Ghosts Of the Past

Good evening, sir, good evening, Bro Gbenga

I met you last year at Sister Ihuoma’s event in Lekki.

When I met you last year, I mentioned to you that I had just started my business and needed prayers for growth. To the glory of God, my business is thriving now, and I am truly grateful to God for how far He has brought me. I got my first car last year, and I am doing well in business.

I also remember telling you then that although life was being good to me in many ways, I was still trusting God for my own husband. You prayed with me, and I have held onto those prayers.

Sir, I am reaching out because I need help, clarity, and spiritual direction concerning a relationship I have been in.

I have been involved with a man who is legally married, but he and his wife have been separated for some time (almost 2 years)

The painful part is that I did not know the full truth at the beginning.

When we started getting serious, he gave me different explanations about his situation regarding the marriage.

He is a very passionate man who loves his family to the point where anything that happens to anyone he loves affects him emotionally.

I notice that when he gets a phone call from his children’s school about any issue, his mood would suddenly change as he begins to consider the steps to take.

Sometimes these issues are just for your information, issues that require no immediate action, and some of the issues are the type one looks away from, or that require noting.

Yet, it would cloud his emotions dramatically.

What he told me when we first met was that he was widowed.

He said his wife went to the USA to deliver their third child, but only the child survived.

He told me this happened in 2020, and I believed him.

He is not someone who lies by nature. In the instance of his wife, he was blinded by passion and hatred and told everybody, including me, that she was dead because upon her return from the USA to deliver their last child, she just packed everything in their duplex, rented another house, and moved into it with her mother.

The birth of her baby had serious complications, her mother and her husband had to fly to the USA from Abeokuta (The husband sponsored the trip. The mother went with some concoction materials that she cooked for her, and this is what they claimed saved her from dying in the delivery room)

Her mother also told her that she is an elegbe (child of a cult) and she had chosen to be married only for eleven years by her predestination and to live alone and raise her children alone after that if she intends to live a long life.

This was why she left her matrimonial home with the children.

I didn’t know anything like this went on in his life before he met me.

When he met me, he told me he had three children and that His Wife died giving birth to their last child.

He said his children were with his wife’s parents, as the demands of business have not given him the time to nurture them himself.

He said he was hoping to get married and relieve his in-laws of the burden of raising his children in their old age.

The children are 12 and ten years old.

The youngest one is five years old.

He said his plan was to send them off to the boarding school once they got to SS1, even if he was able to remarry on time. He is well-to-do by his own right, but when we met, he practically moved into my flat because he said the “ghost of his past life was haunting him in his mansion.

It was only later that I began to realise that things were not as he had presented them.

`his wife had told him to regard her as dead to him and to move on with his life. The push gift he bought for his wife for the last child was a duplex at a popular estate in Lagos. He had not presented it to her before she left the marriage. He showed me the documents.

The evidence he presented regarding his situation was overwhelming; the best of them all was the fact that he is living in my flat even until now.

I knew he was “widowed” and would need time to heal. I didn’t push any agenda. I just loved him and made sure I didn’t complicate his life with womanish troubles. I am 40 years old, and he was a very good catch for someone of my age. He is not a troublesome person, and he cares deeply for everything and everyone in his life, including me.

After about two years of being with him, I told him I would like to either get married or have a child, as I was not getting younger. I am a woman of substance by the grace of God, and I didn’t need anything from anyone in order to live a good life on my terms. I was willing to pay for artificial insemination with donor semen in order to fulfil my dreams. I only informed him of my plans so that he might be carried along, or hopefully, I felt he might want to be a part of my project.

I could do it without a man involved, but if he were a part of it willingly, I would appreciate it and be grateful for it. He was excited about it and told me to get all the documents I needed to deliver the baby in the USA.

The enthusiasm however died down gradually as his separated wife got broke and began to take advantage of him emotionally by calling him every night by 2-3 AM crying of loneliness and how much she loved him but destiny is wicked and how she and her mother has been running around to seek a remedy to her separation from him while hoping he would hold on and not marry somebody else until they have a definite answer from their spiritualists on how to change her destiny so that she might remain married to him.

This was the moment he told me the truth about their separation, the circumstances, and the fact that his wife might still come back into his life if a solution was found to the “cult child curse” she was carrying, relating to her marriage and life.

The children are with his estranged wife, and not with his parents, as he had previously made me believe. Being the kind of dedicated father that he is, he tries his best to see them in their schools as often as he can because he has been forbidden to see his wife face-to-face in this life, so that she would not die.

I also discovered that although they are separated, he is still deeply emotionally attached to her. From the day his wife called, He took responsibility for her life, pays all the bills, and seems unwilling to fully let go of that marriage, even though they have been apart for a long time.

This has left me in a very painful and confusing position.

The truth is, I love him deeply. He has been one of the kindest, most present, and most intentional men I have ever experienced in my life. Beyond financial support, he has shown me care in ways I have never really known before. He is thoughtful, attentive, and very involved in my life. He has become such a huge part of my emotional world, and that is what has made it so difficult for me to walk away.

The conversations about building a future together and even having a child stalled from that day his wife revived his hope that they could come back together. He began to say he was not in the right mental space and that he could not give me what I truly wanted. More recently, he told me clearly that he is still waiting for his wife and is not ready to move on from her. He made this statement two days ago.

That statement broke me deeply.

Because the truth is, while he says he cannot give me what I want, he also does not seem willing to fully let me go. This has kept me emotionally stuck for a very long time. I have tried to leave this relationship many times. I have blocked him, ended things, and told myself I was done, but somehow I keep going back, and he keeps coming back into my life also.

Sir, I am tired emotionally, mentally, and spiritually.

Part of me feels I should leave and choose myself. Another part of me feels guilty, like I am abandoning someone who may be going through a lot emotionally and spiritually. He has also shared some things with me about spiritual battles and family issues surrounding his wife’s family, and I honestly do not know how much of this situation is spiritual, emotional, or simply an unhealthy attachment.

This is why I am reaching out to you.

Please, sir, I need your honest counsel and prayers.

I want to know:

Should I completely walk away from this relationship?

Is there something spiritual I need to understand about what I am dealing with?

Am I holding onto something God is asking me to release?

Or is this a battle I should still be praying through?

I am being very vulnerable because I genuinely do not know what to do anymore. I know I may sound foolish, but I am honestly just a woman in love, confused, and hurting. I do not want to keep making decisions from pain, fear, attachment, or false hope.

Please, sir, if you can, kindly help me with your prayers, guidance, and spiritual direction.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read this.

God bless you, sir.

PS: We are all wired differently. Life is not mathematics. It is a series of theories and hypotheses that can either be proven or disproved. I have seen widows and widowers who are so attached to their late partners that anybody who happened to come into their lives later found themselves unable to truly find love and connection with the widow or widower in many ways.

I have seen widows and widowers who moved on from their late partners without looking back.

I have seen divorced people who threw divorce parties and walked away from the marriage with songs of thanksgiving.

I have seen divorced people who are still very much emotionally attached to their exes, even though they both know they cannot be married again.

One would think it is easy to break up, walk away, and start over. It is not.

In a case where a man and woman still love each other but have been kept apart for one reason or another, any third party who comes into their lives hoping for love and affection would find themselves struggling to be loved the way they desire because of the ghosts of the past.

The Ghosts of the past must be buried by the one it haunts. A third party cannot play a role in it.

When you are tired of the yoke, you must break it from your neck was what Isaac said to Esau.

-GSW-