I used to be the woman calling first. I need to tell you that plainly, before anything else.
It started in my mid-twenties, in a relationship I was so sure was "the one" that I organised my entire life around keeping it alive. His name doesn't matter now — I'll call him D, because some names still catch in my throat a little, even years later. We met at a mutual friend's birthday dinner in Lekki, and within three months I had convinced myself I'd found my person.
He was charming in a room full of people. He was also someone who could disappear for three days without a word and return acting as though nothing had happened. The first time, I told myself it was a misunderstanding. The second time, "he's just bad with communication." By the eighth or ninth time — and yes, I eventually counted, because a friend asked me to, and the number horrified me — I had built an entire internal justice system dedicated to explaining away his behaviour so I wouldn't have to face what it actually meant.
I want to tell you honestly what that relationship cost me, because we don't talk enough about the real, itemised price of self-abandonment.
It cost me my confidence. I went from a woman my friends called "the loud one" at university in Ibadan to a woman who ran every sentence through a filter first: will this upset him? I didn't recognise my own voice in my own head anymore.
It cost me my friendships. I cancelled plans more times than I can count because "he might call." My best friend, Chidinma, once told me, gently, over jollof rice at a small buka near Yaba: "I feel like I'm losing you to a man who isn't even fully here." I laughed it off that day. I think about that sentence often now.
It cost me money. I covered his transport, "lent" him money for a business idea that never materialised, once paid a full month's data and airtime for both of us because "things were tight." Nobody forced me. Some part of me believed that if I gave enough, he'd finally feel obligated to stay.
It cost me my health. A knot of anxiety lived permanently in my stomach for almost two years. I stopped sleeping properly. I lost weight I didn't mean to lose, and when people complimented it, I smiled and said nothing about the fact that heartbreak on a slow drip is not a diet plan anyone should recommend.
I tried everything I could think of to fix it. I tried "communicating better" — I had the calm conversation every article tells you to have. He apologised beautifully. Nothing changed within a month. I tried giving him "space to figure himself out." The space simply became more distance. I tried becoming "easier to love" — quieter opinions, smaller needs, a softer version of myself, hoping it would finally earn me security. I tried praying and enduring, the way an aunty told me to, with love in her voice: "No man's ways are perfect, just manage him." I prayed. I endured. Nothing changed, because prayer was never going to substitute for his own willingness to change. I tried threatening to leave, repeatedly, without ever actually leaving — which, I now know, is possibly the most damaging thing I did, because every unfollowed-through ultimatum quietly taught him my words carried no consequence.
The turning point came on an ordinary Tuesday evening, not a dramatic one. I was sitting outside my flat in Surulere, rereading a message he'd sent hours earlier — three words, no warmth — and I caught myself doing the exact thing I'd done a hundred times: constructing a generous explanation for why he might have written it that way, when the truth in front of me was simple. He just didn't care enough to write more.
I have never once, in this entire relationship, had to write a generous explanation for my own behaviour toward him. Why am I the only one doing this work?
That question cracked something open. I started reading everything I could find on attachment and self-worth. I saw a therapist for the first time. I asked older women I respected, who'd built relationships on mutual effort, what they had done differently. I started tracking patterns instead of individual incidents — and the patterns terrified me in a way single memories never had, because a pattern in ink cannot be argued away.
Slowly, over about a year, I rebuilt myself. I set my first real boundary and, for the first time, actually enforced the consequence attached to it. I opened a savings account that had nothing to do with him. I picked my camera back up — a hobby I'd quietly abandoned two years earlier. I reconnected properly with Chidinma, no longer cancelling on her for a man who never once cancelled his plans for me.
Eventually, the relationship ended — quietly, with more relief than grief. And on the other side of that ending wasn't loneliness. It was a woman I recognised again.
I started sharing what I'd learned with friends first, then friends of friends, then women I'd never met — always the same aching question: "How did you actually do it? Not the theory. The steps." So I sat down and built the map properly. That became Never Beg A Man To Love You — the letter I wish someone had handed me that Tuesday evening in Surulere, before I spent another year re-explaining someone else's silence to myself.
