at some point. Moaning and allowing him to finish was easier.

One day, I woke up and realised that bad sex didn’t serve me. It was some weeks before we broke up. In those last days, he talked a lot about how we didn’t even have sex anymore. Even though I ended it, I knew it would eventually have been a dealbreaker. Afterwards, I went eight months without sex. I realised I owed nobody sex and thought I was asexual.

Just last week, I came three times from head and twice from penetration. Before, I was going years without an orgasm unless I was masturbating. With my current sexual partner, I told him head didn’t work for me, and I had written it off. He asked me to trust him and, omo, thank God I did. I’ve had so much fun. I’ve started buying and using more toys. I know now that good sex means caring about your partner’s pleasure; most of those partners didn’t really care about mine. If you do rubbish now, I’ll boo you because I know it’s not my shame to bear. I still think I’m on the asexual spectrum, but step by step. I’m getting the pleasure I missed back.

You���ll Love: What She Said: My Father Is Engaged to the Woman I Called My Sister

5. ��� It���s Just My Assault History Playing Tricks on Me��� – Morenike*, 25

When I had sex with him for the first time, we had been kissing for a while, and then it led to fingering, and I remember thinking, ���The last time I tried this with someone else, it didn’t hurt, so why does this hurt?��� It felt like he was stabbing my insides. I told myself, okay, maybe different strokes for different folks.

At the time, I was dealing with a lot around sex because I’d started having flashbacks about being sexually assaulted when I was young. So I told myself, ���Maybe it’s just my SA history playing tricks on me, and maybe that’s how sex is supposed to feel. He’s trying his best.��� I was inexperienced, but I know now he just didn’t know how to fucking finger.

He was a situationship, and he was really sweet to me. Instead of telling him, ���You kind of suck at this,��� I let my inner avoidant out after sex. I accepted that he was exceptionally awful at fingering and started ignoring his messages asking me to come to his house. We’re still friends, but that’s just it.

Before I got comfortable enough in my body to want more sexual interactions, I’d prepare myself to dissociate because I didn’t know if it was going to be awful. One time, I texted my friend afterwards and asked them to call me with an emergency so I could leave. Years of staying quiet and allowing things to be done to me without speaking up had affected me. Why couldn’t I tell a nigga he didn’t know how to finger? He didn’t even give head. Na so so fingering without lube. What am I, Kanji Dam?

After him, I started telling people what I liked and didn’t like, and directing them to do better. I haven’t had a lot of sexual partners, but they’ve been pretty understanding once I started talking. I’m more comfortable saying I’m inexperienced now. Good sex, for me, means not being afraid to speak up. I also don’t care much for sex because of my demisexuality. If I build a beautiful emotional bond and desire someone sexually, that’s great. If not, I’m not going to force myself to accept casual sex.

6. ���He Didn���t Give Head. Who Does That?��� – Kara*, 31

He was my first consensual sexual partner ever, and I didn���t have a frame of reference for what good sex was supposed to feel like, so it took me a while to realise what was happening. The first time we tried having sex, we discovered I had trauma-related vaginismus, and for some reason, he was very frustrated by that. That should have been my first red flag, but I was young, dumb and in love, so I rationalised it away. When we finally had sex, I was a little bit drunk because I had read somewhere that alcohol helped deal with vaginismus more easily, and it did. The haze of the alcohol made me think it was decent sex. Again, with no frame of reference, I didn���t know what I was missing.

I kept telling myself that it was inexperience, and maybe I was broken because of assault. He was a lot more sexually experienced than I was and made sure I knew it by virtue of jokes. Now that I think about it, that was weird as hell. 

It was consistent for a couple of months, and then at some point, I stopped having sex in general because I got busy with work. After a while, I got my spark back and started exploring with other people, which made me realise how nice sex in general was. He lived close by, so we tried to reignite a sexual relationship, but compared to the other people I had had sexual encounters with, it was just mid. 

I tried having sex with him a couple more times after that, but I kept zoning out because it was a lot of in, out, bye-bye. I felt more like a Fleshlight than anything else. And he also didn���t give head; who does that? I was a people pleaser at the time, so all I did was just make excuses to not see him when he wanted to have sex. I kept assuring myself that this was how sex was supposed to feel, even when it was very clear to me that it wasn���t.

