My foreign wife laments I married her to facilitate my papers…

Dear Agatha,

I feel comfortable with the way you help people solve their problems. I have been reading your wise advice through the internet.

I am from Anambra State but work and live in Europe. I am married to a white woman and we have a son. Our marriage is nearly three years old now. 

My problem is that sometimes this woman feels I married her because of documents. Deep down I married her because I love her, and I know she loves me too. But she often says I married her because of document and this makes me feel very bad each time she mentions this. I don’t know if to continue with her? I am worried because I really love her

Chibuzor.

Dear Chibuzor,

The onus is on you to prove your love for her and dispel any doubts she may have regarding your reasons for marrying her. Something in your past or from the experiences of people around her could have given birth to this feeling. It could also come from the company you keep. If your friends are touting the fact that they married their wives to facilitate their documents, nothing you say to the contrary would assure her of your true love for her. 

Sincerely you cannot blame her since it is becoming the norm for black men to marry white women for the reasons of easing their stay abroad. 

However that is not to say you shouldn’t go out of your way to prove your love for her. 

The first thing is to sit her down to explain your pains and disappointments at her line of thoughts. At this junction an honest approach is all that you need. Go back to your roots, the reasons you came and if you ever harboured the idea of using a white woman to make things easy for you out there, be brave enough to tell her. This is to help her understand where you are coming from as well as to make her appreciate what you really feel for her.

It would also make things clearer to her to share your childhood fantasies of the kind of woman you have always wanted in your life. Draw attention to the essentials, the qualities you have always desired in the woman of your choice.

Follow this with a thorough explanation of what you felt when you met her and how deep she affects you in different and unique ways. Boast about her virtues, the kinds you recognise in the woman of your dreams, and the kind no other woman you have met has gives her the edge. 

Be bold enough to tell her that she reserves the right to believe you or not, but what you are telling her is the truth and that if she doesn’t trust you after being together for almost three years, it is very unfortunate. 

To underscore your disappointment, inform her of your intentions to end the marriage on account of lack of trust on her part. 

Again, lay bare to her what your thoughts are on an ideal marriage and how you cherish that above every other thing. 

Hearing and seeing you talk about it as frankly as you can, will help her to be conscious of the dangers ahead to her marriage to you if she continues to harbour such feelings against you. 

In addition you also have to ask where the thoughts are coming from to enable you block it effectively. 

Ending the marriage isn’t a solution rather it is a complication because rather than erase the impression of you she has it will further fuel her suspicions of you. The fact that you both have a child between the two of you should make you in particular tread carefully. 

Circumstances and situation have put on you the onus to verify your claims of being in love with her. Rather than feeling that you are let down by her doubts, try to understand where she is coming from. Everybody wants to be loved for themselves not what you have to offer. She loves you enough to want you to love her for who she is not because she is providing security for you to stay in her country. Her feelings though irritating to you are very real for her. To dismiss them would be to destroy the one thing that makes her happy as a woman. 

She wants to be able to look at her son and say he came out of a deep love and respect not from a selfishly motivated union by the father. For a woman, such sentiments are what give her and her child the sense of security she needs to be happy with her husband. That she is voicing it out shows that she cares about you in more ways than you know. 

Woo her with everything you have as a man including showering her with affections even in public places. Send her romantic text messages, flowers, chocolates, romantic nights out for just the two of you, perfumes, compliments on her looks and when you can afford it bring her to the country to know your people and culture. It takes very little effort to get most women to trust in their husbands and fall in love with them all over again. 

Everywoman wants to know she is very important to her husband and that when not with her he is thinking of her. There is no way she would ever doubt your reasons for marrying her if you let her know through words and actions that she is constantly in your mind. 

Finally, learn to pray by not relegating the God that brought both of you together to the background in your home. 

Good luck.

She wants me after her lover relocated

Dear Agatha,

Thanks for the good and marvelous work that you have being doing in helping people out of their problems.                            

I am 18 years of age and have just finished my secondary school education, waiting for my results. There is this girl, three years older than I am who has been asking me out. According to her, she is in love with me. She knows that I lack nothing to give her, but insists she wants me. 

