When he wooed me, I snubbed him, now I want him badly

Agatha,gataedo@yahoo.com, agatha.edo@gmail.com, Tel: 08054500626 Dear Agatha, Four years ago, this man in my office asked me out, declared his intentions to marry me. Because he wasn’t as good looking as I dreamt my man should be, I declined his offer. But that didn’t stop him from asking me to marry him. Until two years ago, he was still asking me to marry him. The guy I was dating then, after three weeks of leaving me got married to another woman. It was so painful an experience but I kept trusting God that someone else will come into my life. Since then, it has been very difficult attracting a man let alone finding one who is interested enough to make a marriage proposal to me. I am fed up. All my friends are married and have started making babies. At the point I was thinking of making overtures to the guy in the office, I discovered he would be getting married in a month’s time. I have suddenly realised he is a very good man and responsible too. He has the best set of lips and dentition I have ever seen. What more he isn’t really bad just that at the time he first came, I wasn’t interested. Now I am very interested but there is another woman in his life. I want him desperately. Some of my close friends I shared the story with think there is still something I can do about it. One of them said I should go and declare my love for him, while two others said I should seek spiritual help in getting his interest back in me. They argued, a position I shared too, that since I have always been the one he truly loves, he went for her because I turned him down. And that once he finds out that I love him, he will call off his wedding plans to the other woman. Agatha, I need your help. How do I convince this man of my true love for him? Do you know of any good spiritualist I can approach for help? Is there anything you can do for me to get him back? I was 35 in June. Ewa. Dear Ewa, Pride goes before a terrible fall. Your case is the proverbial rejected cornerstone becoming the most sought after. Had your boyfriend not disappointed you, would you have made this kind of dramatic U-turn in your long held opinion of this man? Why do you suddenly want a man you persistently turned down, said he wasn’t good enough for your dreams. Didn’t measure up to the kind of man you admired for a husband? Would you have even considered him if your former boyfriend had remained in your life, or one of the ideal men by your standards, had come to you for your hand in marriage? It is too late for you to want this man. He is getting married to another woman who saw beyond what you failed to recognise in him when he offered to share his life with you. You had your chance to be his wife but you threw it away for flimsy excuses. What has good looks got to do with marriage? Do you marry a man on account of how he looks or because he is responsible and understanding? Why has it suddenly occurred to you that he has the best set of teeth and smile? These qualities have always been there. He didn’t develop that kind of teeth yesterday or the smile for that matter. The notice you have of them now calls to question the sincerity of your interest in him as well as the worth of your feelings for him. This man doesn’t need you in his life because your feelings for him aren’t skin deep. They are superficial and won’t last the bumpy marital road. It takes a special kind of love, devotion, determination and understanding of all the kinds of sacrifices embedded in the precept of marriage to overcome all the natural and man-made challenges that come with being married to a person. If from the first time he came to you, all you saw in him are imperfection, nothing he does will ever be good enough for you. This is why after a while he stopped asking you because he found another woman blessed with the abilities to help him overcome his disabilities and was willing to overshadow him with the best of her qualities. She gave him his unconditional trust to get him to want to keep her for life. To go to him is to expose your deceit and confusion. Nobody can help you because you are yet to come to terms with reality. From your e-mail, you don’t even know who you are or what you want. To identify the right man for you, you must first recognise whom you are. At 35, you are no longer a young lady and romantic teenager or young adult. You are a mature woman who by right should know that life doesn’t always go or give what we want. And that life itself is a process of compromises. If you are unwilling to give up something to get that thing you require for life to move smoothly, disappointment is often the end result. At the time he wanted you, you were too blinded by your self-importance to recognise his inherent qualities. He was and will never be yours. The fact that he made attempts to date you doesn’t make him yours. He is just like every other man that has come to ask you for a date. Why aren’t you talking about the man who got married three weeks after you both broke-up? Surely, that should bother you more than this man you never gave a chance to get close to you. The bottom line is – you are desperate. What your friends are asking you to do is what frantic women do. Are your friends not married? Are they not women? How would they feel if another woman goes to a spiritualist to get their men to like her? How would you feel for that matter if another woman wants to snatch your man? How did you feel when you heard your ex was getting married after only three weeks of you leaving each other? This man and woman didn’t offend you in any way. The man’s only crime was declaring his interest in you, which you rejected. So how is it the fault of that man or the woman he is going to marry some few weeks away? Why do you want to go to a spiritualist to destroy this couple when you should be seeking help for your inability to attract the attention of another man? Or is it the fault of this man or the woman he is about to marry that no man is interested in you again? Don’t do something you will end up regretting for the rest of your life because even if you succeed in stopping their marriage, nothing says he will come to you. Besides, nobody can upturn what God has ordained. If this couple has the blessing of heaven, you will be fighting a lost battle. If care isn’t taken, you will end up adding to your problems. Therefore don’t listen to your friends or capitulate to that destructive voice in you. Rather go on your knees to ask God for mercy and forgiveness. Chances are that God is punishing you for your arrogant disposition to this man when he came to ask for your hand in marriage. These friends should have told you to pray and even offer to pray along with you to ask for mercy. If they had asked you to seek a spiritualist to know why you are no longer attractive to men, it would have been understandable. Their offer and manner of assistance to you clearly spells out the kinds of friends you all are to yourselves because I am sure as your friends, you must have told them about this man’s interest in you and persistence then. Why didn’t they try to match-make you with the single men around, friends or relatives of their husbands who are single? The fact that none of them could talk sense into you, encouraged you not to throw away perhaps the only man heavens ordained for you as a husband, should tell you, if you are wise, to run away from them. Forget about this man. He isn’t yours. The best you can do is to wish him and his wife the very best in life and marriage. Free yourself from any form of needless bitterness. Help comes from only God. If you are in right standing with Him, there is nothing impossible in His dictionary. You will discover 35 would be like 16 when He is set to do something great in your life. Make peace with Him and forget whatever solutions your friends have suggested. Good luck.

