Would you advise me to marry this man?

Published 9 December 2018

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Dear Ola,

I'm a girl of 17 and in high school.

My parents are divorced. They are remarried to other people, and are out of town. They abandoned me with my aged paternal grandmother.

To augment my grandmother's meagre support of me, I grow tomatoes, pepper, and other vegetables, to eat and to sell. I also hire out to help other people on their farms.

I have inadequate time for my studies and do poorly in them.

People consider me attractive. As I stand at 1.6 metres, with a fine-boned face and a slender frame. With the consequence that several of my male teachers want me. I had no interest in men, and I ignored my teachers' advances. But this angered them, making them cane me twice as much as they caned the average student. Until one of the older teachers, a man of about 50, advised me to choose, and give in to, one of the teachers who were after me. To stop these teachers thrashing me so much.

So I gave in to one of my teachers.

He disvirgened me when I consented to intercourse: agony for both of us, as, in my hysterical pain when he broke through into me, I clawed at his face. But he was understanding, apologetic, sympathetic.

Each day, in school, he gives me money for lunch. Each day, after school, we go to his place and he sleeps with me a few times—to my begging moans in simultaneous pain and pleasure.

And I've somehow grown to like him. While I stand in more awe of him than of any other person.

I've thought of seeing someone closer in age to me. And I briefly saw a boy a few years older than me. But it ended when I visited him and he sprang at me in a bid to throw me on my back and rape me. I broke free and fled!

My teacher and boyfriend asks me to be his second wife. His first wife, much older than me, lives with their two kids in the bungalow that he has built in his home town. She works in the town. The town is about an hour's drive from my own town where I school and where I have an affair with my teacher. He spends weekends with his family in his home town.

My reservations about marrying him are, one, that I think bedding me every single day is excessive. And, two, that if I marry him, I'll end up under one roof with his first wife who is much older than me. And I'll become like her maid, doing all the household chores and running errands. A not too appealing prospect to me.

I alluded to my first reservation above in a conversation with him, and he ceased touching me altogether for a week. I coaxed him to resume bedding me. When I alluded to my second reservation, he said I won't live with his first wife in his home town, but with him where he works.

Please, Dear Ola, would you advice me to marry my teacher-boyfriend?

—Bimpe, Isan, Nigeria

Dear Bimpe,

Your teachers, including your boyfriend, did grave wrong sexually harassing you.

But you have grown to like your boyfriend, you say. And you have only two reservations about marrying him.

Polygamy has a high potential for inter-wife feud. But any kind of marriage can suffer worse blight.

You can explicitly discuss your qualms with your boyfriend now and reach an understanding with him on each reservation.

Marry this man. Except you are proposed to by someone else with whom you are sure to have a more comfortable and happier life.

—Ola

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