Aware she has a boyfriend, I asked after him. She said he has relocated to Owerri and that is why she wants me since she cannot wait for him. Bothered about her statement, I asked if she would also dump me if I gained admission outside where we both stay. She didn’t answer. When I also asked what would happen should the boy come back she didn’t also answer. However my message box is flooding with love texts from her. Please Agatha what should I do before I get on the wrong lane? 

Ndu.

Dear Ndu, 

Candidly, you don’t have the experience to deal with this kind of lady. She is ways above you, so run while you can else you will not only have your fingers burnt, but also your heart shattered. 

What she is offering you isn’t love, but an adventure into the world of pains and disappointment. Concentrate on getting a school where you will meet the right girls. 

Any girl who will dump her man on account of him relocating to another part of the country cannot be counted on to be faithful to any man. Like you rightly observed, there is nothing that says she won’t also leave you when you are not available around her. 

Relationship is about endurance and perseverance. A woman, who isn’t ready to persevere in a situation isn’t ready for a relationship. It is also about trust and sacrifices. The boyfriend who is away expects loyalty from her, wants to depend on his woman’s support and grow the confidence that no matter what happens to him she would always be there for him.  Leaving him on account of him being away to follow you falls short of what is expected of her and a decent woman. What if they were married and he has reason to travel without her for a while, will she go outside her marriage to have an affair? Responsibility to one’s partner doesn’t begin on the day one goes into a relationship, it is what everybody should train himself or herself to do from day one of having a relationship. 

There are no guarantees she won’t also leave you for another man or that she would be faithful to you when her other boyfriend comes back. 

At 18, your major challenge now should be how to improve on your life, getting the right kind of education and equipping yourself for the challenges ahead as a man. There are season attached to everything we do on earth. When it is the time for you to be serious with women, God will bring the right kind of woman who would support you to succeed in life your way.

Good luck. 

My passion wanes due to her zero-education

Dear Agatha,

Peace of God will be with you and your family always.  You once helped my friend out of a very difficult situation. Thanks and please keep the good job going.  I have a girlfriend that I love so much. She is the mother of my daughter though we are not yet married. She is full of respect for me, so nice and epitomises everything I want in my woman. 

But the challenge I am facing with her has to do with her low level of education. She can’t read and write, not even her name. For fear of not knowing where to start, she doesn’t want to go back to school. My problem is that all my friends are married to well read women. I haven’t told her I will marry her, despite being the mother of my child.  She is however hopeful that I will marry her. I also nurtured the hope. But I keep thinking it may be a problem in time to come, and I don’t want to have children from two women. Please help me.

Worried Kenneth.

Dear Worried Kenneth, 

A woman doesn’t need a university degree to make a good wife or mother. What she needs is the right attitude to make the difference in her home and life.

That your friends are all married to well read women doesn’t mean they would have happier home than you. The golden rule of life, the thing that makes it workable is contentment. There is nothing you can achieve in life without learning to be contented with the choices before you. 

Granted, education is important, especially in today’s high-powered technological world, but it cannot guarantee happiness. 

This comes from the heart, not governed by letters, figures, but from very primeval emotions that defy even the best of scientific experiments. Its chemical composition is unknown which makes it impossible for anybody, but those in it to accurately gauge. 

You slept and had a child with this woman knowing she cannot read and write. Does her lack of education in any way affects the way she responds to you in intimacy or the quality of the child she gave to you? The heart isn’t literate and the language of love has its own patterned writings and images to stimulate it to knowledge.

What you should do is to search through your mind. Does she meet all your requirements in a woman? How much happiness has she been able to give you since meeting her? Has her lack of education affected you in anyway?  When it comes to the issue of marriage, a lot of attention should be given to those aspects that appear very unimportant at the beginning. Look at this lady dispassionately, on a scale of 1-10, how would you score her. Be objective. I am sure she isn’t the first woman you have dated. Like your friends you must have gone out with very educated women for you to have left them for this woman, going as far as having a baby with her shows she has some uncommon features you are yet to appreciate on account of her zero education. 