She isn’t fair enough…

With Agatha Edo, Email: womaneditor@independentngonline.com gataedo@yahoo.com or agatha.edo@gmail.com, 08054500626 Dear Agatha, I am an ardent reader of your columns. There is a saying that says it is better to do what’s right than to insist on being right. I am 30-year-old, the eldest of my siblings. My immediate younger brother is married and already has a child. My people are pressurising me to marry irrespective of the fact that I am still in school. I’m demure and resilient. I used to have a girl friend always pestering me for money. Now, I have met another girl through her mother. It happened at a place I frequent to meet my friends. Because it is a place I must go to meet my friends, the lady’s mother is pressurising me to befriend her but I have refused. She’s into foodstuff business and always pestering me to buy on credit, though sometimes I oblige her. I can’t avoid her because she’s at the exit of the house. She always says she loves me because I am quiet. She’s from my hometown but married from another town. To get out of her pressure, I told her I prefer one of her daughters. Since the younger sister is the only one I have met besides the fact that the second daughter is always sharper than the first sister. So, I settled for the second. Agatha, I want to know if I should go ahead with this relationship. She’s through with her secondary education. But the snag is that I like women who are very fair like me. She isn’t as fair as the ladies I have previous dated. Please help me. Bernete. Dear Bernete, The question is: what do you want from this relationship? Whether she is fair or not isn’t as important as the person who resides inside of her. Many a time, in the process of making a choice of who we want to spend the rest of our lives with we market issues that are not as important as those that we would contend with in the union. If just being fair is the only criterion for you, how come those other fair ladies you dated are no longer around you? With the amount of pressure coming from your family, ensure the woman you are going to date now is the kind of woman you can live with for the rest of your life. At this stage of your life, anything can happen that would warrant your family and hers insisting you marry the woman. To avoid a situation where you would end up regretting your decision or blaming people around you for forcing you into a situation you don’t want, pause to think of what you understand by relationship in the first place. Is it for you just a physical thing one premised on outward qualities or the more lasting ones of who the person really is? In addition, this relationship you are about going into calls for tremendous caution. If the conduct of the mother is anything to go by, there is the need for you to be of extreme care. To avoid you ending up with a wife, who like her mother would throw morals to the winds to run after younger men, take time out to study this lady before making any commitment to her. You must devote appreciable time to uncover the mask behind her personality. Issues like her moral values, her temper, attitude towards life as well as her place in your own plans in life are most important than the colour of her skin. There is also the need for you to ask yourself what kind of woman you really want beside you, putting into consideration your dreams in life. Your woman must have the drive and belief in your dreams to help you get to where you hope to be in future. Without the right kind of woman by your side, achieving your dreams would either be a struggle to achieve or die completely as other factors she would throw up at home could frustrate you sufficiently to make you give up on your own plans. For instance, if your dream can only accommodate two children and you end up with a woman whose dream in life is to have as many as 10 children, the difference of eight children is enough to sink your dream forever. So ensure you first offer her friendship, it is the only platform to discover if you and her can make it beyond the point you both are now. In addition, you must also factor in the attitude of her mother? Beyond trusting the daughter, do you think you can trust the motive of her mother? Can you trust her to behave like a mother-in-law should when the daughter isn’t around? A woman who has cravings for a particular man doesn’t just give up. Honestly, this to me is the major worry in all these! Can you contain the unbridle desire of a morally bankrupt mother? Please talk to God to avoid you going into a relationship that could cripple you spiritually. Good luck.