I tried having a conversation with him one time, where he gave me a bullshit reason about why he didn���t give head and then made the conversation about the ���magical powers of his dick.��� No, that���s exactly what he said. Incredible. 

Never again. I���m grown, and I have told a man to get up from my body because he was doing nonsense, and it wasn���t working for me. I now move with the audacity of a man. These men would be very vocal when you���re not pleasing them, so why shouldn���t I do the same?

You���ll Enjoy: The Cost of a Better Life��� ��� Ifeoma Obinwa on love and survival  in A Happy Ending

7. ���I Told Myself That Knowing I Could Make Him Feel Good Was Worth It��� –  Tolani*, 23

I didn’t realise the sex was bad until years after I’d left the relationship. When I finally had a different experience, I thought, ���Oh, this is what it’s supposed to be like,��� and chuckled at everything I’d been through before.

He was the first guy I’d had sex with, so I thought it was supposed to feel that way. I was in love with him. He was my best friend, first love, first time and all that. I told myself that knowing I could make him feel good was worth it, even when it made me uncomfortable. There was nothing to compare it to; I assumed Wattpad and erotica stories were full of shit. I pushed for lots of lube because it was cold and tingly and made things more interesting. I tried to bring a vibrator into it too, because I knew I could finish with one. He didn’t seem keen, and I didn’t want him to feel emasculated. Some men think toys are an indictment of their masculinity. Thank God for journey mercies.

I knew some things I wanted even without knowing what sex could feel like. I tried to get him interested in a D/S dynamic, but he just didn’t have that dawg in him. I think he laughed at some of my kinks, so that was that. We had an unsteady relationship; we were friends with benefits, and bigger issues sometimes kept us apart or made things awkward. Towards the end, I started to accept that we weren’t going to be ���together-together’ and that he wasn’t a good person for me. Sex stopped feeling like, ���It’s not good, but at least I get to be close to him and make him happy.��� It became, ���Yeahh, this sucks.��� We’d finish, and I’d wonder what I was still doing in his bed.

We grew more distant. I started talking to someone I found ultra attractive, who was pretty good at being a dom. That made it easier to let go. Later, I had another partner with whom the sex was also bad. This time it was worse: he thought thrusting really hard was the way to go, and sometimes it straight up hurt. I had to psyche myself up to get through it.

I think those small acts of betraying yourself add up. Women are taught to centre male partners, so it was easy to feel proud that I was making him happy while ignoring how I felt. Sometimes I felt bad about myself for letting it happen, even when it bordered on painful. I was afraid that if I made him feel bad, whatever we had would end.

Then I met someone and being with them felt like being back in secondary school: sweet and nice, almost silly. We’d inch closer on the couch and find excuses to brush against each other. The sex feels good. I like the way they look at me during it. The passion isn’t a raging flame; it’s like enjoying an orange so much you squeeze its juice into your mouth as hard as you can. Tangy, sweet, and refreshing, and you don’t want it to stop.

I’m more assertive now about how I want to be touched. I put my comfort and pleasure first because there’s no award for suffering, and I’m here for a good time. I just wish I’d known sex was actually supposed to feel good. I wouldn’t have put up with obvious mismatches for so long while telling myself, “Well, at least I’m getting some.”

You���ll also enjoy: Uzoamaka On Siraam: ���Sex Isn���t A Dirty Topic, Stop Acting Like It Is���

Names* have been changed and responses have been edited for clarity and flow.

But most of these products weren’t made for your face; they were made for your feed. So we asked Certified Clinical Esthetician Babarinsa Oluwadamilohun to walk us through the products the internet has convinced you that you need: what they actually do, how to use them, and how not to.

1. Niacinamide

What it is: Niacinamide is vitamin B3. It helps with oil, the look of pores, and uneven tone, which is why it shows up in nearly every routine video on your feed.

How to use: Apply at 2-5% once or twice daily. It layers well with almost everything, which is honestly part of the problem: because it plays nice, people stack it.

How not to use: The 10% serums the internet loves aren’t faster results. They increase the risk of skin irritation. If your routine already has seven products, niacinamide isn’t the missing piece. It’s just another layer.

2. Tretinoin

What it is: Tretinoin is a prescription-strength retinoid, and the real thing behind most “glass skin” transformations online. It treats acne, texture, and fine lines, and it works. That’s why people preach it like gospel.