Look beyond her no-education status to the real substance in her. If what is in the package is valuable, you both can always find a way of getting through the other things as long as you are friends and willing to make it work.  If she is unwilling to go to a formal school, you can get her a private teacher that would come to the house to teach her to read and write. She doesn’t have to go to a formal classroom to get it. Right in the comfort of her home, you can transform her from a stark illiterate to a literate woman. What counts is her ability to communicate in efficient English as well as write it. She can write her General Certificate Examinations from home as well as other correspondence courses. Once there is a will there is always a way. 

Good luck. 

Hints on successful relationship please…

Dear Agatha,

I am 30years old from Edo State. I have encountered a lot of disappointments and pains in my relationships, all ended painfully. Thank goodness, I am currently in a very sweet relationship, which I am praying should end in marriage.

Big sister, please give me tips to make it work.

Tonia.

Dear Tonia, 

Having suffered disappointments and pains in all your previous relationships, begin by going down memory lane to evaluate your own mistakes and faults in all these relationships. When a problem becomes perennial in one’s relationships, it signposts a problem with the person rather than with the persons he or she have been having relationships with.

There is no way all these men would inflict pains on you if you aren’t contributing actively to the reasons for their attitude and treatment of you. There is no smoke without fire. By x-raying yourself as honestly as you can, you set the part for a new life for yourself. 

Nothing much is achieved in life when we bulk-pass the reasons for our failures, actions or inactions to others. A mind willing to heal must at all times be bold enough to accept his or her own faults as well as guilt. 

You are who you are on account of the character your have. By searching through your personal and natural archives, a new you would emerge, the one ready to do away with certain areas of her life and adopt new attitudes that would help her along life’s many hurdles. 

The next step is to accept your own limitations as a human being. This way, it would be easier to appreciate the limits of your partner, thereby helping you to understand many things you nagged or couldn’t tolerate in the past. Many a time, we criticise the very things we are guilty of in other people. 

Once you have the needed understanding, you will also be appreciative of every effort put into the relationship by your partner. Learning to say thank you instead of always criticising everything your mate does, goes a long way in healing and building the foundation of a growing relationship. 

Be honest about who you are to avoid disappointment in your current relationship. Don’t for the sake of fear of being left on the shelf endure a situation you know you cannot sustain. Much as it pays to be patient and understanding, if you find a situation absolutely unbearable, say so because that is the least you can go. We all have our maximum and lowest level. Once you get to the lowest level, pretending the situation is all right would only lead to pains for both of you. 

Your partner won’t blame you for having your limits, which is a natural thing but would feel bad and think twice about the whole thing if you elect to fight over it. 

Also make up your mind to make sacrifices for him and the relationship. There is nothing in life that is achieved without some forms of sacrifice. You must be ready at all times to give up on certain things in the interest of the relationship. 

You must also realise that a relationship is not an equal gender thing. Someone has to be in charge for the boat not to sink. Respect the natural order of things by allowing your partner the headship of the family. Being the man, it is his right to be in charge. Therefore give him the respect his position and person deserves at every point. Sometimes, it may not be as easy as other times, however once you prepare yourself to, no matter what he does or says, it will be easy to accord him his due respect. Respect is reciprocal. There is no way any man would respect a woman who doesn’t even recognise him as the head.

Make him your best friend. For any relationship to last, the couple must be friends. It is imperative to making a relationship work well. There are certain things love cannot forgive or mend which true friendship can do effectively. When the imperfection of friendship mingles with the perfection of love, it lays the ground for a couple to endure turbulences in the relationship. 

Friendship enables the couple to communicate freely, laugh with and at each other. It also helps the couple forgive and forget issues, which in other relationships could destroy it completely. Friendship is what lasts forever in a relationship, not the sex or love we all profess at the beginning of the relationship. Knowing this would go a long way in helping build into your relationship from the beginning the right values.

