The Day I Chose Myself Over a Man Who Would Never Choose Me

My mother cried when I ended that engagement. Not because she thought he was a good man — she had always been quiet about him, which was her way of screaming. She cried because she was afraid for me. Thirty-one and unmarried in Nigeria is its own kind of war.

But I had been shrinking for four years. I had stopped wearing certain colours because he preferred others. I had stopped seeing certain friends because he called them "too loud." I had stopped expressing opinions at dinner because it always ended in an argument about how I liked to embarrass him.

The day I gave back the ring, my hands were shaking. He laughed and said no other man would want a woman like me. And something in me — some small stubborn thing that had survived four years of being told I was too much and not enough — whispered: then I will be alone. And I will be fine.

That was two years ago.

I have my own apartment. I cook what I want. I laugh too loudly. I wear red on days I feel red. I have not found another man yet and that is okay because I have found myself and she is extraordinary.

If you are in a relationship that is making you smaller, please hear me: you are not a problem to be managed. You are a person to be loved.