How to use: Start with a pea-sized amount at night, two to three times a week. The sandwich method helps: apply it after a moisturiser, then top it with another layer of moisturiser.

What not to do: start daily at full strength because someone told you to push through the purge. And don’t pair it with benzoyl peroxide on the same night.

3. Benzoyl Peroxide

What it is: Benzoyl peroxide kills acne-causing bacteria. It’s a spot treatment, not a personality.

How to use: Use 2.5-5% as a spot treatment or short-contact treatment, in the mornings.

How not to: The internet’s version has you 10% slathered all over, on the same night as your retinoid, which bleaches pillowcases and skin barriers alike.

4. Reedle Shot

What it is: The reedle shot is a spicule serum: tiny micro-needles that create pathways so what you apply next absorbs better. The tingle is normal. But it���s a relatively new product, and there���s not much research on it. 

How to use: Use it a few nights a week, right after cleansing.

How not to: Don’t use it daily, and don’t stack it with retinoids and acids the same night. More absorption of everything is the problem, not the goal.

You’ll Love: 91心頭利嫋���s Guide to Caring for Your Skin

5. Retinol

What it is: Retinol is tret’s gentler cousin. Same family, slower-acting, and available without a prescription.

How to use: Start with a low percentage, at night, and build up slowly over weeks.

How not to: Don’t buy the highest percentage first, and don’t expect tret-level results. And if you’re already on tretinoin, you don’t need retinol too. Pick one retinoid lane.

6. Hyaluronic Acid

What it is: Hyaluronic acid is a humectant: it pulls water into your skin, which is what gives that plump, hydrated look.

How to use: Apply it on damp skin, then seal it in with a moisturiser.

How not to: The mistake is applying it to dry skin in dry air. With no water around to grab, it pulls moisture from your skin instead.

7. Snail Mucin

What it is: Snail mucin is hydration and repair support, and the original K-beauty glass skin poster child.

How to use: You can use it daily, after cleansing, before your moisturising cream.

How not to: Just don’t expect it to resurface anything. It’s for comfort, not transformation. And comfort is fine, as long as you know that’s what you’re buying.

8. AHA (Glycolic/Lactic Acid)

What it is: AHAs are chemical exfoliants. They dissolve the dead skin cells sitting on your skin, which is where the glow comes from.

How to use: Use them one to two times a week, at night. That glow is enough.

How not to: Don’t do daily peels, don’t use them the same night as a retinoid, and don’t skip sunscreen afterwards. Freshly exfoliated skin burns fast.

So, Do You Need Them?

Some of these products earn their place. Some are solutions to problems the internet invented. The difference isn’t the product; it’s whether your skin has a reason for it. The internet sells you routines for glass skin. What your skin needs is a reason for each step.

You’ll Also Enjoy: QUIZ: Does Your Skin Care?

We spoke to seven Nigerians about the financial complications that came with their divorce. If you���re married, some of these stories will make you triple-check your joint account(s).

1. ���He took ���19m from our Joint Account and Disappeared��� ��� Ronke*, 34

My ex-husband and I had been saving for a duplex in Lagos for four years. Every month, we would both send some money to a joint account we opened for it. I trusted the process because I was married to him; trusting him was a given until he cheated.

I found out and confronted him about it; he was very defensive and accused me of monitoring him. It was in the middle of us arguing that he told me he wanted a divorce. From where to where? After that, he left our shared apartment and withdrew ���19 million out of the ���20 million in our joint account. Unfortunately for me, by the time I got to the bank to find out what was going on, there was nothing left to argue about. He was gone.

My friend who���s a lawyer said I could pursue it legally. But realistically, the case would drag on for years and probably cost more than what I had lost. I had to let it go. I still think of that duplex sometimes.

2. ���I Paid Her Way Through Law School, Then She Left��� ��� Dami*, 38

I feel like people think men don���t lose anything financially in a divorce, and that���s not true. I singlehandedly funded my wife���s law degree, paid her fees, bought textbooks, an expensive laptop, and more. The plan was that once she started earning money, we���d build together.