As a woman, you should know how to take care of your man and home. Don’t ever make the mistake of consigning his food to the maid, your or his siblings. No matter how busy your schedule is, don’t be too busy to cook for him and care for his personal effect. There are a lot of women out there but only few qualify as wife material. Don’t ever allow distance or official workload prevent you from communicating with him. You have to make yourself relevant to him whether with him or not. He has to know when you are not around him that he is missing something and this is only possible not by sex but by the little things you do for him or words of encouragement you give him when down and out.

Also don’t ever make the mistake of nagging him or showing him that you don’t trust him. A lot of time, suspicions on the part of women make them nag. Even when you have reasons to suspect him, you don’t achieve results by nagging. Playing down on the immediate reason would help you focus on how best to navigate and get him back on track. Disentangling a man involved with another woman requires wisdom and prayers. A lot of women that tried to use force found out that they lost out completely. Nagging breeds stubbornness in men. Once another woman is involved the best approach remains being loving and cool headed.

No man also likes his orders disobeyed. Therefore learn to be humble, even when you have reasons to raise objections at what he is saying. No matter how irritated you are by his attitude, don’t ever in the presence of an audience counter him or point him at his fault. From this early, learn to personalise your relationship. The less people know about what is happening between you and your partner the best for you both. Third party interventions sometimes destroy what could have been a perfect union. So be careful whom you share your thoughts and incidents in your relationship with.

Finally, be prayerful and depend on God. Everywoman who desires a stable home must be ready to depend absolutely on God always.

Good luck. 

My white wife bears no child, so…

Dear Agatha, 

I have a good friend.  She is white, 42-year-old.  Our relationship is four years old. I actually married her in Nigeria before I was given visa to live with her in this country. I met her when I travelled to another country abroad and got married to her when she came for a visit in Nigeria.

She is like a mother to me, takes good care of me; provides for me. But the problem now is that I want a child of my own. She has a grown son, who is my very good friend. Being the only son in my family, my father advised me to marry a black girl before travelling to be with this woman. This I did. I really love this white woman for her care, but not enough to live with her forever. Now my wife in Nigeria has delivered a baby girl. And I would love to be with them. My desire is to live with my wife and children happily without any interference from anybody. I really don’t like the white woman because she cannot give me babies. Besides she is older than I do. Agatha, how do I end the relationship so that I can be with my family? Please help me.      

Divine.

Dear Divine, 

At what point did you realise that you cannot live with this woman forever? When did you notice she is too old for you and unproductive? Is it at the point you married her in Nigeria or at the point you discovered that you have saved enough from her kindheartedness to set up something for yourself and family in Nigeria?

Didn’t you know the rules and implications of being with an older woman or didn’t your father know that she was white and would not be favourable to bearing children when he encouraged you to marry her and travel to be with her?

Sincerely, you are not being fair to this woman. It would have been a different case if she had lied to you about herself, but you knew what the scores were and you still went into it. 

White and older than you or not, in the eyes of God and the laws of our land, she is your wife while this woman who gave birth to your child is regarded as mistress. Under the laws of our land, if you take another wife while you are still legally married to this other woman, it would be termed as bigamy to take any other woman as wife. If this woman does anything to hurt you, she would be within her right, because what you have done is not only to defraud her emotionally but financially too. You knew from the beginning, what your agenda was, yet you led her into trusting you by marrying her, so she can care and provide for you. Now that you have had enough of her, you suddenly remember she is too old and cannot give you a child. In her shoes, how would you feel if after investing your all and all in a woman she makes a u-turn and begins to give the same kind of excuses you are now giving? To appreciate the hurt, humiliation and her sense of betrayal at the magnitude of the pains you are about to inflict on her, try putting yourself for a second in her shoes. If she were your sister or your father’s daughter would you or he do what you both did to this woman? Her only offence is loving and caring for you. If you have never been honest in your life, this is the time for you to do the honourable thing. Not for today but because of the future that is always pregnant with surprises. After booking your flight and confirming your ticket, call her to explain the presence of another woman and child in Nigeria. It is the least you owe her after all that she has done for you. The essence of telling her is not to continue to give her hope that you are coming back or that there is still any space for her in your life. 