My husband has low self-esteem

WithAgatha Edo Email: womaneditor@independentngonline.com gataedo@yahoo.com or agatha.edo@gmail.com, 08054500626 Dear Agatha, My husband and I married three years ago after five years of courtship. We are both in our 30s. My husband is a very sweet man though very anxious and with low self-esteem. His relationship with his mother is a volatile one – she nags him a lot and is quite critical of him. A priest friend of ours described her as oppressive and my husband, often curses and swears at her in their conversations and when being nice, talks to her in a baby voice. I get on well with her although I’m often in the middle of their arguments. His father is emotionally absent as he keeps his head buried in newspapers all the time. One of the problems in my marriage is that my husband refuses to spend time with my own parents and indeed some of my workmates. My workmates and family all want to spend time with him. Prior to marrying him, I was extremely close to my family. Now we are not. He gives different excuses to avoid spending time with them and I am constantly putting my family and friends off. I sense he is scared of them getting the wrong impression about him and I also think for some unknown reasons he might dislike them. He constantly competes with me and if I, quite innocently, bring up some subject about an achievement I attained during a conversation, he will put on a stupid mocking voice and say, “oh how wonderful you are!” Often I am mindful of what I say when conversing with him as he can be very touchy and sensitive. The few times he visited my parents, he took alcohol or drugs to calm his anxiety. Since I don’t like him resorting to the use of these drugs, I have had to give in to what he wants – that is, not spending time with my parents. As a result, my entire family and colleagues feel I have something against them as I have distanced myself from them all; giving my attention to my husband. I haven’t told them why I have distanced myself from them as I do not want to betray my husband in any way. I recognise that he may be mentally ill but, he does not think so as he has always been this way. He realises how it upsets me and my family but, he doesn’t seem to give that much thought. I pray a lot too. Any advice? Struggling Wife Dear Struggling Wife, If you courted for five years, you must have known or noticed this aspect of his person. This isn’t something he could have hidden from you for too long. You married him knowing you could cope with his emotional disabilities. To want to change him now is to further set him off on a path that will completely destroy him forever. It is either you learn to cope as you coped during your courtship years or simply pretend that aspect of him doesn’t exist at all. Two things would happen when you try too much to change him from the person who he currently is to what you want him to be; first you will simply be replacing his mother with yourself in his life and second, you will make him hate you like he obviously hates his mother. It isn’t easy growing up with a domineering mother; one who thinks and treats you like a baby. His mother didn’t only destroy him but turned his father into a hen-pecked husband which is why the father finds safety behind the pages of newspapers. Your husband has, throughout his life, watched and experienced intimidation; what he needs now isn’t another woman who will destroy him as his mother destroyed his father but one who will love and help him out of his predicament. For now, if he doesn’t want to visit your family, allow him be. All his life, he has faced criticism from his mother; no matter how much he tries to please her. Now he isn’t sure of who he is or sure of how to properly conduct himself without risking condemnation from his audience. In plain English, your husband lacks confidence in his choices as a man. His pains are deep and real. He cannot even recognise help and true friendship when he sees one. But, that he managed to fall in love and marry you shows that he isn’t completely lost. He may have married you too because something in your attitude reminds him of his mother. For your sake as well as his, be resolute not to allow that side of you overshadow the soft side of you so your husband too doesn’t take after his father by escaping behind the newspapers. But again, you must also be watchful he doesn’t try to repress you like his mother. The challenge in marrying this kind of man is to be wise and prayerful. Trust me, from experience, it isn’t a bed of roses being married to a man who has been psychologically damaged by his mother. The wife has to be alert that she doesn’t end up being like her mother-in-law or being the victim of her husband’s desire to act like a man for the first time in his life. For this reason, you must have the strength to strike a balance between being supportive and being independent. This is because he is currently mixed up. For the first time in his life, he is free from his mother and her constant naggings, he has a home of his own but deep inside, he is still very afraid of his mother. This fear is why you shouldn’t force him to do anything against his will; rather, find a way of making your family understand why you have kept your distance from them. Your immediate family has to understand why he appears uncomfortable with them; you need their help to make him develop the confidence in himself. He needs understanding to come out of the bondage of his environment. Let them come for a visit instead. Having confided in them, your parents’ show of love will go a long way in helping him see another side of parenting. Through the help of your parents, he will be taught how to love and be loved. The challenge here is to get him to know what love is. A man that swears and curses his mother is obviously lacking in love and respect for everything his mother represents. There is no way that man can ever respect his wife because mothers are the gateway to life. He has never known what true love is all about. You have to teach him what love gives and demands. His cynicism of your achievements is a direct flow from his mother. His mother has never shown appreciation for him or his achievements. He doesn’t have it in him so he cannot give what he doesn’t have. Begin by showering him with compliments and pleasure in all things. Rather than nag his attitude, compliment him; his looks and sense of dressing. Even when you are not too pleased, first compliment him before lovingly pointing out his mistake. Don’t forget he has never been treated with respect or love. He needs you and your family to show him a different kind of life from where he is coming from. It is the only time you can also get him to treat you with respect, be sensitive to your needs and trust you with his everything. He cannot be but selfish because that is the way he has seen his mother behave all his life. Pray for him always and continue to urge him to see a psychiatrist. Good luck.