Two months after she got called to the bar, she filed for a divorce. We had been having horrible arguments in the months leading up to her bar exams. She didn���t talk to me for a while. I didn���t think it would end in a divorce, yet here I am. No settlement could cover what I spent on her education because it wasn���t structured as a loan or investment. I was just a husband supporting his wife, so there was nothing on paper.

She���s doing well now, and I see her posts sometimes. I don���t think I regret supporting her, but I���d definitely put things in writing next time.

3. ���My In-Laws Asked for a Bride Price Refund��� ��� Ego*, 29

After my divorce, my ex���s family sent me a message through an uncle asking for the bride price. They even added extra for ���inflation.��� When I first saw it, I laughed till tears came out of my eyes. It was so ridiculous. I told my friends and one of them said she���d heard that some families actually pursue this legally in some states.

Mine didn���t go that far, but their audacity was mind-blowing to me. I spent two years building a home with their son, and somehow I���m the one that owes them money because I want out. I didn���t pay one kobo, but there was a lot of back-and-forth between us before they finally let it go.

4. ���The Business Was in His Name, So Legally, It Was His��� ��� Mayo*, 41

I decided to start a fashion brand in 2015. I had learnt tailoring before that, so I knew that it would work out. I told my husband, and he was happy with the idea. I designed, sourced fabric, managed the tailors, and built an online presence from scratch. My husband handled logistics and funded the business.

When we got divorced six years later, I found out that he had registered the business under his name. We didn���t plan it that way. He offered to handle the CAC registration and never added my name to the paperwork.

I had to walk away from six years of work with nothing but my portfolio and a few clients.

5. ���Child Support Takes All I Earn��� ��� Tochi*, 36

Honestly, I���m not complaining about supporting my children, because that���s a non-negotiable for me. But the arrangement my ex-wife insisted on assumed that I���d keep earning the same amount as my old salary forever. Eight months after the agreement, I lost my job. The payments continued, regardless.

I���m currently sending money that I sometimes don���t have. I have to borrow from my brother just to stay afloat and keep up. My ex says it���s not her problem, and legally, my friend says she���s right.

I love my kids more than anything, but I���m buckling under the weight of all the responsibility.

6. ���I Moved Back to My Parents��� House at 33��� ��� Cynthia*, 33

After the divorce, I had nowhere to go. The house we were living in was his family���s, so I had to move out. I packed my bags and moved back to my old room in my father���s house. I was 33 and sharing a bathroom with my brothers, who are over ten years younger than me.

It took me two years to save enough for my own place. That period humbled me in ways I can���t even explain. I wouldn���t wish it on my enemy. It���s so important for women to have their own money. If anything happens, at least you have a cushion to fall on. And trust me, everything can happen.

7. ���We Split the Ajo Contributions, and I Got Less��� ��� Joke*, 27

We were both in the same Ajo group with fifteen other couples in our estate. When we got divorced, the group had to decide how to split our contributions. Everyone was uncomfortable and understandably so, to be fair. Some of these people were our neighbours and church members. The concluding agreement was favourable to him because he had joined the group a few months before me.

Even though I had been the one paying most of the contributions for over a year, I still got less than him. After that, I left the group chat. I was actually angry that things turned out like that. I started my own savings with an app after that. I���m not mixing finances with any mad person ever again.

Next Read: Anne Njemanze On Survival, Choice, And The Power Of Empathy In A Happy Ending

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. 

The subject of today’s #WhatSheSaid is Temi*, a 39-year-old project and product manager based in Lagos. She talks about the women who came before her, the sister who raised her and died too soon, a marriage she rushed into and walked out of two years later, and the decade she spent building a life so solid, but loneliness still found a way in.

Can you tell me about yourself?

I am thirty-nine, I live in Lagos, and I work in project and product management. I started out as a civil servant, which I don’t talk about much because it feels like a different life now. When my marriage ended in my late twenties, I needed something to hold onto that was entirely mine, something that answered only to me, and I used that need to rebuild my career from the ground up. I pivoted, studied, pushed, and have been rising steadily over the decade since. Work has been the one place where the effort I put in has reliably come back to me. I cannot always say the same for other areas of my life.

I travel when I can, mostly across Africa. I have built some financial stability. I have a life that looks, from the outside, like something a person should be grateful for. And I am. I am genuinely proud of what I have made of myself. And I am also very lonely.

Why do you feel so lonely?