You really need to seek and beg for her forgiveness because there is always a reckoning somewhere. It could come in the form of the mother of your child being the complete opposite of what this woman is to you. The fact that the pigmentation of her skin is different as well as her culture doesn’t mean she isn’t prone to emotional pains like you and I.

Before you move back to the country, ensure you find a way of gaining her forgiveness. It is imperative. Good luck.

My love, his sister, mum unfriendly

Dear Agatha,
I am a 25-year-old lady. My boyfriend and I have been dating for close to three and a half years.  

I am having problems with his elder sister and mother. For reasons best known to them they don’t like me. It is really strange because the sister and I used to be very close until her attitude suddenly changed towards me. I have gone to her to ask why the change in attitude towards me, she insisted nothing was amiss. 

Along the line too my boyfriend’s attitude towards me also changed and when I asked him too why he changed, his only excuse is that he doesn’t want his sister to insult me. Recently we had a misunderstanding, which made me to send him a mail. He sent a reply that I should never send him anything again.  Please Agatha, does he love me? I really need your help. 

Confused Girl.

Dear Confused Girl, 

The picture you painted now shows that even if this boy has plans to marry you, you may not have the support from his family members to enjoy the marriage. It isn’t just the typical case of his mother not liking you but also his sister. How far can you go with a man whose entire family is up in arms against you?

Rather than desire this relationship, you should be glad that it is happening before you both walked down the aisle. A Yoruba adage says that good in-laws are more desirable than a good husband. The belief is that when a husband is bad and the in-laws are supportive, the marriage can still work because they know the man’s weakness as well as his strength and would use this knowledge effectively to make him capitulate to their desire. Unlike when the man is good and his people bad, they will make the home ungovernable for the woman to stay with their son. 

If his sister has joined her mother to wage a silent war against you, it is only a matter of time like your boyfriend has just exhibited for the man to begin to look for faults where none previously existed.

But beyond that, there is the need for you to look inwards.  There is no smoke without fire. Why is everyone in the family turning against you? What quality of behaviour have you been exhibiting? Often than not, we are quick to blame everyone around us but ourselves for our deficiencies. There must be something you are not doing right that is making all of them turn against you. 

Granted this relationship may not be going in the direction you want it to go but be wise to use the opportunity provided by it to reappraise yourself as honestly as you can. The tragedy of life is to think others are wrong and we are right. Life is a mix of the good, the bad and ugly. We all have the tendency to misbehave at any particular time if we are not careful. It takes the grace of God to save us from the lure of our flesh. Although you are hurting now, help yourself to refine your character so that you can avoid the mistakes you made in this relationship. 

Being in love goes beyond one’s partner. It is a feeling one must extend to the close family members of the one you are in love with. For a man, his mother and sisters are very important. You cannot love a man without making all attempts to love his mother or sisters. Only a few men would brave marrying a woman who has an issue with his mother and siblings. 

Had you studied your man, you would have known what his weakness is. Obviously his mother and sister are his area of weakness and strength. Because you didn’t bother, preferring to isolate your feelings only to your man, you lost out. His mother and sister had always been there before you and know the string to pull to push you out of his life and that is precisely what they did. 

A wise woman should always be generous with her feelings for her man. It doesn’t cost her much to be nice to members of her man’s family but a lot to be nasty or show indifference to them. 

By checking on your own mistakes, you give yourself the greater opportunity of becoming a new person, one who would make that special man and his people want her in their family. 

Furthermore, if God had intended you and this man to be an item, nothing would have made him change his mind about you. That he did, should tell you that you need to pray more so that God can help you in identifying the special man he made just for you. 

Pointless pushing yourself or desiring a family that clear doesn’t want you. No matter what you do to keep this man by your side or declare his love for you, if he isn’t yours, you are simply wasting your time on him. So instead of wondering if this man really loves you, be grateful that God loves you enough to save you from the folly of your own desires. Losing your three years of relationship is nothing compared to a lifetime of unhappiness.

Good luck.