My Wife Drives Her Ex’s Car Because I Couldn’t Afford To Buy Her One

I saw Theresa when we were young. I was friends with her family, so I went to their house anytime I wanted. It was obvious I liked Theresa, but I couldn’t say it to her. Her sisters saw it and started calling her my wife. She smiled anytime they told her, “Your husband is coming.” To me, that was enough. We were very young. I was in SHS, and she was in junior high.

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After SHS, I left town to attend the university and didn’t come home again for a very long time. I must admit that I forgot about her. I fell in love with others and made a few of them girlfriends. One day, when I was all grown and had a job, I went back home and saw Theresa, still very beautiful, but this time around she had a son. She had a son with a man who didn’t marry her.

We talked. The love was still burning fresh in my heart. I made several attempts to let her know that I loved her, but she didn’t catch the clue, or she did and simply ignored it. It was her elder sister who later told me Theresa was dating Francis, and they looked like they would get married. I told her, “It looks like I will never have your sister.” She answered, “You could have had her when we called her your wife, but you didn’t do anything.”

I was young and naive. Love wasn’t meant for people like me and her during that time. If we did fall in love, we wouldn’t know how to handle it and maybe let it burn us. I travelled back to my base but this time kept in touch with Theresa and her sisters. A year or so later, I was on the phone with Theresa when she told me she had broken up with Francis.

I asked, “I thought you two were getting married, so what happened?”

She told me Francis didn’t marry her because she had a child.

I knew it was time. The stars had aligned on my behalf, and I didn’t have any excuse to let it happen. One day I asked her, “I’m very free this weekend. Can you come and visit me?”

She got here on Friday evening, and that very evening I proposed to her. I didn’t assume she knew, or that the fact that she came to visit me meant anything. She said yes to my proposal, and for the first time in ages, we had a relationship.

We dated for a year and a few months and got married in 2018. The only problem we faced in the beginning was how she could leave her job there and come to stay with me. We started looking for a job here for her. It was becoming an uphill battle each day, so finally I told her to pack and come while we still looked for a job for her.

For a whole year, she didn’t get a job, and fortunately and unfortunately, she got pregnant while we were looking for one. Our child was only seven months old when she got pregnant again. Life was becoming harder because we relied heavily on only my income.

I couldn’t save, I couldn’t build anything meaningful, but I didn’t blame anyone. My wife got a job five years after marriage, when both kids could walk and call us by name.

When she got a job, I thought she was going to help the house, but no. Her money was for her, and my money was for the family. She wouldn’t use her money for anything in the house but would still ask me for money for her personal use because she’s my wife. We fought about this every day. Our marriage was slowly becoming a battleground instead of a place where love and peace lived. She said I had enough and had done it alone for five years, so why would I rely on her money all of a sudden when her money wasn’t anything to write home about?

Eight years later, we don’t own land or a business we can call our own, all because I have a wife who wouldn’t support the growth of the family.

My wife travelled back home for Christmas last year and left the kids here with me. She said she was going for a few days but ended up spending over a week. One day an old friend called and said, “Come and see what your wife is doing here. It’s not fine at all. It even taints your marriage.” I asked what the problem was, and he said, “Do you know your wife has been driving Francis’s car ever since she came to town?”

I asked, “My wife? Does she know how to drive?” He said, “Oh, you don’t know? She drives Francis’s car, and I’ve seen her driving while Francis sits next to her twice. Everyone is talking. It’s looking some way, to be honest.”

I called her elder sister, who was also home for Christmas. I asked if it was true, and she sighed. She asked me to be patient because the family had been handling the issue. I said, “I just wanted to know if it was true. Thank you for confirming it.”

I called my wife and asked whose car she had been driving and since when she learned how to drive. She told me it was Francis who taught her how to drive when they were dating. “And you went home to drive his car? The same Francis who wouldn’t marry you because you had a child?”

“What is wrong with that? He realized I needed the car to do my rounds and freely offered it to me. He was rather helping me, so what’s wrong with that?”

I asked her to come home. She said her son needed her around, so she would come only when her son had had enough of her. Later I learned she sent the car back to him, but the impression had already been created, and to me, it was more than an impression. It was a stab in the heart of our marriage.

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When they were together in the car, where did they go? She said because she was using the car, she had to go and pick Francis when he needed her to. Just imagine. Finally, she told me the fact that I couldn’t afford a car for her didn’t mean she shouldn’t drive. This hurts me to date, and our already scarred marriage is now walking on a limp.

I feel like it’s time to walk away. I made a mistake marrying her in the first place, but we have kids. I love them with all my being and will do anything for them, which is the reason I’m still married to a woman I should have let go even before the new year arrived.

—Brethren  

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