I think it comes from wanting to share something with someone and realising there is nobody to share it with. I have people in my life. I have friends, family, and colleagues I respect. But there is loneliness that has nothing to do with how many people are around you, and to understand why I am sitting here at thirty-nine feeling this way, you have to understand where I come from and the women in my family.��

Tell me more.

My mother was seventeen when she had my older sister, the product of a marriage to a man who eventually abandoned them both, leaving her with my sister and a son who later died. She eventually remarried almost 10 years after and had my brother, then me. That second marriage lasted five years before she walked out after fights that left emotional and physical scars on them and us, the children. For the next eleven years, she raised us mostly on her own, making a life from whatever she could gather and her teaching, with my brother and me going from her house to our father’s across the years, until a third man came and turned out to be something she had probably stopped believing existed.

This man was kind to her. Genuinely kind. He noticed things and remembered them. He showed up without being asked, which makes a woman feel loved and like she has a true partner rather than someone who has simply assigned her a role to fill. He was even romantic with her. My mother, in her forties, after everything that had come before, finally had the love she deserved. She had two more sons with him. Then he died. And she had to begin again, a single woman with five children, her oldest grandchild already the same age as her second-to-last child, her last-born only two years older than her second grandchild, both of whom were my sister’s children.

My sister, that first daughter my mother had at seventeen, had her own first daughter at eighteen and went on to have four more daughters for a man who had money and used both the money and his hands to remind everyone in the house who held the power. He was abusive, and he was unfaithful, and he was the kind of man who made himself indispensable while making everyone around him smaller, and my sister spent over a decade with him, leaving and returning and leaving again in the exhausting rhythm of women who love men who hurt them and feel like they have no choice because of the children they have for them do, until she finally left for good.

Can you tell me more about your sister?

She was eighteen with her first baby when I was eleven years old. While she was inside that man’s house, his money put me in school, kept food on the table for me, kept me safe and comfortable for the years she was with him. She helped raise me. She was my big sister in the fullest sense of that phrase, the person who stood between me and whatever was coming next.

She was there when I got pregnant at 21 and didn’t know what to do. She sat with me through the abortion without a word of judgment, just presence, just her hand and her voice and the absolute certainty that I was not alone. She was there through every man who damaged me because I was young and still learning what I was worth, through the heartbreaks and the cheating and the slow accumulation of disappointments. She was there after I was tricked into an audition that turned out to be something else entirely, something that stripped us literally and figuratively, something that took a long time to shake from my body. Every time, she was the first call I made, and she always answered.

She eventually left her husband. And then she died. The man who killed her was not the one she had spent almost 2 decades with; he was the one she found after she finally freed herself from that one. She survived the man who hurt her for years and was killed by the next one. He beat her so fiercely that she was in a coma for weeks before she passed. I do not have a way to make that make sense, because it does not. It is just what happened.

I had been planning my wedding with her. She knew every detail. We had talked through all of it together; she was supposed to be standing next to me at the front of that room. She died 10 months before I got married.

What She Said: My Father Is Engaged to the Woman I Called My Sister

I���m so sorry. It must have been a horrible weight to carry. How did it affect your wedding plans?

I still got married, and I want to be honest about everything that was driving it, because it was not simple.

The whispers had been getting louder for years, about the women in my family and what followed us, about how we could not hold onto men, about a curse that was being passed down through our blood. I had heard about my grandmother’s life and her struggles with marriage. I had watched my mother. I had watched my sister pour herself into a man who did not deserve a single drop of her, only to then die at the hands of another man. I was terrified of becoming another chapter in that story, and I was also grieving my sister in a way that made me want to hold onto what we had been building together, as if finishing the wedding she had planned with me was a way of keeping her present in my life.

The red flags were there. Looking back now, I can see them clearly. I was 28, he was in his mid-forties. The whole thing moved too fast, but he was performing so well for everyone around me, putting money in my younger siblings’ hands, showing up for my nieces, and being entirely available and enthusiastic.

What happened after the wedding?

Less than a month in, the performance stopped, and I started seeing who I had actually married.

It began with things I was not supposed to find: video calls, names I did not recognise on his phone, and a husband who was physically present in our home while emotionally somewhere else entirely. It got to the point where I started following him, and I found exactly what I had been afraid I would find. There were women who reached out to him, women I tracked down myself, a husband whose attention and energy had apparently always been distributed across multiple people, none of whom was his wife. We fought about it constantly and resolved nothing because you cannot resolve anything with someone who was never genuinely with you to begin with. Every argument ended where it started, with me holding the evidence and him giving me just enough reassurance to keep holding on.

I held on for two years. I held on because leaving felt like confirming everything people were already saying about the women in my family, like becoming another chapter in a story I had married specifically to escape. But the marriage was what it was from the beginning, and nothing I did inside it was going to change that, so eventually I left. I walked out childless, with nothing from those two years except a very expensive education in exactly what I was no longer willing to accept from anyone.

What haunted me most in the aftermath was not the cheating. It was the question I could not answer about my own body because all the tests said I was fine. I had not been able to get pregnant in that marriage, and I did not know whether the abortion I had when I was young had quietly closed something inside me that I would never be able to reopen. The church offered its own explanation, a spiritual husband blocking the natural one, and when you are raw and desperate for a reason that is not your fault, you will accept almost any story that removes the weight from your own chest. I held that one longer than I should have.

What happened to the whispers when you left?

They stopped being whispers. People said it plainly and directly, and to anyone who would listen. The women in that family, they said, something follows them, something is wrong with them, they cannot hold a man. I was 30, divorced and childless, and I had just handed everyone who believed in the curse the freshest evidence they could have asked for. It felt like the story had always known how it would end and had simply been waiting for me to catch up.

If you���d like to be my next subject on #WhatSheSaid,  

What did you do with that?

I built. I threw myself into work, into becoming financially independent, and into a version of myself that did not need anyone to hold her up. I pivoted my career, I studied, and I rose through every role I took on. I traveled. I invested in myself in every way I knew how.

I had men over the years, various men in various shapes of disappointment. Unfaithful ones, unavailable ones, men who were already married and had simply not mentioned it, men who wanted everything I was offering while offering as little of themselves as they could get away with. Each time one of them failed me, I added another standard, another line I would not cross, another thing I had decided I was no longer available for. I built the boundaries carefully, and I was proud of them, proud of the clarity they gave me, proud of no longer being the woman who accepted things she should not have accepted.

What changed?

Nothing dramatic. Just time, and the loneliness that time brings when you have been alone long enough.

I am thirty-nine. I have built more than most people I know personally, and I mean that without arrogance, just as a fact. I am financially stable, I am rising in my career, I travel when I want to, and I take up space in my own life in ways I could not have imagined when I was 30 and walking out of a marriage with nothing but my dignity. I am proud of all of it.

And I am lonely. It’s not about being without company but about wanting to share something with someone who is genuinely yours, and realising there is no one there to share it with. And I want a child. I have wanted a child for longer than I have let myself say out loud, and I have been lying to myself about it by calling it a future thing, a when-the-time-is-right thing, a thing that could wait. It cannot wait the way I have been pretending it can.

Do you believe the curse is real?

I think about my mother finding love in her forties with a man who was kind and romantic and who saw her fully. And I think about how he died, and she still had to keep going anyway, still had to raise children and make a life without him. By the end, my mother had done everything ‘right,’ and it was still hard. Maybe the curse was never a curse but just the specific difficulty of being a woman who loves in a world or society that does not always handle that love with care. Maybe the women in my family were not marked by anything supernatural. They were just women, surviving men who were not worthy of them and building whatever they could from what was left.

I do not know if I will marry again. I genuinely do not know. What I know is that I am not willing to take apart the standards I have spent ten years building, not even now, not even with the loneliness this close. The boundaries I have built are not the reason love has not found me. They are what I constructed precisely because I know what it costs to love without them. Men have spent years suggesting that I am the problem, that I have made myself too much, too unwilling to bend, too difficult to love, the way I insist on being loved. I have spent more time than I should have wondering if they were right.

At thirty-nine, I am choosing to believe they were not. What I am looking for deserves to come to this version of me, the whole version, the one who has been through everything I have been through and is still standing and still wanting. Not a smaller version or a more convenient one.

If that takes longer, it takes longer. But I will not undo a decade of becoming myself just to make the waiting end sooner.

You’ll Enjoy: Virginity Is a Social Construct. So, Why Does It Carry So Much Weight?

Names have been changed*